The First Amendment Doesn’t Protect Big Tech’s Censorship

Does the Constitution require Americans to accept Big Tech censorship? The claim is counterintuitive but the logic is clear: If you submit a letter to this newspaper, the editors have no legal obligation to publish it, and a statute requiring them to do so would be struck down as a violation of the Journal’s First Amendment rights. Facebook and Twitter, the argument goes, have the same right not to provide a platform to views they find objectionable.

Big Tech censorship has provoked interest in new civil-rights statutes—state laws that would bar the companies from...