This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and I'm here with the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish

Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Now Richard, it's our end of the year podcast. I'd like us to do a bit of a retrospective on some of the biggest issues of the year and well maybe look ahead to next year.

When I look at 2022 Richard, I think about free speech, not necessarily as much about government

coercion of free speech, but free speech issues at universities and at major companies,

especially like Twitter.

Now Richard, I'd love to know your take on some real recent

Elon Musk drama going on.

I mean, Elon took over and there has been, I would say, just a back and forth of a lot of different rules, people getting kicked off accounts being suspended or brought back on to Twitter. And I think I'd like to know what you think Twitter might look like in next year. Are they going to figure out

some consistent clear rules on free speech? Do you think Elon's going to have some sort of jurisprudence, some sort of philosophy in place or do you think we're in for well Twitter and you can go to every other social media site like Facebook or Meta or the rest of them.

And are we going to have just, I guess, constant fights about what you're allowed to say on each platform?

Well, I think it's going to be a very bumpy ride and the reason it's going to be a bumpy ride is all of these

organizations that once thought themselves invulnerable find themselves in various kinds of trouble.

Part of the trouble is financial, the stock of every one of these major corporations is tank. That means that they're losing viewers to somebody and when that happens they have to worry about their ad streams and everything else.

And so a kind of a shakeup in terms of the way in which you put yourself together may be required

for simple business reasons wholly apart from the First Amendment.

The second complication that comes in there is it's looking more and more to be the cases,

though there was intensive involvement by the Biden administration over the last near two years,

with the various sites on whom they should promote

and whom they should dock and all the rest of that stuff.

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