This view that only government's can censor, that only state agents coming to your house and slapping something over your mouth counts as limiting free speech, really needs to be tackled.

The oddest part is that's it's generally the left which seems most content to let private companies wield extraordinary power over who can speak and how.

There are all sorts of legitimate reasons to limit free speech. Right now we are seeing one of them with Trump - to prevent incitement to violence and a threat to the functioning of democracy. But it is still censorship.

We need to be clear that that is what it is, rather than limiting our definition of censorship to the smallest range of actions conceivable.

This is not a new idea. Benjamin Constant, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill were treating the silencing which comes from society as equivalent, or more dangerous, than that of the state hundreds of years ago.