Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?
Free speech and equal rights in a legal sense, meaning staying out of jail? Sure, with caveats about threats and abuse.
Free to use a private platform? No, nobody's entitled to the support of someone else's private platform. Equal rights are about protection from the state, not from others' opinions.
Platforms themselves also have speech-based rights. Even if one portrays itself as a neutral 'town square,' it puts its own rights to work as soon as it implements an algorithmic feed, implicitly deciding what content to promote or hide.
You are entitled to your opinion: good, bad, or irrelevant. You are entitled to your words. You are not entitled to an audience.
Brilliant statement, I fully agree.
The issue is who chooses to give them an audience. IMO it is up to the audience not to listen, but it seems to be the opinion of a lot of people here that gatekeepers (companies) should have the power to decide that and 'protect' their audience from it. That IMO is anti free speech, as the 'protect' part of the term is abiguous/subjective and depends on the beliefs/opinions of the gatekeepers.
If their choices were unpopular, people would flock to alternatives. They don't.
Which puts a hole into the underlying theory. If people do not naturally gravitate towards alternative ideas, and network effects keep people in one place, then these networks should be made government owned.
Firms have a right to their property, and the choices of how they maximize revenue on it.
I mean, should the head of a media firm be threatened by the Government or President, and forced to comply with their preferred style of gatekeeping?
Regardless of whether someone is entitled to free speech, is a private company bound to the constitutional protection?
My understanding has always been that its specifically the government that can't censor me, a private company or citizen can. The NY Times isn't required to write an article I submit to them for example, that's no different than Twitter deciding not to keep a post a write.
I generally agree with your point about private companies and the 1A.
However, the NYT and Twitter/X are fundamentally different in that the NYT is not a user platform but rather a media company who decides what it wants to publish--meaning that is it's stated goal. Twitter/X stated goal is to provide a platform for users to publish whatever they want to say. Now, Twitter/X can have a policy saying "here's a platform where you can say whatever you want except for X, Y and Z" and that's fine. Just like HN has policies. As long as it's clear and transparent as to what they are allowing or disallowing, then users are informed enough to know what they're going to get when they log on to X. Just like I know what I'm going to get if I visit Fox News.
Prior to Elon, Twitter's policies were stricter and so there was a lot less "hate speech" (for lack of a better term). Those guardrails are gone, since for one Elon fired the whole moderation team, and also because of Elon's own immature posts setting the example, it's devolved into a reddit-style cesspool so I decided not to go there anymore.
Banning links to Signal would be no big deal if Elon hadn't loudly proclaimed himself as the "defender of free speech" and demonized the "censorship" of Twitter.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten too cynical to believe any company or rich individual making a business deal to actually tell the truth - its all marketing at that point.
I agree with your viewpoint I think, but Im sure as always there are some edge cases which make this definition difficult.
Then you have no free speech. I can just refuse you internet access, or not sell ink and paper to you…
So my take is that no, it should not be allowed to private companies to censor arbitrarily. And of course an "algorithm" that sorts stuff in any other way than chronologically is censorship. The feed should just show chronological ordered stuff of followed accounts. No more and no less.
They are about ensuring that the government doesnt use its unique powers of force to ensure that certain ideas are not shared or discussed.
What the current government is doing, with Fox + Twitter, is fundamentally the opposite of free speech. They have the power to say something, then pretend it is true, and act on it.
Its not a fair fight.
Don't sell me paper. Cut off my internet. That doesn't stop me from saying whatever I want, whether in public or private.
Calling for the eradication of people with certain sexual preferences or skin color for example.
I would still argue, though, that saying literally anything should be legal. Acting on hate speech, by plotting to commit a crime, may be illegal. The problem there is that you plotted a crime and in certain case that plot itself is illegal, it isn't about what you said but what you did.
This is not a simple matter of people saying things that are undesirable, or even heretical. It is not a matter of someone saying something hateful, then ignoring them as a hater, because chances are they want to suppress the speech of those they hate.
Child pornography, slander, and death threats are other examples of exceptions.
This is why the no asterisk position sets itself to implode.
The core defense of Free speech, one of the better articulated points is from Oliver Wendell Holmes. He articulates that free speech serves the search for truth, but the search for truth via the competition of ideas.
>that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,
This was his articulation in a sedition case brought by the government against citizens.
It is specifically in the case of government using its power to become a player in the market of ideas.
You clearly don't know anything about actual law and rights.
Yeah it does, at least in America. You can't yell fire in a theatre and incite panic.
Also there is the paradox of tolerance.
The limit is basically “speech which threatens imminent violence”.
So saying “we should kill all group X” is fine. Saying “lets go kill those people from group X standing on Main St at 2pm” is not ok.
Even in his dissenting opinion in Abrams vs the United States, Holmes valued not free speech, but the market place of ideas - the competition of ideas that underlies the search for truth.
Slavishly sticking to free speech, and destroying the market of ideas - creating a monopilist propaganda force, with a symbiotic political party is NOT free speech.
Today we have far more information than any of the founders had anticipated. Monopolies of ideas, far more content than fact, the race to the bottom due to advertising - a source of stress in every pocket?
Yeah, your network is going to have a very specific signal to noise ratio. Your market place of ideas is going to be selling junk food, because its cheap and easy to make.
The idea of counter speech works, if counter speech is heard in the first place. If your message never gets to the other side, or the other party is completely enraged and unable to think past their fears - you have no market place of ideas.
If I said it was my political opinion that the gestapo should show up to your door, and drag you, your wife, and children to a death camp - we don't just have a "disagreement." Would you tolerate a discussion around somebody who said they personally wanted to do something like that to you?
There's a line somewhere around political opinions that involve using the state to inflict violence on another that I believe should be inexpressible in public, and I think it's fine for non-state actors to ensure that's the case.
Isn't that free speech?
