That's from the 3rd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Then read his comment as "more restrictive guardrails" or "moving the guardrails", to understand his point.

His point is moot because twitter has never claimed to be a free speech platform and I wouldn't expect rights guaranteed to protect me from the US government apply to a private corporate entity.

That Twitter never claimed to be a free speech platform? Please check the history of Jack Dorsey's statements, he was very much a proponent of free speech on his platform.

Regardless of if his or the company's official claims, when network effects centralize virtually everyone into a small number of platforms, it becomes a defacto utility. This has wide ranging and damaging effects on actual democracy. I don't particularly care what statements Twitter has made, if their platform has such wide ranging negative effects then it becomes an issue that needs to be addressed. How that's addressed is another question, but being a private entity doesn't magically free them from accountability of the negative effects of their platform.

The terms of service you agreed to when you signed up for twitter determined that was a lie. People say all sorts of things that aren't true, especially in the business world. If you're taking people at face value, that is your problem, not mine.

Twitter is a business and it literally has nothing to do with democracy at all. Using twitter is a personal choice, if you don't like it, don't use it. That's the solution. Your perception of their business being negative or even positive is neither here nor there.

Yeah, but then it turned out "being a free speech platform" meant the thing was flooded with nothing but spam. Getting rid of the spammers took a massive hit in the public market because their numbers plunged dramatically, but it saved Twitter from becoming completely irrelevant. People have a right to speak, but they don't have a right to be published.

Once that was done, they noticed that people aren't free to speak & won't use a platform where they are constantly under attack from racists, sexists & harassers. As a private entity, Twitter cared more about people feeling comfortable participating than it did about other people's "right" to bully, harass or send dick pics.

They also realized that if they kept letting their platform be used to radicalize terrorists, the government was going to shut them down because they were harmful to the community. It's also possible that they didn't feel great about helping people murder people they hated. Repeatedly.

By that point Jack had realized that "Free Speech" is a lot more nuanced than he imagined as a 29 year old with no background in sociology, philosophy, law or political science. Jack still believes in freedom: he just knows now, experimentally, that you can't achieve that by letting might make right.

It's still possible, and useful, to talk about these things, in the context of a private company, especially much of what he said happened. The concept of social media is new. It's ok to talk about that new thing, in order to understand it and what it's doing to society as a whole.

Nobody is arguing that constitutional rights directly apply here. They're arguing that free speech is important, especially when the government has been pushing around that private company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2021/07/15/gover...