I think no free speech right was trampled because it wasn't the government that acted, not because the reasons you stated. I mean, going by your logic, it's impossible to trample the free speech of someone unless you make it physically impossible for them to express anything ever again.

I have zero qualms about private businesses or private citizens stopping nazis from shouting their hate to the world. Nazis are free to shout as much as they want, and I'm free to tell them to shut the fuck up.

Yeah. We both agree. I thought you were arguing with me about something, but I guess not.

Hey, if you want to know the definition of censorship, it is right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government,[5] private institutions, and corporations."

This is the wikipedia definition of censorship, so that makes your definition wrong.

Yes, but GP was specifically stating that no rights afforded by the United States government were trampled on in this case. This is, no doubt, censorship, but some questions are:

- did censoring 8chan significantly limit any sort of harmful behavior?

- is censoring 8chan "right"?

- does this merely hide the problem, preventing an open discussion?

- should CloudFlare, an entity with massive control of Internet infrastructure, really be acting as a moral arbiter? Or do we expect some kind of neutrality from them? Do our expectations matter?

Would you say the same thing if Cloudflare and several ISPs all unilaterally decided to stop hosting democratic party websites?

The line isn't as clear when you generalize the action.

That's clearly against the spirit of free speech. At that point, what's stopping the government from relying on corporations to perform censorship for them in exchange for say, tax benefits and just going off of this plausible deniability of "oh, but we the government didn't do it! Go blame that corporation!". I suspect if water and electricity services weren't public utilities, you'd argue that they too can take away service from whoever they want simply because of their unrelated views. I'm guessing you also think it's okay when banks and transaction processors can interfere in the unrelated business of their clients, relying on their large market share to coerce their clients into dumping certain users. There's absolutely nothing authoritarian about that! Seriously, this naive approach to things is going to ruin this country. The road to hell is truly paved by good intentions.