An American can exercise their government-protected right to free speech on their own website. This right does not apply to someone else's website, since it would be infringing on the website owner's property rights. Freedom of speech doesn't grant the speaker the right to occupy someone else's private property.

If those websites wish to police speech to this degree then they can reclassify themselves as publishers and accept all the legal burdens that come with it. At least then they'd be intellectually honest.

Let's use Facebook as an example.

The "Facebook © 2019" notice on each Facebook page tells users that they are on someone else's website. Next to the notice is a link to Facebook's terms of service, which discloses their "Community Standards". Facebook has been dishonest in many situations, but they don't hide their ability to moderate content in any way.

It's certainly within one's right to be upset with Facebook's policies. If you feel strongly enough about this, you have the option to stop using Facebook, and you can switch to a different platform with policies that align more closely with your views. You can also publish your own website, where you can establish your own rules.

But Facebook's website is not your property, so you can't graft your preferred rules onto Facebook. You can ask them nicely and you can apply social pressure, but Facebook makes the final decision on how they run themselves because the site is not yours.

Yeah that's not really the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that Facebook is acting as a publisher and publishers don't have DMCA protection which is what makes the model work. They want the privileges without the responsibility.

Facebook doesn't become a "publisher" by removing user-generated content from its platform. They'll continue to qualify for DMCA Title II's safe harbor provision as long as they take down copyright infringing material that gets reported to them. Facebook is not required to leave non-infringing material intact to be protected under DMCA Title II.

But on the internet almost everything is on someone else's private property, unless you run your own website on your own hardware running on your own network and using your own DNS.

The commenter didn't conflate anything. They defined the legal parameters under which freedom of speech actually exists in the United States. You can insist on talking about this idealistic normative if you want, but in common parlance it's reasonable to refer to the legal concept by the colloquial term.

You know how you can say whatever you want on the street, but I can make you leave my house for whatever reason I want? Same idea. Free speech is only a coherent concept in public spaces. Otherwise my right to private property would be impaired by your right to say whatever you want in my dojo.

As for your last question...I mean, really? "What's the point?" Are you actually asking this in good faith? Go take a look at any country which doesn't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press. How about being able to say what I want without being disappeared in the middle of the night? If Twitter bans someone for hate speech you honestly believe that's comparable to something like Khashoggi's assassination?

You're quoting Voltaire like the stakes for private and public censorship are the same but that's utterly ridiculous.

> The commenter didn't conflate anything. They defined the legal parameters under which freedom of speech actually exists in the United States. You can insist on talking about this idealistic normative if you want, but in common parlance it's reasonable to refer to the legal concept by the colloquial term.

This is an opinion, and one many people disagree with. The idea of freedom of speech existed before the first amendment. They're not the same thing, it's just convenient for authoritarians to conflate them because it creates a narrower scope. It's intentional equivocation and a pretty flimsy argument tactic.

> You know how you can say whatever you want on the street, but I can make you leave my house for whatever reason I want? Same idea. Free speech is only a coherent concept in public spaces. Otherwise my right to private property would be impaired by your right to say whatever you want in my dojo.

Again, not the same thing, but what you're getting at is freedom of association. A company can choose whom they do business with, as an individual can choose whom they allow in their home. The interesting thing lately is that many people only believe in freedom of association when it means that they get to pick who is excluded, and very rarely believe in the actual principal. You can see this in the whole "gay wedding cake" situation that played out in the last couple of years. Much of the same political group that loves to trot out the idea that you can censor people out of existence on the internet was horrified when a private business chose not to create a specific message on their product.

> You're quoting Voltaire like the stakes for private and public censorship are the same but that's utterly ridiculous.

Not really, it's actually pretty dead on. John Stewart Mill wrote at length about censorship in On Liberty and specifically wrote about censorship via social pressure and how dangerous it was. It's not some imagined idea, it's just one inconvenient to a particular political group's goals right now.

Thanks for making these points so clearly.

The person you are rightly critiquing seems similar to the careless but widespread view that says, "sure, go ahead and X, that's fine, it's your [legal] right, but I think blah blah" with this thing few ever catch which is: it's often totally NOT fine to do something that is nonetheless legal.

You have the right to X, but I can still say STOP IT. And I could reasonably argue in various cases that X is anti-social or bad for any range of reasons. Please people do NOT just accept or do whatever as long as it's legal. That whole idea is craziness.

Private companies can't arrest you, put you on trial, sentence you to prison, or kill you. Government can. That's the point.

> Private companies can't arrest you, put you on trial, sentence you to prison, or kill you

In many US jurisdictions they can do the first (and so can essentially everyone else.) They also do the last, often without legal consequences, though not as the outcome of a judicial process (but in civilized countries, government can't do that as the outcome of a judicial process, either.)

But they can use their opinion in such a way that I am not accepted by the majority of other companies in the sphere.

I'm not picking on you in particular, but this is a rather annoying argument that people bring up that is utterly nonsensical. Companies can and do cause harm to individuals. No they can't put you in jail but they can otherwise isolate you from society via making you unemployable, revealing personal information to social embarrass you, or barring you from essential services to function in modern society. To pretend they aren't is to be in denial to the scope and power and of modern companies. I say all this as an ardent capitalist for what it's worth.

Sure, but no one is claiming private companies can't hurt you. That's not what this is about. Note the specific term used: the government can kill you. It is the sole arbiter of what's legal in its domain. The first amendment doesn't exist to protect you from being shamed or embarassed for what you say. It exists to keep you from being jailed or murdered to censor the voice of the people.

So no, it's not "utterly nonsensical." Everything you're bringing up is completely orthogonal to the political theory of freedom of speech.

I mean that is exactly what the thread was about. Legalism, and the 1st amendment is very uninteresting as an argument about morals to me. The principle of the freedom of speech is an interesting moral argument which these platforms (publishers if we're being intellectually honest) are often guilty of abusing. Slavery was once "legal" yet when people talk about freedom the entire concept isn't hinged on the 13th amendment.

I'm not conflating anything. I stated a fact, that the federal government cannot punish you for exercising freedom of speech, nor can it restrict your speech. Private companies aren't beholden to those restrictions on their own platforms. The person above the one I replied to was the one conflating the two, as I said.

> What's the point of having free speech protected by the government if in practice no company will allow you to practice your free speech?

It’s your right to talk, but that doesn’t compel anyone else to broadcast it. Freedom of speech doesn’t require that anyone he made to listen.

What Voltaire said is entirely irrelevant, this is a legal question.