[ben_w]

If what is was also what ought to be, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.

Personally I don’t have more than a nebulous idea of what I think the shape of free speech ought to be: {fire in a crowded theatre, parasite medicine during a viral pandemic, homeopathic cancer remedies in general} seem like harmful things to allow, but the reason society (collectively rather than just the individuals within it) should allow and encourage free speech is to find the stuff where we’re all incorrectly confident what is and isn’t true. It combats groupthink.

Likewise, who should that freedom bind? Just the government, nobody else? That’s great where communication is mediated by public-owned forums, public-owned post, and public-owned telephone networks, but most communication is now mediated my private companies.

Compelling all private companies to be content-neutral in the same way as the government? I don’t see the downsides, but it is a radical change and I am a very long way from any form of law let alone constitutional.

But the point is, this is about what isn’t, not what is.

[beej71]

The government isn't a private organization in that only the government can put people in jail. This is what freedom of speech is really about: the ability to say just about anything and not be fined or imprisoned.

But it has never guaranteed that you'd have a platform from which to say those things... which is the same guarantee you get from Facebook or anywhere else.

Goverment: no guarantee of a place to speak, cannot put you in jail because of the First Amendment.

Facebook: no quarantee of a place to speak, cannot put you in jail because they're not the government.

Also, it's unclear what legal mechanism could even be put in place to prevent companies from banning and censoring. And it's fraught with problems because you're trying to guarantee a platform, something the First Amendment never intended. Are companies allowed to delete comments? What if they're old comments? Do you have to keep them forever? Who pays for that? Can you delete porn? The First Amendment allows you to say "f--k" over and over and over as long as you're not threatening. Can you imagine people on, say, a religious board posting that over and over? And the organization wasn't allowed to censor it?

It's a massive can of worms.

Finally, on my blog I want the freedom to delete any comments for any reason or for no reason.

[ben_w]

> The government isn't a private organization in that only the government can put people in jail. This is what freedom of speech is really about: the ability to say just about anything and not be fined or imprisoned.

Here is a deliberately hyperbolic scenario to illustrate the problem:

If a future government sold all their land to private interests who have opinions about what can and cannot be said, then undesirable people have nowhere to stand while doing the speaking, and those private entities can punish those they don’t like thanks to trespass laws.

This feels like it would de-facto remove freedom of speech even if the government itself passed no new laws.

> It's a massive can of worms.

Agreed 100%, that’s the point of my disclaimers about not knowing enough to have strong, well-defined opinions, nor having relevant skills, both near the start and end of my previous comment.

[beej71]

> If a future government sold all their land to private interests who have opinions about what can and cannot be said, then undesirable people have nowhere to stand while doing the speaking, and those private entities can punish those they don’t like thanks to trespass laws.

The flipside would be people having the right to protest on your private property whenever they felt like it.

Or, back in techland, the right to say whatever they wanted on your blog's comment section.

I hear ya, but it's going to be a massive challenge to come up with a cure that's A) Constitutional and B) not worse than the disease.

[krapp]

If you have to resort to that degree of hyperbole to make the problem seem problematic, it only suggests that it isn't much of a problem in practical reality.

[ben_w]

Principles should apply even when exposed to the most extreme (physically possible) hyperbole, IMO.

[krapp]

The problem is the principle is hypocritical.

The deliberately hyperbolic scenario which results from what's being proposed here - that platforms be forced to publish all legal content regardless of their intent - is that governments declare all websites to be platforms, and thus governments directly control all online communication and publishing, and then simply declare any speech they dislike to be illegal.

In essence, what is being argued is that in order to protect free speech we cannot trust private citizens or any communities they form to exercise freedom of association. Yet the same community that considers everything else that governments do a violation of their fundamental civil liberties and a naked and obvious pretext towards rounding up dissidents for the gulags seems to implicitly trust the same governments to act as fair and impartial arbiters of online speech, to the point that they consider giving up what were (until some point in 2016) considered essential liberties to be a necessity.

If the scenario where governments cede all of their authority and property to private interests you mentioned earlier is reasonable enough to be actionable, then this scenario which at least describes things that governments have historically actually done, should be even more actionable.

Yet, given the choice of Facebook not having secret police, and it being possible to simply create other networks on the open internet if you disagree with Facebook's terms, and Facebook having secret police, and the creation or moderation of any new network being directly overseen by governments, and terms of service being enforced by the state's monopoly on violence, people would rather Facebook have secret police.