> This has been said before, but free speech is beyond just government censorship and has a wider definition.

This has also been said before, but free speech specifically includes the right of others to dissociate from you because of your speech, as a central aspect of their freedom of speech, and in fact such dissociation is a central part of the concept of the marketplace of ideas supported by free speech.

> the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech

Yes, the fact that our society doesn't provide a minimal non-market guarantee of livelihood makes free interaction coercive economically coercive for many people. The problem is not with free interaction, however.

My freedom of association trumps your freedom of speech.

If people don't want to associate with a person who says awful things, it's not a violation of their freedom of speech to disassociate with them.

But my freedom of speech should trump your freedom to spin up angry Internet mobs that proceed to turn my words into lies that they use to rip my life apart.

Time will come there will be regulations aiming to fix that, because slander laws apparently aren't enough. And then people will come out and talk about freedom of speech, but the only answer will be, "you had it, and you misused it, and almost ripped the society apart".

> But my freedom of speech should trump your freedom to spin up angry Internet mobs that proceed to turn my words into lies that they use to rip my life apart.

Your freedom of speech doesn't trump anyone else's freedom of speech. If someone is knowingly or recklessly spreading harmful lies, you have recourse for that, but freedom of speech includes freedom of angry speech, and outside of harmful knowing and reckless lies, it included the freedom to be wrong in your speech.

Maybe you read different words from the rest of us, but RMS pretty much dug his own grave on this one.

There has to be a give and take, otherwise this logic can justify many things we've decided is wrong. Things for example like firing someone trying to unionize or for being black or a woman. There is a difference between freedom of association for an individual and freedom of association between a company/organization and its employees or members and that is part of why.

We have a give and take, it's called a "protected class". It lists reasons you can't fire people and includes reasons like being black or being a woman. We can update the laws to protect people in other classes as well, but I don't see anyone clamoring to make "defenders of pedophiles" or "creeps who alienate their coworkers" a protected class.

Yeah, because that would solve problems. Honestly, the same people out for blood would be church types in the 18th century. And by the mail in question I sincerely question the competence of the MIT in general, because Stallman was actually correct.

If somebody doesn't want to associate with somebody I think that's of course 100% fine, even if in response to nothing more than what somebody said. But if somebody chooses not to associate with somebody because of an online mob [1] - that's not so okay. Granted some line does have to be drawn here. I think it's great that social media was able to 'touch' an 'untouchable' like Weinstein that would have been impossible without the protection of a mob. But now that we've unleashed the beast, it's starting to gnaw at anything it can find. And Stallman's far from an innocent, but he's being depersoned here for some relatively tepid comments.

[1] - This event was started by somebody sending a copy of a discussion on a private mailing list to a third party. This third party then took social media and shared it. It fell flat, except for a handful of 'Twitter activists'. They then started spamming it off to their followers and media outlet they could find. Some of the clickiest baitiest institutions took it up along with some completely unrelated Twitter personalities. It all spun what were relatively innocuous comments into limited context outrage bait and that then caught the outrage train spot on.

So, if something was violated I assume there will be a court case that will ultimately decide if this was the case?

If someone was raped, I assume there will be a court case that will ultimately decide if this was the case?

correct

"Well, as it turns out, your Hollywood career promptly ended and you were blacklisted by every studio for saying, in the middle of the 50s Red Scare, that Karl Marx had some good ideas about the sociology of capital. But a court ruled that none of that treatment violated the First Amendment, therefore no one is allowed to be worried or have any negative emotion about what happened you, and hence no one's speech could have been chilled into silence by those events."

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

McCarthyism was a direct violation of the first amendment. This does not compare.

Did you miss that I was referring to the non-Congressional aspect of the Red Scare i.e. the studios privately blacklisting communist sympathizers?

In case anyone missed my general point there, it was:

One can be worried about the chilling effects on speech, regardless of who is doing it; dismissing such concerns "because it didn't violate a law"[1] is confused, and a kind of category error.

[1] edit: or, in your case, relying on a court for all relevant judgments about this matter

Extending free speech in that way infringes upon people's rights to free association.

Neither MIT or FSF should be required to continue to associate with RMS if his views are repugnant to their organizational core.

I will say it again. Stallman is not being silenced in any way