It wasn’t and isn’t unthinkable in most of the world. “Free Speech” is an US thing. It pretty much doesn’t exist anywhere else as a right, and never has.

What about in Canada, Germany, England, France, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Spain, Italy, etc?

It's quite different:

Canada it isn't an absolute right and has much more willingness from the country to amend "unacceptable expression". Which is different to the US quite substantially.

Germany you are right it has a similar framework to the US.

UK doesn't have this as a right outside of parliament (parliamentary speech is protected). So not sure why you raise this as a counter example.

France is a weird one to bring up... where they have banned certain kinds of expression in different settings (i.e no religious symbols). Extremely different from the US.

India similar to Canada has so many provisions (and willingness) in which to revoke this right, it's definitely not as strong as a constitutional right that the US gives.

Italy again its freedom of expression is tempered by a host of restrictions on that freedom.

I could go on... none of them are like the US having a constitutional right for freedom of expression that quite literally supersedes other laws.

We've been doing this for a while: https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/uk-elections-media-b...

I think even democratic country like India would start to consider "national" social media for national security purpose. Of course, Jio might be a strong lobbyist for that.

Iran and China both banned stuff all the time. I think a few other countries did too, those just leapt to mind first.

When they were shutting down the internet during the arab spring uprising?

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I've created 4 accounts over four years.

wolco - which had 5000 karma over three years wolco2 - which had 500 karma over three months wolco3 - negative - one day wolco5 - active

The first one got hacked. The second one I created a super difficult password and couldn't remember when I cleared my stored passwords. The third I started off poorly by replying to a Trump thread and wanted to start fresh.

I'm not a spammer creating accounts for some purpose other than losing accounts and I would love to get back my wolco account if possible.

Ok, I've clearly misclassified you—sorry! There are a lot of accounts doing less defensible things and it's not always easy (well, basically impossible) to tell who's up to what.

I'd be happy to help you get the wolco account back, but can you email [email protected]? The process for account recovery is best not performed in public.