Which is why freedom of assembly is lumped in with freedom of speech. As long as two people can congregate together, they can communicate with one another.
Except they're not. And these platforms (Google, Facebook, CloudFlare, Twitter, Youtube, Berkeley, Patreon, Namecheap, etc) are all daily indicating, to varying degrees, that they are willing to step in as a third-party between two consenting individuals "congregating" and "communicating" in order to censor them.
Such individuals, if they choose to say things that the platform doesn't like at an institutional level, then they don't have that right anymore because they get removed/de-listed,banned/de-platformed. Generally, I'm a free-market person, and I'd advocate that entities should have the right to deal with their own platform how they see fit. But in this case, they're collaborating with traditional media, learning institutions and social-agenda groups in order to create a giant echo chamber. We're watching that play out right now in that certain non-left and non-pc speech behavior is condemned and those that wish to express them are de-platformed.
We may not always agree with those points, or find them palatable, but up until now I think we've been navigating a middle-line where general public opinion ebbed and flowed between the two sides. It's tipped incredibly to one side on numerous issues, and I'm afraid that a specific set of viewpoints are now pervading our society. Once it gets to a point, it's only a matter of time before entire generations are raised believing only the accepted-viewpoint. It may be a bad example, but you see it happening already in public-schools where teachers are actively pushing social-agenda issues onto their kids. It happened with anti-Trump attitudes, with transgender-activism, gender-gaps, race-activism, etc. One side is accepted, and debate is silenced, and teachers are forced or encouraged to teach those things to impressionable young minds instead of encouraging free debate.
Further, if you ask most conservatives, they actively disagree with a lot of those things even if it's from the perspective of government-meddling. Conservatives are generally half the population, so something is definitely skewed and going wrong.
Such individuals, if they choose to say things that the platform doesn't like at an institutional level, then they don't have that right anymore because they get removed/de-listed,banned/de-platformed. Generally, I'm a free-market person, and I'd advocate that entities should have the right to deal with their own platform how they see fit. But in this case, they're collaborating with traditional media, learning institutions and social-agenda groups in order to create a giant echo chamber. We're watching that play out right now in that certain non-left and non-pc speech behavior is condemned and those that wish to express them are de-platformed.
We may not always agree with those points, or find them palatable, but up until now I think we've been navigating a middle-line where general public opinion ebbed and flowed between the two sides. It's tipped incredibly to one side on numerous issues, and I'm afraid that a specific set of viewpoints are now pervading our society. Once it gets to a point, it's only a matter of time before entire generations are raised believing only the accepted-viewpoint. It may be a bad example, but you see it happening already in public-schools where teachers are actively pushing social-agenda issues onto their kids. It happened with anti-Trump attitudes, with transgender-activism, gender-gaps, race-activism, etc. One side is accepted, and debate is silenced, and teachers are forced or encouraged to teach those things to impressionable young minds instead of encouraging free debate.
Further, if you ask most conservatives, they actively disagree with a lot of those things even if it's from the perspective of government-meddling. Conservatives are generally half the population, so something is definitely skewed and going wrong.