While I love XKCD and am not a fan of Trump, limiting the philosophical idea of "Free Speech" to explicitly being about the Federal Government is a fairly dangerous idea.

When this country was founded Government was by far the most powerful agency in people's lives. Merchants where important, had a lot of influence but still could not be too aggressive with a regent.

Today the Government has far less influence over your daily life than large corporations and you employer. In 1776 most people where farmers, the only agency that could deny your livelihood was the government (they ultimately had control over your land). Today government policies have far less of an impact than your employer on your livelihood.

The fact that a handful of oligarchs can decided that Trump doesn't need a voice is not democratic solution to a politician I radically disagree with that I would like. If you feel like the list of things you can't say publicly without ruining your career is shrinking, that is certainly a threat to the spirit of free speech.

"Today the Government has far less influence over your daily life than large corporations and you employer." ... let me know when the average employer has the right to bust down your door and shove a gun in your face because you decide to grown some weed in your basement.

The East India Company finds your lack of historical perspective amusing.

You're correct about the control of speech. At the moment at least Twitter, Google, and Facebook are private companies, and under the law and in the eyes of the Free Market, they can choose what they want to show and what they don't. It's their product, their rules. They kept the former occupant of the oval office on their platforms for as long as it was profitable to them.

The solution entails more than questioning the philosophical idea of "Free Speech", it involves considering the nature of government and human rights in an entirely different light than the currently dominant neoliberal economic consensus.

Let's try it out with HN? Maybe start a petition to demand that there is no more flagging/banning, etc. Anything goes in this marketplace of ideas, right? Let's stop letting dang tell us what we can and cannot say, eh? Let's stop the censorship now!

If the government allows companies to buy all the avenues to free speech, do you really have free speech? For reference, North Korea has rights to freedom of speech and assembly. But it definitely does not mean they actually have that right.

So arguing that the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd. If you cannot express your speech anywhere because a mob disapproves, you don't have freedom of speech. Freedom of Speech is not "Freedom to only listen to the things I want to hear." Otherwise there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.

The solution to things like that (and we are nowhere near that) is antitrust law. But we are nowhere near that state today; the far right dominates talk radio and owns tons of local radio stations, and has Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN to get their message out, as well as lots of content on Facebook and Youtube even if those platforms ban some things.

Oh, I'm not saying it's rational. I'm pointing out that it's the current state of the neoliberal economic consensus. Companies can determine and who and what to amplify or block because Free Market fundamentalism outweighs human rights concerns, globally.

> the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd

Indeed, it is, but that's where we are.

> a mob disapproves

In this case, it's not a mob. It's a handful of people who care more about making money than upholding rights.

> there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.

"Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate" - John Milton, "Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England", 1644 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm

Free speech has always been constrained by what is culturally acceptable.

You can't seriously be drawing parallels between Facebook and North Korea of all things. What could Facebook possibly do to prevent you from exercising your right to free speech and free assembly? If they have that power why aren't they using it to stamp out all of the various competing platforms that serve people banned from their own? This line of reasoning just doesn't make a lick of sense.