For all the left-wing emoting going on because Elon Musk is talking about “free speech” and sort of meaning it, the most telling statistic, as well as the best indicator of true feelings, is how many leftists are actually quitting Twitter.

It’s too soon to be definitive, but like all those leftists who swore they’d move to Canada if Trump were elected president, liberals have a habit of making grandiose, virtue-signaling threats and not following through on them. I suspect there will be a few hundred thousand users who are mad enough to quit the platform, but don’t expect Bernie Sanders or AOC to lose too many of their millions of followers.

That’s because there is simply nowhere else to go.

Even among many conservatives, Twitter remains an essential platform despite the bias, the banning, and the maddening double standards. It’s not as important to the rightaverse as it once was, but it still has a big role to play.

There are other platforms with a larger user base — Facebook and Instagram, for example. But Twitter is where the political elites gather and hence is far more influential.