In public, sure, but a website is explicitly private property, so the megaphone-DDoS move would in this case be trespassing and harassment.

And the slippery slope is a real problem, no matter how much people call it a fallacy. As we’ve seen countless times in history, the distance from viewing some group as less deserving of freedom than you, and actively persecuting them is short.

Free Speech is more complicated than that, at least in the US. The Supreme Court held in Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center that simply being private property does not by itself allow the owners to restrict speech.

> Over two decades ago, our state Supreme Court concluded that a privately owned shopping center that attracts large numbers of people to congregate in order to shop and take advantage of other amenities offered by the shopping center is the functional equivalent of the traditional town center, which historically is a public forum where persons can exercise the right to free speech. ( Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center (1979)

Further, the Supreme Court has found that putting a website on the internet grants a wide variety of privileges to the people using it. Specifically speaking, the Supreme Court held that if websites such as Linkedin make pages publicly accessible they can't use the legal system to stop access of those pages that they don't like- specifically, they can't stop bots from scraping by suing to get them to stop.

So if we're talking free speech I'm not sure we can count a website as private property in the sense you're talking about, and whether it would even matter if we could.

You're conflating a number of points here. California's State Constitution provides a positive right to speech. The Pruneyard case, concerning protests in an open-air shopping center, was upheld due to the Court deciding that the State Constitution's right to positive free speech does not conflict with the negative right to free speech outlined 1st Amendment under certain conditions (i.e. only using common areas accessible to the general public, not protesting inside storefronts, etc.) While it theoretically applies to other states with positive free speech rights, so far, the Pruneyard case has, in practice, only applied to California. Even then, Pruneyard does not apply when it comes to regulating the time, place, or manner of speech and may be rendered irrelevant for supermarkets. (https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...). And, as a result of Section 230, I certainly doubt Pruneyard applies to content providers, if it ever had any.

In addition, what the Supreme Court found in HiQ Labs vs LinkedIn in regards to obtaining publicly available information says nothing about pinging a website too death until its offline. We're both quite capable in separating the two.

IANAL, but pretty sure that DDoS attacks don’t count as “free speech” of some sort.

Something needs to replace it - the closest is the canary I think - as long as X hasn’t happened I am not threatened. As long as the student I know is doing worse than me hasn’t been put on academic probation, I am fine.

Canaries are everywhere and real.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is implicitly morally corrupt or a member of some interest grooup, I have no clue what switter is and i'm sure many others don't either, kiwifarms has been on the media for the entirety of the last week.