For the nth fucking time. Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever shit you want and I have to listen to it and give you an avenue to do so. It just means that the state can't take legal action against you. If I run a coffee shop and you come there and say "murder all the xyz", I can very well ask you to leave because that's not suppressing your free speech. I'm just saying you can't say that on my property.
Those who don't get it can keep screaming into the void.
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@viv Well I kinda agree here but not entierly.
Disclaimer
Do not take the below as me claiming that free speech is necessary or evil not to uphold. I think there is a great deal of value in tolerance and inclusivity and ejecting abusive elements from a personal space is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. My following statements are of a technical nature on the meaning of free speech as a term and how I interpret your usage in this post.
Meaning of Free Speech
For the nth fucking time. Free speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever shit you want … It just means that the state can’t take legal action against you.
Free speech is a principle (which can be encoded into law or a personal policy or even the rule of an organization) whereby people are protected to hold any opinion they wish without punitive repercussions. It does not carry over to calls to action, harassment, or similar destructive behavior.
Free speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever shit you want and I have to … give you an avenue to do so.
Presuming the things being spoken here are a reference to opinions, and not a call to action then as such this would mean, presuming you run an instance, that your server or instance does not employ free-speech principles. That would be true even if you operate out of a country that has free speech laws.
Free speech laws protect you from punitive actions from your government with regard to your opinions. Likewise a free speech instance would protect you from punitive action from your instance for your opinions.
If I run a coffee shop and you come there and say “murder all the xyz”, I can very well ask you to leave
This would not be considered an opinion but rather a call to action. Presuming there is some potential for people to follow this call to action it would not be covered by either legal free speech or a personal policy of free speech.
However if someone said “We would be better off if xyz were all dead” then that would not be a call to action. It would be legally protected in a free speech legal system but likewise if your coffee shop employed free-speech policy it too would be permitted in your coffee shop. If you kicked someone out on those grounds it would be well within your legal rights in a free speech state, but it would mean that you personally are not supporting free speech as a principle.
because that’s not suppressing your free speech.
You would be suppressing free speech, but you are legally permitted to suppress free speech in private spaces. Therefore you would not be violating free speech laws despite the fact that you would be suppressing free speech
Those who don’t get it can keep screaming into the void.
I do agree with the fact that a lot of people don’t get or understand the nuance here. Many people think that you must enforce free speech in your cafe as a legal right, and you are correct that you are free to suppress free speech. However I think many people who object dont do so because they feel you would be in legal violation but rather because free speech as a principle is the morally right thing to do and by not upholding free speech principles in your cafe you would be in moral, not legal, violation of ones perceived sense of right and wrong.
@freemo I feel no reason to believe as if free speech infringements only comes from the state, especially in this context where most censorships are done by corporations, media and other non-government institutions. It should be kept in mind that the social settings in which the first amendment was made is very different from the one we are now living in. The biggest threat of free speech is always from the powerful Orthodoxies trying to ban unpopular and heretic opinions, be it the state, the press, the news outlets, the big tech, the mob, or the social circles where only a very narrow range of opinions are allowed.
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@Vectorfield
I dont exactly buy the whole “the first ammendment wasnt written for the modern era”, so I disagree with your reasoning, BUT I do agree with your conclusions to some extent, that being that corporations that deal in social media, or rather, ones which have a near-monopoly on social media, should be legally obligated to uphold free speech policies. But my reasoning is quite a bit different than yours.
First off before UI explain why let me be clear, I only feel monopoly level social media companies that have a significant portion of the market should be required to uphold free speech principles, as such smaller companies like parlor or mastodon should remain free to censor as they see fit.
My reasoning is that when a private entity owns a large portion of a communication medium, and can control the speech unilaterally it becomes a kin to what we tend to define as a “public utility”. This is the case with other communication means that in many cases have an infrastructure built by private companies, but where a common shared use is needed. for example the physical telephone wires, even when built by private companies, as part of a national network is considered a public utility. The same can be said of the internet infrastructure itself. For these reasons a telephone company can not restrict your free speech, it is treated as if in a public space, same thing for an ISP.
I would argue that because things like Facebook and Twitter are so pervasive, and in fact, the only medium most people can use to contact the majority of their friends and family, it too should be treated as a public utility. As such I would argue they should loose their rights to censorship in the way that other private forums or communities have a right to do.