Of course there are plenty of good reasons to be opposed to the world’s richest man owning a portion of the modern public square. As Batya Ungar-Sargon argued on spiked last week, even genuine liberals should be uncomfortable with the fate of free speech online resting solely on which billionaire is in charge. There is also reason to believe Musk isn’t the ‘free speech absolutist’ he claims to be.

But that’s not what Musk’s critics are worried about. They’re terrified that he is the real deal – that this is indeed a kind of ethical venture on his part to free up Twitter from censorship. As Musk put it at a TED conference in Vancouver yesterday: ‘Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s really important that people have both the reality and perception that they are able to speak freely, in the bounds of the law.’ This is what curdles his critics’ blood.

Amid all the fume and fury we see that censorship has become a core part of liberal-elite ideology. Politicians, think-tankers and commentators have got it into their heads that the threat to democracy comes not from censorship, but from an excess of freedom of speech – and that the state, Big Tech and corporate media must all do their bit to censor and protect civilisation.