I was recently having a conversation with Natalia Antelava, founder of the newsroom Coda, about social media regulation. I was telling her my wariness about it: as a journalist, I don’t want the government making rules about which speech is or isn’t harmful. I know social media platforms are powerful, and do cause lots of harm, but for a long time I believed we were stuck with them as they are, because social media platforms are forums for speech, and I don’t want the government regulating speech.

But Natalia — who, having grown up in the Soviet Union and reported in repressive regimes around the world, certainly does not take speech protections for granted — pushed back.

“I always think the way that big tech weaponized the First Amendment is very similar to the way the gun lobby weaponized the Second Amendment,” she said. “The tech lobby has very successfully made sure, through incredible lobbying efforts, to contain all the conversations about regulation around the publication, free speech arguments.”

But really, social media platforms — and now AI services — are products. They are designed, not unlike a vehicle, to operate in a certain way. And, also like a vehicle, they can be redesigned to operate more safely.

As Jeff Horwitz, who reported the Facebook Files leak for The Wall Street Journal, recently told me: “If the entire impact of my career were to make clear that social media platforms — that how people behave on them — is heavily influenced by the design choices of the owners of those platforms. If that was the only thing that people took away from my career, I would be wildly pleased with myself.”

I think 2026 is the year journalists will widely reframe our understanding of tech platforms: to see them as more akin to cars than to newspapers. We will realize that tech companies have exploited journalists’ greatest weakness: our love of the First Amendment. And that will finally free us to push for serious accountability from some of the biggest companies the world has ever seen.

Journalists like Antelava and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa have been warning for years that tech companies are poisoning democracy and the media ecosystem, through algorithms that optimize for engagement and outrage. But in the last year, the leaders of these companies have made their values crystal clear. You could choose many examples — from Meta pulling down a Facebook group 80,000 people used to share information about ICE in Chicago at the behest of the Trump administration; to YouTube getting into business with Newsmax, a major purveyor of lies about the 2020 election; to Apple removing an app, ICEBlock, from its store that allowed users to track the presence of ICE agents after being pressured to do so by the Trump administration. (This week, ICEBlock sued the administration for First Amendment violations.)

The image that stays with me as the year comes to a close is from the day Donald Trump’s FCC head was bullying ABC to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air. That same day, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Ruth Porat of Alphabet and Google, were dining with President Trump at his state dinner with the King of England, nibbling on quail egg salad and chicken ballotine.

This is not an industry that is standing up for free speech. And journalists need to stop letting these companies use free speech as a way to escape accountability.

There’s a consensus growing about the dangers of social media platforms. Schools are banning phones. There are bipartisan proposals in Congress to reform Section 230, the 1996 law that shields “interactive computer services” from lawsuits for much of what happens on their platforms. After the killing of Charlie Kirk, Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox chose to use his national platform to go on a crusade against the “conflict entrepreneurs” of social media. The advance of deepfakes and generative AI is only making the worries more acute.

I know that some of these proposals can feel scary to journalists. Attempts to regulate new technologies and media do often veer into censorship. I have felt scared of that too. But I think where we can find ballast is by staying unwavering in our defense of the First Amendment. It is possible to develop strong accountability mechanisms for tech that do not violate First Amendment rights. But journalists have to keep the First Amendment as our North Star, and push for more effective accountability for those who are undermining it. That includes tech companies.