[ashtonkem]

> Political speech, in particular, is supposed to be protected from this kind of treatment.

No, it is not. It is supposed to be protected from the government punishing you over it, any other requirements are purely made up.

> There's also an intermingling of private and public sphere, and firing someone for private legal behavior because some internet hive mind started a smear campaign also should not be lawful

So you would use the power of the state to suppress speech in the name of free speech? I don’t think you’ve thought through the long term consequences of this.

[Zuider]

>No, it is not. It is supposed to be protected from the government punishing you over it, any other requirements are purely made up.

The United States has an unusually robust legal protection of free speech in its constitution. It is the case that this only protects citizens from the state, and any other protections people imagine it provides are, as you state, 'purely made up.'

Even so, the First Amendment is based on a prior ethos of the value of free speech.

The philosopher, J.S. Mill, in his impassioned defense of freedom of speech saw both government and private actions as being threats to free speech, and advocated protections against both.

There is an adage which has been much repeated in recent years that freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences. That depends on what those 'consequences' are. One may disagree, argue back, or even block a person with whom you disagree, but it crosses a line when you respond by trying to destroy a person whose views you reject.

[jhgb]

> any other requirements are purely made up.

Protection from the government punishing you over political speech is "purely made up" as well. All laws in all countries are "purely made up", humans made them so.

[ashtonkem]

It’s fairly obvious from the context that we’re talking about the American tradition of free speech, and the jurisprudence around it. So in this case “made up” means “there is no case law to support your assertion about how the principle of free speech should work in American law”. I find an attempt to assert that all laws are made up kind of lazy side stepping of bother the issue at hand and kind of annoying.

Furthermore, even if one just decides to YOLO a few centuries of American jurisprudence on the matter, one will quickly find oneself either advocating for authoritarianism, or recreating our existing speech system from scratch. Those are the only two logical outcomes that can come from an assertion that one parties speech should be suppressed in order to “protect” (promote, imho) the speech of another group.

[jhgb]

> It’s fairly obvious

But why? Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized? That was absolutely not obvious to me.

[ashtonkem]

> But why?

Because the top article is a NYT article, and this forum is largely American in composition. There are interesting discussions about free speech rights in other countries, but in this case it’s reasonable to assume an American context.

> Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized

I’ll remind you that presuming good faith is a rule here, this is a nakedly bad faith interpretation of what I said.