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Okay, I'll take a step back and clear the table of about 50% of what you and the other replies seem to be objecting to. I don't think Reddit should be regulated by the government, or laws, or some anti-trust, anti-monopoly thing. I don't think 1A should be changed so that Reddit can be forced to allow speech. What I am in favor of is recognizing, as a society, the value of free speech, not just as a constitutional technicality but as a principle. I believe we ought to value it as a good. And I think that as a society, we should stop and be like, hey, wait a minute, online communication is now dominated by a handful of sites, doesn't it violate the spirit of free speech if, in practice, all those sites enforce roughly the same overton window, and your options are to (a) get in line or (b) not use the 5-7 sites that everyone else uses? In fact, I think the conversation about the constitutional limits of 1A, or governmental rights, or whatever, is a distraction. I'm not suggesting the government step in. I'm just saying we clearly have a situation where the principle of free speech is being violated — where people are not able to share certain ideas on the platforms that everyone else uses. I'm aware we don't have a law protecting that. I'm making a prescriptive argument that society ought to view this as a bad, dangerous thing. So in terms of a practical agenda, I dunno, I would like to see a stronger shared appreciation of free speech, and bottom-up pressure for the big communication platforms to stop enforcing their own capricious filters. From this perspective — not the 1A perspective — I think the argument that "private enterprises can do whatever they want" is pretty weak and irrelevant. The actual question is what externalities it has on society when the platforms used by everyone decide what you can say on them. I think the answer to that is not obviously "nothing," and probably "something." |