[TeaDrunk]

I'm so baffled by this because there are plenty of places where speech is suppressed and its fine. A highschool teacher can fail a student for shouting answers in an exam. A person can kick someone out of their house for saying horrible things. A cafe can ask someone to leave for saying slurs. A professor can ask a student to leave a lecture hall for talking...

The right to speech is curtailed all the time in private... We even teach it to our kids, such as raising one's hand, or waiting their turn.

[username90]

You are misunderstanding free speech, it isn't a literal statement. Free speech is about being allowed to express ideas, not disrupting classrooms or harassing others. If you are allowed to express your idea after waiting for your turn, then your speech wasn't suppressed even if people told you to be quiet for a while.

[TeaDrunk]

"The ideal of free speech and its merits applies just as well to private actors and we should try to live up to it whenever we can."

What exactly does this mean if it doesn't apply to actively telling people when and where they can speak?

[username90]

It is fine to police disruptions, but you shouldn't police ideas. If all conservatives are told to wait for their turns while it is fine for liberals to just blurt things out then it isn't free speech. However if everyone is forced to wait and a conservative gets banned for talking out of turn then it is still free speech, he got banned for disrupting and not for his message.

It is hard/impossible to create laws around it since it is hard to formally define, but often it is obvious when it is infringed in practice just that we can't litigate it.

[ac29]

This seems like a strawman - no one is getting banned from social media for having polite disagreements on foreign policy or income tax rates.

[tekknik]

You haven’t been to imgur have you? Some sites have a point system and if your “social score” is too low you most definitely can get banned. There’s generally more left leaning people than right leaning people on some platforms, and when someone disagrees with someone else but otherwise can’t refute their statements they hit downvote. Enough of this and you get a ban.

[ac29]

You took my comment too literally - of course there are people who've been banned somewhere online for having opinions another human disagreed with. My point was that no large social media platform has a policy of banning people for civilized political disagreements.

[perl4ever]

Some site are like that, plus talking about the voting system is against the rules, and even if you get plenty of upvotes, you can still be throttled or banned by a moderator.