There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house. The first amendment was always about public discourse.
I think the privatization of surveillance is much scarier than the privatization of censorship. To escape the latter, I can just visit my local library, whereas the former is growing at such alarming rates that it might just make that impossible very soon. The chilling effects are real.
Imagine if every single law on the books is enforced 100% of the time. No leeway, no margin for discretion.
You underestimate the ability of cultures to self-censor and convince free-thinkers to leave.
Plenty of people in North Korea are afraid to speak out, for fear their neighbors will rat them out. Same goes for speaking against royalty in public in Thailand.
That said, I do think the First Amendment was born out of practicality. Censoring speech, even in the internet age, is not a good growth strategy when your competitors censor less. People will do their best to get to the most free place.
Most "live free or die" types wouldn't tell someone struggling against government repression, "If you don't like it, why don't you just leave your country?" Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states. It may seem histrionic to complain about much free-market censorship now, but the vise will tighten as firms consolidate and anything threatening to the bottom line will become increasingly difficult to disseminate to a wider population.
Of course, I would prefer an amendment to guarantee this, but it's less tenuous than other precedents.
> Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states.
Yup -- and a quick reminder (for the people in the back) that Google unilaterally controls what more than 3 billion people find when they search for information. This is a larger impact than any government in the history of humanity -- and unlike any other government in the history of humanity, Google has no constitution or laws which require it to be accountable to its citizens (or users, in this case).
You might argue that some regimes like China or the USSR only had theoretical protections for their citizens (with abuses by the government being commonplace and unpunished), but Google has no such protections to even pretend to follow. And like most independent nation-states, Google feels no pressure to obey other nations' laws if it's inconvenient for them.
They probably meant liberalism. 'Liberalism' has multiple meanings. To my knowledge, the US is unique in equating 'liberal' with 'the left'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_State...
Securing a private channel is a very different problem altogether.
Unfortunately this would also mean spreading the sort of crap as debunked on Snopes.
There is no "just herpderp yourself" when communication and publication in our digital society involves information coming in contact with a handful of middlemen who can tamper.