Does that include platforms like Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, which:

>can not accept cash donations via any payment processor

>has had their domains revoked from multiple providers

>is only barely able to be able to protected from (numerous, expected) DDoS attacks due to being kicked off Cloudflare, etc.

There comes a point when a person is not free to express their content on any platform on the web despite a lack of government censorship.

I want to be sympathetic to this sort of thing in the general sense. I really do.

But... I'm not at all sad that Daily Stormer has trouble staying online.

Free speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want. It doesn't mean that anyone has to give you a platform to say your piece. It doesn't mean that people can't react negatively to what you say. It doesn't mean that there are no consequences to what you say.

Assuming there is reasonable diversity in your options for platforms[0], and yet you still can't find a place for your speech, maybe you're just an irredeemable asshole and should change your views[1].

[0] The current availability of this is certainly debatable.

[1] Maybe you're not and you actually are being unjustly oppressed and censored. But I don't believe that's the case with the Daily Stormer.

Free speech is an interesting ideal but historically there's always been "acceptable speech" and "discouraged speech", where discouragement comes on a spectrum between "outright banned and prison" to "people don't invite you to parties".

In hunter-gatherer days if you had extremely antisocial ideology your tribe probably just left you in the desert and you died.

You are proving the OPs point. No government compelled cloudflare to stop providing services for the daily stormer. They stopped because most people don’t want services from your neighborhood white supremacy DNS provider and that was what cloudflare would be known as if they did.

Should the government compell private internet service firms to service anyone?

An argument can be made that if the ability to use the web is a human right[1] then yes, governments have a responsibility to ensure their citizens can actually use it. You can make an analogy to (private) providers of healthcare denying coverage to patients they find disagreeable.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/4/12092740/un-resolution-con...

In what ways are domain name services analogues to healthcare?

Both can be true. These platforms are censoring and people are free to go to other platforms.

Of course! But when China says you're free to discuss the Free Tibet movement in any other country but China, we rightly call it censorship. What makes this any different? Or, I suppose, what makes the differences one of kind and not of degree?

In a lot of ways, Facebook is as much of a country as the Vatican is.

The analogy holds no water, it is infinitely easier to broadcast your speech on another platform (or make your own platform) than to deal with state level censorship. Publishing them on a company's dime and expecting platform neutrality is preposterous.

It's not easy to make a new platform. it's insanely difficult. These big social media companies have huge moats at this point, due to network effects and scale.

When other things have such powerful network effects we force them, through the state, to treat people fairly. For instance, utilities like water and electricity are natural monopolies because of the limited physical space for the infrastructure. Social networks aren't quite the same but there are powerful similarities.

They are indeed differences of degree, not kind. I don't know of any culture that has embodied 100% free speech through-and-through, it's all degrees of what you can say and what you can't.

The key difference is the penalty: is it going to jail or some people roll their eyes and stop being your friend?

I don't think it's ever going to be "people enthusiastically try to understand your positions and respect them". That has been the ideal in the US, but historically I can't find the pages in a history book where it's been largely true.

> Of course! But when China says you're free to discuss the Free Tibet movement in any other country but China, we rightly call it censorship. What makes this any different?

If you talk about a Free Tibet in China, you risk having your legs broken and your family put in camps.

If you violate Facebook's ToS, you might get banned from their website. Then you can just type literally any other website into your address bar and be on your way.