Hatred promoted as heroic defiance of censorship, daring to say the unsayable, is a poisoned arrow aimed at the achilles heel of liberalism – its dutiful tolerance of illiberal opinion.

These issues would be hard enough to navigate if it were just a challenge of balancing state control, public interest and private enterprise in a single jurisdiction with clear lines of democratic accountability. It is far from that.

The concentration of digital power is an ocean away, wielded by companies whose bosses are, at best, quietly complicit in Donald Trump’s assault on the US constitution and, in the case of X’s Elon Musk and Palantir’s Peter Thiel, vigorous advocates and enablers of the new US despotism.