[cdsmith]

I'm puzzled that you feel we are losing this, when it seems clear that with every passing day, we are moving further and further into a world where anyone can freely express anything they like. You and I and everyone around us has the ability to write whatever opinions we have, and immediately share them to tens of thousands of people. This is something that would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. Groups that were for much of history suppressed by dominant cultures are now vibrant and active. The LGBT community certainly doesn't wish for a return to the past, for instance. Whole social movements have been organized between people who, prior to recent history, would have been logistically unable to communicate with each other.

At the same time, certain people have views that are morally abhorrent. Or, heck, even just not very interesting. It's important to NOT to shoehorn some kind of homesteading right over public attention in the name of free speech. In the past, society's way of protecting itself against this was mainly that speech was expensive, and extremists frequently lacked the money to impose themselves on others' attention. This was in some ways a horrifying way to solve the problem, since it suppressed the disadvantaged, and didn't work anyway. In any case, it's gone. Speech is no longer expensive.

What remains to see how we can regain some semblance of sanity in a world where all public communication devolves into people shouting at each other. I'm sick of living in that world. I don't particularly care whether Facebook takes down Trump's comments; they've already been heard. But I do care about notions of free speech that prevent tech companies from trying to solve the pressing social challenge of how to let people regain control over their own attention spans.