Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.
I understand that there's a different level of consequence we're talking about here (legal vs comment deletion) but how we treat child porn is the extreme for intolerance and I think it's safe to say child porn is less than it would be in the more "tolerant" alternative. And I actually do mean think, I don't have evidence, and I don't know, so if there's evidence otherwise that some society accepted child porn with the caveat of "this is bad" always being placed beside it and then saw it's usage and distribution drop I would find that pretty damn compelling case.
I would point to other comparables though. What causes a decrease in smoking? Did putting health warning labels on cigarette boxes decrease smoking? How did that compare to banning commercials and removing indoor smoking?
People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me.
Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.
Am I being censored or deplatformed? ;-)
I'll see myself to the corner...
But if a platform wants to be a "common carrier" and not a publisher with all the responsibilities thereof, it doesn't get to make the distinction, so actually in a very real sense, you are entitled to use the platform of anyone who wants to be a common carrier, by definition.
If you send something controversial via USPS, they don't have any liability for it, and only in very exceptional circumstances would it be intercepted in transit. If they were responsible for everything they carried, the postal service would look very, very different. If it's illegal you can be busted at either end but the postal service itself doesn't care.
You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech.
I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.
Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced?
It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.
