Cloudflare is very happy to lend their megaphone and DDoS protection to people hosting nonconsensual pornography boards on the other hand. Along with a multitude of other sites that exist solely to traffic in human misery and exploitation. Even when you follow their processes to the letter to report them nothing comes of it.

No, but you wouldn't expect them to just hand over a users data just because some individual doesn't like the opinion someone has of them. There are consequences for free speech I totally understand that. Unfortunately the consequences for me are not going to be good.

That's a violation of privacy problem, quite different from free speech. With all the vacuuming of user data, our data is leaking around all the time for all sorts of reasons, including just being sold. No subpoena required.

Free speech is an interface, the first amendment is an implementation. We can’t use them interchangeably. So when you say

> there is no free speech argument

You really mean there is no first amendment argument. There is still an abstract free speech argument.

Another example: SLAPP laws that effectively intimidate people into silence are a free speech issue but not a first amendment issue.

I was with you until the last paragraph. How do SLAPP laws intimidate people into silence? Their purpose is to combat the use of legal means to silence speech, so it seems the opposite is true.

Further, if SLAPP laws did burden speech, then that would be a first amendment issue since they are enacted by states which are bound by it.

Sorry, I meant SLAPPs themselves, not the laws against them. Oops.

Why do people make the default assumption that "free speech" only refers to a specific American legal principle? Free speech existed long before the Constitution and yet whenever someone says, "My right to free speech is being violated," unless the culprit is directly the US government, someone always responds, "Actually, that's not literally illegal, so it's fine."

This kind of confusion was so common online (where people often complain about uneven and capricious applications of TOS) that I never failed to find it. It makes two mistakes: confusing 1A with free speech and an appeal to the law.

Just because companies are legally allowed to remove content (e.g. the owner of Twitter removing content critical of Tesla) does not mean there are no free speech issues. That would be like saying there are no free speech issues in China as long as you follow the law.

Further, just because the law says a thing doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. Laws have legal authority not moral authority, so even if a company is legally allowed to do something doesn’t end the conversation.