That's not what free speech is about. Free speech protects your opinions from the state. Someone offering you money to take down public information about them is just a transaction between citizens. Nothing to see here.
To be fair, I'm a European citizen, so I'm not too familiar with the first amendment. I believe the basic princies hold true on both sides of the pond, though.
Free speech is just the ability to speak your mind without fear of reprisal or censorship.
It is not something we technically have here on HN or on twitter or in other such places.
Most governments that claim to value the concept of free speech usually have it said somewhere in their governing documents that the government will honor this concept.
Right, but censorship can only happen at the state level. The New York Times not letting Alex Jones write a column is not censorship or reprisal, it's an editorial decision. Same for Twitter or HN. The Douma deciding to ban certain words like "war" or "invasion" in relation to Ukraine, or the executive arresting bloggers on planes, that's censorship.
However the law has to put boundaries on free speech, because it can easily infringe on someone else's basic rights, so there is no such thing as completely free speech in practice. Even within the circle of your best friends, there would be limits to what you can say, wouldn't there?
I do believe we agree. I'm merely trying to be precise in my use of words like censorship, lest they become meaningless.
>Right, but censorship can only happen at the state level.
False. Censorship can and does happen at the twitter/facebook/youtube/reddit/wikipedia level all the time. It's the main reason there are alternatives to all of them. They tend to call it "content moderation" but that's just newspeak for censorship. Real content moderation would be limited to spam removal and child porn. What all the big tech companies do is censorship.
censorship can happen at all levels, its just that speech rights only protect you from censorship by the government. The censorship at other levels can still exist, and be meaningful.
