Platforms and publishing

In the end, publishers are corporations

Let us get one thing straight about the right to free expression: It has evolved as a mechanism to defend speech against the intrusions of state power. Governments have the ability to constrain what you or I say; we have a right, mandated under our Constitution and similarly liberal ones elsewhere, to ensure that this freedom is not taken away arbitrarily. Sadly, in India this right is not as absolute as one would desire, and thus various officials of the state do indeed act arbitrarily to constrain speech — from district magistrates shutting down the internet, to the wholesale silencing