Regulation and chill. Last week, days before the most polarizing presidential election in decades, and with the unprecedented censorship of the New York Post on the mind of every Republican in Washington, the U.S. Senate called a tech hearing to discuss Section 230. While Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg both testified, it was Twitter’s bearded, world-weary, positively Gandalfian Jack Dorsey who took center stage and captured the imagination, if not the heart, of America. Mercifully spared by congressional Democrats from this summer’s tech hearing, this was Dorsey’s first, public trial. It was his opportunity to provide clarity on his thinking concerning appropriate forms of censorship, to defend a history of decisions he has presumably made, and to forcefully defend Section 230. In each regard, his performance was unsuccessful.

A rough summary for those of you wise enough not to have wasted your time with yet another morning of Senate grandstanding:

In questioning, Democrats first argued this hearing should not be happening, and spent considerable time making this case. As far as they were concerned (along with, it must be noted, most of the mainstream press) it didn’t matter that a story about a presidential frontrunner had been censored weeks before an election. It didn’t matter that Twitter was still, two weeks later, censoring the media company that had published the piece. In fact, none of this was even censorship. This was only commonsense “moderation,” and — at least according to Tammy Baldwin, who all but asked Dorsey to delete the president’s account — it hadn’t gone far enough. Once they ventured beyond this initial grievance, Democrats mostly divided in two camps, torn as they were between congratulating tech companies for censoring their Republican opponents and admonishing them for making money (the next four years are going to be wild, folks). Republicans, on the other hand, came focused. In lock-step, they told a breathless story of outrageous censorship, and collusion among Democrats and a nefarious, leftist “Big Tech.” In particular, Ted Cruz woke up looking to murder people. Rebuffed by Zuckerberg, who eloquently made the case for Facebook’s handling of the Post disaster, he turned to Dorsey, who collapsed under fire.