Elon Musk’s maybe-impending purchase of Twitter is being treated not as a mere business acquisition but as a kind of twilight battle over the fate of the American experiment. Maybe there was a time when hypothetical and probably minor changes to the terms of service of a social networking website could be seen as an eminently survivable event, without any larger implications for long-established rights and customs like free speech. But those days are gone now, as evidenced by yet another high-profile, strong-arm effort by a weirdly open combination of private and public powers acting in unison to taint or scuttle the Twitter sale.
On May 3, a trio of so-called “advocacacy groups” sent a letter to Twitter’s major corporate advertisers, including image-conscious and regulation-sensitive heavyweights like Coca-Cola and Disney, urging them to pull their business from Twitter if Musk proves unwilling to censor speech on the platform to those organizations’ satisfaction. “Elon Musk’s...