Last spring when Elon Musk announced his investment in, and then purchase of, Twitter, I said that he’d “dropped a knowledge bomb on the information minefield.” Musk insisted that it wasn’t a financial play. Rather, he said it was a last-ditch effort in the face of overwhelming online censorship, to secure free speech and even democracy.

With the deal now consummated and Musk launching big changes, the heads of Musk’s critics are indeed exploding. Celebrities proclaimed they were leaving the platform (for Mastodon, or maybe Canada?), and a dozen or more Fortune 500 companies said they were canceling or pausing multimillion-dollar ad buys, likely under threat from activist groups.