[ashtonkem]

> People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO.

Nobody deserves special protection from "deplatforming"[0] from the government; giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech". If one has the freedom to speak and associate, one must also have the freedom to be silent and disassociate.

[0] It's amazing how many people who've been "cancelled" or "deplatformed" continue to tell me so on the internet. One can't help but wonder how effective this so-called deplatforming really is.

[dllthomas]

> giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech"

Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?

[ashtonkem]

You can go ahead and toss out the post office here, as part of the US Government arguably the first amendment applies directly to it, which isn't going to be true for any private companies.

So the general rule is that the government can override one's right to free association, but that the government needs a compelling reason to do so. This is the basis for very important civil rights rulings, as the courts have overridden one's ability to refuse service based on various protected characteristics. The question is, does speech and speech alone rise to this standard? In a few cases yes, but in general no.

The rationale for phone companies is that they're classified as "Common Carriers", a concept that comes from common law. A common carrier is a regulatory concept that places certain obligations on service providers (typically transit companies) in exchange for the right to sell to the general public. This has never been a mandatory thing, private and contract carriers have always existed in parallel with common carriers, but if you want to sell to the public directly without drawing up a contract per client one has to be a common carrier. Telephone companies fall under this common carrier distinction largely because they must connect with each other; it's pretty much impossible to create the equivalent of a "contract carrier" in the telephone space, since they're only useful when interconnected.

You'll note that your ISP is not actually a common carrier, as the FCC reversed its stance in 2017. Technically speaking there is no legal requirement that your ISP carry any speech disagrees with, even though from a marketing standpoint that would be a disaster. Given that we haven't regulated ISPs as common carriers, despite the relative lack of competition in this area, there is no clear legal rationale for the government to regulate hosting providers as common carriers. They don't sell to the general public, you in fact actually sign a one-off contract to work with them, and the end consumer has a dizzying array of options for hosting providers in the case of bad behavior by one. Any attempt by the government to force a host like Wordpress to carry speech would be both an unnecessary attempted expansion of government power, but would probably crash and burn in the courts almost immediately.

[dllthomas]

> as part of the US Government arguably the first amendment applies directly to [the Post Office]

Quite fair.

As to the rest of it: I agree with your description of how things work, but I don't think it really addresses the point I was trying to make which (made more explicit and construed narrowly) is that we need to be more precise about the situation before we say "compelling carriage of speech is tyranny".

[ashtonkem]

To re-summarize my point; arguably even common carriers aren’t actually forced by the government to be content neutral. Rather they’re given certain benefits (such as the right to sell to the public without contract) in exchange for meeting certain standards of behavior, including content neutrality and regulations on rates and liability. Companies are free to reject those restrictions, but they lose access to the benefits as well.

[rbanffy]

> Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?

Neither allows you to target millions of gullible targets almost for free.