The problem here is that this analogy imports a heck of a lot of assumptions, many of which are not justified.

Suppose your marketplace is full of products laced with toxins (cheaper manufacturing), where everything is sold and resold and resold again, so you never really knew where anything came from. Suppose your marketplace sells food with no nutrition labels, and in reality is full of sugar, salt, and the "olive" oil isn't from olives. Oh, and suppose you have to buy everything in small packages in the checkout lane, in a rush.

This marketplace is in great shape compared to Twitter.

Marketplaces don't work when there's no functional accountability, where there's no ability to distinguish scam from honest deal, where there's no space to evaluate. The biggest blind spot of free-market economics is that information is assumed to be perfect in all of the simplistic models.

The problem with Twitter and most of social media is that it's a terrible marketplace for ideas. Emotionally-gripping fantasy has a massive advantage over accuracy given the fast-reaction popularity-based engine that underlies practically all social media these days. This isn't hypothetical, and Twitter is right at the center of it: https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308.

I'm all for free speech--all for having a stupid view aired so it can be rebutted.

But that's not how social media works. People with similar stupid views get exposed to other similar stupid views, and isolated from dissenting views. Someone annoying? Just block them!

Furthermore, there is long tradition about setting the right prerequisites to actually have a substantive debate--standards of evidence, standards of argumentation, standards of poise. Twitter is so far from that that I initially forgot to even bother saying that Twitter isn’t that. Yes, it literally goes without saying.

So, honestly, I don't see that simply making Twitter nominally, dumbly, more "free" actually accomplishes anything. Twitchy uninformed biased mob-rule isn't particularly better or worse than twichy manipulated government-rule. It's all so bad, because it's all so divorced from reality, that there isn't any useful comparison. Which ends up worse depends on the winds of fate at the moment--populism can be absolutely awful and authoritarian rule can be absolutely awful. We've gotten genocides out of both.

So, even though I have a higher opinion of Musk than other people seem to here, I don't yet view his view on Twitter as beneficial. Maybe not harmful either. I'll have to wait and see.

I’ll have to wait and see because I'm all for a healthy competition between ideas, but Twitter is where good ideas get dragged out back and beaten by ideological bullies. This is because of Twitter’s core dynamics; it has nothing to do with censorship. And I don't see anything Musk has said yet that will address that to any meaningful extent.