[vanattab]

> What some people don’t seem to understand about the first amendment is that while the government is obligated to not stop you from publishing, no private party is obligated to assist you.

What some people don't understand about freespeech is that it's a bigger principle then just the 1st amendment protections. Most of us are not arguing that companies ARE violating the law/first amendment. only that political/religious speech restrictions by large gate keeping institutions can have similar negative effects on society. We are arguing for ether more protections to be put in place or even for social change where instead of demanding companies censor these who disagree with us we demand they allow them to speak, EVENTHOUGH we disagree with them.

[pron]

What some people don't understand is that the freedom to create a reputation by selecting which speech to amplify and disseminate is, itself, an integral part of free speech, and the reputations of the oldest, best established social institutions for the dissemination of information -- such as schools, universities, and publishers -- have been built on what they don't publish as much as on what they do. We are arguing for more freedom of speech for organisations to allow them to choose what level of scrutiny, or even what bias, to apply, so that we can establish the level of trust we think they deserve based on their record.

[slavik81]

> Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries.

> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

> There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Library (1859)