The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your property is historical fact and precedent.

There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehovah's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc

Originally, it was once widely recognized by US jurisprudence, though property rights and freedom of association are important, the First Amendment was even more important and trumps property rights.

Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a DNS registrar.

Surprisingly few people cared when the US government carted off my bandmate's parents to concentration camps. That's a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.

The first amendment says that the government cannot restrict free speech it has nothing whatsoever to do with a private entity tolerating "free speech" on their property.

The totality of the public space being private property in the aforementioned scenario sounds like a unique situation and a poor position to reason from.

In general not only do you not have a free speech interest in communicating on someone else's property the government forcing facebook to carry your message would actually be compelling them to communicate their approval of your message.

You would be protecting a wholly imaginary free speech interest while trespassing on a real one.

Not only has the GP indicated one case (JWs) but there are shopping mall cases and many others where a “public forum” doctrine has extended 1A scrutiny to private property.

(That said I think the analog here for the public forum is somewhere well down the OSI stack. In Layer 7 I am pretty firmly a believer that the private actor discriminates how she pleases.)

Really? Because most of YouTube and Facebook very much strikes me as public space. That's how the population thinks of it. That's how society uses it.

You would be protecting a wholly imaginary free speech interest while trespassing on a real one.

Does anyone really think that YouTube not getting to censor people is hampering YouTube's ability to express their political expression? No one in 2018 mistakes a random YouTuber's opinion for YouTube's. Only people interested in silencing others hold to such an opinion. Such an opinion only makes sense, if you directly equate censorship to "expression."

YouTube does have an editorial stake to the product that they can present to their advertiser customers. However, YouTube has stepped way beyond that line! The same goes for Facebook.

Nobodies rights will be violated by this.

1. Jehovah's witnesses tend not to shoot up synagogues, whereas an otherwise typical member of Gab did.

2. Antisemitism isn't a protected class.

I can see from your comments that you are one of those, "I'd defend to the death your right to say it," people. I must admit, I would not defend to the death someone's right to spew hate toward Jews. That's not my hill to die on. I rather feel . . . the opposite. I'm glad that Gab got kicked off GoDaddy, and if I had my way, they'd be relegated to the dark corners of Tor.

Similarly, as much as anyone hates antisemitic speech, it IS protected speech because it’s free speech.

At some point we are going to have to decide in this country if we wish to continue forward with the enlightenment and grow up as a society where we actually talk to eachother again, or are we going to descend back into declaring someone a heretic and burning them, or in modern parlance, deplatforming and doxing.

You don’t stop ignorance by banning it or doing virtual book burnings, you stop it by educating people with the ignorant viewpoint.

Banning speech and ideas simply grows it underground, where you never get to witness it through glad handing, but you will experience it at the worst possible outcome instead.

This is a false equivalency and a weak argument, where you are suggesting that all muslims are both terrorists and anti-semites.

A "terrorist" shot up a gay night club, and yes, we do ban terrorist propaganda from the public square, or are you advocating for allowing ISIS/Taliban/Al Qaeda, etc, to be allowed to preach their hatred and drum-up support?

The way he talked on Gab seems pretty typical of users there, so going and shooting people seems like the only thing that wasn't typical.

Or are you arguing something else?

It sounds like Gab is being de-platformed for the typical part and not the otherwise part.

I don't understand how people can claim on one hand that Instagram/Facebook/Whatever is making people more superficial while at the same time claim that people encouraging each other to be violently racist has no effect at all.

It's weird that you would try to push such an infamous counter-example out of bounds instead of making an argument.

> It doesn't mean it does matter either.

Someone said something doesn't matter because "few people care", just one example of something that mattered and about which also "few people cared" refutes that reasoning. They're not making an argument, they're refuting one.

edit: Another example would be Linus' announcement of Linux at the time. Few people cared, in contrast to the people who today find Linux extremely important, or depend on it without knowing. And there you go, I now made a "direct" (whatever that means) comparison between Linux and Japanese being put into concentration camps in the US, as well as a "direct" comparison between Linux and neo-nazis being deplatformed. The point matters more than the comparison used to make it.

Only if we assume the soundbite it's just like when Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps didn't happen.

The point could have been made without the comparison, by writing something like this:

"Surprisingly few people cared" is a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.

And then we can discuss how social norms and the legal system interact, rather than have this conversation.

English isn't my first language, even I had no problem understanding the intention of the words, and arguing against the "strongest plausible interpretation" is in the guidelines.

> And then we can discuss how social norms and the legal system interact

Personally I'm content with it being settled that "few people care" is an invalid argument.

You know better than that, and you should know full well I'd expect better of you.

"Surprisingly few people cared" is a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.

?

However, I will be moving a handful of domains to Easy DNS because I appreciate them taking this position. I looked at Gab once a while back and was mostly disgusted, and never looked back, but I don't like this trend toward censoring and deplatforming. I don't worry about my speech being censored because (at least for now) it's relatively popular. But popular speech isn't the speech that needs protecting, the unpopular speech does.

Anecdotally, these deplaformings are shifting my worldview further right. And I know for a fact that it is having the same affect on many of my peers. Some might call that a negative consequence.

More citations needed! This is a bare assertion that is not widely agreed upon. The polarization was getting worse long before the deplatforming trend started.

Since you started out the game, I'll add a bare assertion of my own. Constantly being bombarded with extremist views fuels polarization! Under that thesis, deplatforming actively works against polarization.

The moral of the story is that you can make almost any argument as long as you are allowed to rely on unproved premises.

The center collapsed because the establishment discredited itself in the 2000s: Iraq, the housing bubble, banks-before-people bailouts, etc. Now everyone is flailing around looking for alternatives. The hard right was first to the dance, but I see a lot of signs of growth on the hard left too.

I wonder if the hard left will get deplatformed too if the rhetoric starts sounding really extreme? They might, especially if there is a loud call for wealth redistribution.

But I could turn out to be wrong about that. We certainly live in interesting times.