Freedom of speech shouldn’t necessarily be compelled by law to be allowed by online platforms. But freedom of speech is not just a legal principle and individual right, but considered by many of us to be a core American cultural value. It seems reasonable for there to be public outcry and negative response to a company suppressing free speech. Free speech doesn’t include provable lies or inciting imminent violence which unfortunately I believe occurred this week.
Free speech includes being able to -not- utter things of your choice, too. No one will join me in decrying that my local paper will not publish my 30 page treatise on Flat Earth.
Yes-- power concentrating with a few gatekeepers of speech in tech is troublesome. That's what makes their moderation decisions so worrisome: that they're so empowered.
> Free speech doesn’t include provable lies
I think most provable lies are included in free speech, actually.
> or inciting imminent violence
Yup. But we kicked all the people off the mainstream platforms for things that were less than this, so now those platforms have less power to suppress the cries for violence.
I do think that Twitter and Facebook need to be exceptionally careful and use their powers more sparingly, but there's absolutely no reason that they should have to repeat people literally coordinating and normalizing shooting elected officials, like many threads on Parler are at the moment--- speech that almost everyone agrees is not protected by the First Amendment anyways.