Political blockbuster news always seems to evoke the same responses: one side pounces on “the smoking gun,” while the other side yawns dismissively at the “nothing-burger.” The latest such blockbuster is Elon Musk’s release of the so-called Twitter Files, documentation that confirms the platform’s long-suspected systematic restriction — with possible government collaboration — of conservative viewpoints.

While the media seems obsessed primarily with Musk and his motivations, this one is not just another case of political one-upmanship. It’s a big deal. It matters, for at least four reasons:

1) Illegality: If the facts hold up — and they seem solid — much of what we’re seeing is flagrantly unconstitutional.

Yes, Twitter is a private company. They have every right to harbor their own biases and to let those biases influence their published content. That may be irritating to conservatives, but it’s not surprising and it’s not illegal.

But if entities of the U.S. government (e.g., the FBI) have actively participated with Twitter in deciding what otherwise sound information is to be withheld from the public, that would be a clear violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. That appears to be exactly the case.

2) Consequences: The suppression of information by Twitter has had far-reaching effects on our country.

One obvious example is Twitter’s decision to prohibit content related to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop, and the effect of that decision on the 2020 presidential election. Whether it changed the election’s outcome is unknowable, but quite possibly it did — post-election polls indicate that many might have voted differently had they been aware of the evidence of Biden-family financial connections with China.

Let’s be clear — the 2020 election is long over, and it’s not the first tainted election in history; the recent midterm results made clear that voters aren’t interested in settling old scores. But the Twitter Files should at least silence the “fair and transparent” chorus.

And the matter remains every bit as pertinent today. Doesn’t every American citizen deserve to know whether their president is, or was, on the payroll of one of our nation’s major adversaries?

Here’s another consequence: pandemic policy. The Biden administration’s iron-handed enforcement of COVID policy — including lockdowns, school closings, and mandatory vaccinations — was indirectly aided by Twitter’s suppression of alternative views. For example, Twitter shadow banned Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, eminent Stanford expert on infectious diseases and primary author of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” which argued for a more sensible, targeted protective COVID strategy that could have saved many lives.

Again, it’s impossible to know whether a better-informed public would have demanded a more effective public pandemic policy; we’ll never know. But absent that opportunity, we’re left with millions of American deaths and a shattered economy.

3) Extent: This is probably just the tip of the iceberg. It is not unreasonable to suspect that Twitter’s practices are endemic of all of Big Tech. And consider the complicity of other information outlets in consciously restricting information available to the public.

As examples, the owners and operators of The New York Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”) and The Washington Post (“Democracy dies in the darkness”) may have been truly convinced that Donald Trump’s reelection would be bad for America — but they owed it to their readers to provide a balanced, measured look at the credible evidence of malfeasance by his political adversary.

Nevertheless, they chose to bury the New York Post reporting about the Hunter Biden laptop and to accept without question the “Russian interference” alibi. Adding insult to injury is their stony silence today, as their willful ignorance two years ago becomes more obvious.

4) Democracy: One of the prominent political narratives of the Biden first term is the alleged decline of American democracy, attributed by the president and others to Republican extremists and election deniers.

While I believe that’s a wholly contrived issue, it appeared prominently among the worries cited by midterm voters. On the contrary, however, Musk’s Twitter Files reveal what is in fact a very real threat to our nation: the potential that Big Tech and a large segment of mainstream media, in league with government entities, can directly manipulate the information available — and hence the thinking, and ultimately the voting — of millions of Americans.

As an op-ed writer, I sometimes worry that my warnings are too loud or too shrill, or that the echoes of George Orwell’s “big brother” are overstated. But what is far more unsettling is learning that the real situation may be more serious than I’d ever imagined.

This may be one of those cases. It matters.