[AnthonyMouse]

Yeah, it's three different things.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution applies to the government.

Free speech is the principle that suppressing allegedly false information is more dangerous than not suppressing it because if the information is actually false you can refute it but if the information is actually true then it allows powerful actors to suppress atrocities and lie with impunity.

Censorship is the suppression or prohibition of speech. Private censorship is not a violation of the First Amendment but it's still censorship.

[amanaplanacanal]

That stretches the meaning of the word beyond anything useful though. Is it censorship if The NY Times doesn’t publish your letter to the editor? Is it censorship if I kick you out of my party when you get drunk and start yelling racist slurs? You could take a maximalist view and say yes, those are censorship, but I doubt you would find many people that would say you shouldn’t do those things.

[AnthonyMouse]

Censorship is the suppression or prohibition of speech. If the NY Times doesn't publish your letter to the editor but you can post it on Facebook and have a reasonably proportionate number of people able to read it in practice, it's not being effectively suppressed. If neither they nor anyone else with a similar reach will carry it, that's censorship.

It has nothing to do with who does it and everything to do with whether the idea is being suppressed in practice.

[djrogers]

> That stretches the meaning of the word beyond anything useful though.

No - it’s literally the definition of the word censorship: “suppression or prohibition of speech”. It really sounds like you’re trying hard to redefine the word to mean what you want to say, but maybe you should just pick a different word?

[amanaplanacanal]

If that's the definition you want to use, I doubt you could find anybody that is seriously against all censorship. Then it just comes back to where you want to draw the lines.

[rhizome]

Where do you draw the line between censorship (as you define it) and editorial policy?

[djrogers]

This isn’t my definition, it’s the literal dictionary definition.

[Ir0nMan]

It is truly amazing that so many people do not understand that free speech is a principle that exists beyond, and in fact existed before, the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution.

[wolco5]

Free speech is a concept that exists outside of the US.

Free speech is about being able to express ideas and these can be supressed by private entities, communities or a number of non-government entities like a church.