I find it depressing that many Americans seem to gauge our country’s commitment to free speech based on whether a billionaire buys a social media platform that treats its users as if they’re incapable of processing more than 280 characters all at once.

Most three-year-olds can spit out sentences with more heft.

Although based on my occasional excursions into Twitter it seems that the three-year-olds have been let loose there already, with similar results as when toddlers have the run of the kitchen.

I have nothing against brevity, to be sure.

The federal tax code, among much else that the government expectorates, could benefit greatly if it were subjected to a Twitter-style diet.

But the dramatic distillation that Twitter requires encourages people, or so it seems to me, not to sharpen their minds and hone their messages but rather to spew the first thought that comes to mind. This is rarely a thought of which we’re later proud. Spontaneity has its place — deciding where to have dinner in a city with a wealth of restaurants, for instance. But engaging in a respectful discussion requires a certain amount of contemplation. There’s a reason the conversations we enjoy most tend to be punctuated with extended moments of silence. Twitter is more akin to someone standing on the porch and screaming at the dog that just took a dump on his freshly mowed grass.

Even a model of rhetorical restraint such as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address would have had to be broken into a gaggle of tweets.

(And speaking of that era, let’s not even ponder Facebook groups pitting the rebels against the Yanks.)

But it’s not the nature of Twitter, with its near insistence that sober consideration of complex topics be squeezed into a bumper sticker slogan, that bothers me about the recent hysteria surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform.

What chafes me is what seems to be a widespread belief that on Twitter rests the sanctity of the First Amendment, one of the fundamental, and foundational, principles that are integral to the enduring greatness of America.

This strikes me as not just a great exaggeration, but also as downright daft.

The concept of “free speech” is, naturally, closely associated with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But the First Amendment, which uses the term “freedom of speech,” doesn’t deal with citizens’ right to express themselves in any privately owned forum they choose. Rather, the amendment prefaces all the things it protects in addition to freedom of speech — free exercise of religion, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and to redress the government for grievances — by stating that Congress shall make no law restricting any of those rights.

And although the crafters of that wondrous document could not have foreseen Twitter (or, perhaps, Elon Musk) they were quite explicit in confining their concerns about repression to ensuring Congress wasn’t the outfit doing the muzzling. They weren’t worried about some colonial version of social media.

The point is that although the debate over Twitter, and the nature of its censorship, involves free speech in a general sense, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment.

I’ve read and listened to Musk’s ideas on the matter and, if he is sincere, then I can’t help but agree with him. He is advocating for the tolerance of all viewpoints as against the suppression of those which some people deem offensive. This, it seems to me, is the proper way to think about free expression, on Twitter or anywhere else, simply because the notion that we ought to defer to any person’s, or group’s, definition of what’s offensive is antithetical to the very concept of free speech. The previous owners of Twitter were on solid enough legal ground in making such determinations — they’re not Congress, after all. But morally speaking they waded into quicksand — and Musk says he wants to yank Twitter loose from the morass.

For all that, I can’t muster any great amount of angst about how Twitter, or any other social media platform, stifles its users.

The reason is simple: volume.

I’m talking about terabytes, not decibels.

Twitter and Facebook can fairly be called 21st century versions of the public square, I suppose, solely due to their popularity.

But I think it’s ludicrous to contend, as some people have, that the censorship which certainly exists on those platforms, no matter how ubiquitous they are, poses any significant threat to our ability to express ourselves, or for other people to find our viewpoints and embrace or impugn them at their leisure.

Twitter, massive though it is, still represents, in one sense, a drop in the vast online sea. The notion that a person can’t make available his every harebrained idea to everybody with a cellphone (which IS everybody, essentially) is laughable.

When somebody claims that Big Tech is severely suppressing free expression, ponder this question — is it easier today than it has ever been to avail yourself of the dizzyingly vast array of crackpot theories of which the human mind is capable?

The answer, as any sensible person must agree, is yes.

And nothing — including whether or not Elon Musk owns Twitter — can possibly change that reality.

Having earned a paycheck for three decades thanks to the perpetual gift that is the First Amendment, I instinctively abhor censorship.

And it troubles me that so many Americans, under the guise of protecting people from the terrible experience of reading something that they find reprehensible, would so readily conclude that such opinions ought to be excluded from public discourse.

But I also trust the free market.

Plenty of people have complained about censorship on social media. But perhaps only Musk has the financial clout to do something about it in a prominent way.

His takeover of Twitter quickly prompted a parade of stories about how many people have vowed to quit Twitter — those, it seems to me, whose dedication to free expression seems to falter when they encounter opinions that might make them, or others, feel bad.

No doubt that will happen.

And it might well be that more people drop Twitter than flock to it, the latter group attracted by Musk’s apparent commitment to the sort of rhetorical smorgasbord that the internet made possible.

But at least all those people will be choosing for themselves.

And as obnoxious as people can be — and frequently are, on Twitter and other social media platforms — I still subscribe to the notion that freedom, and I mean the genuine article and not the ersatz version determined by the easily offended, requires that we sometimes trudge through the sludge as we wade about, searching for inspiration and wisdom.