The US still has a crime of, and recent prosecutions for sedition! A crime abolished as a relic in some other places. Pot, kettle, black? :)
The US constitution is very clear in its wording on free speech: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". It is unfortunate that our judiciary has chosen to turn a blind eye to this and many other affronts to the rights of American citizens.
If an immigrant overstaying their Visa publicly declares their status to an immigration agent, they can get deported. Did this violate their right to free speech? If a person's public speech is so vile that everyone agrees to not listen to them, does this violate their right?
What we are actually talking about in this case, is morally (because of course, we have no rights to free speech in Australia) what are the acceptable restrictions that should be placed on people or businesses, to restrict others rights to speech?
And is the restricting of the right to silence others (say on your platform), in itself not a kind of restriction of right to your own speech?
This is much, much more difficult to answer consistently.
I think that your first example is also not a violation, as it is not an opinion. I think that this example reveals a more potent problem: what do we classify as opinion? As to that, I have no answer; I am no philosopher.
As for the morality of restricting others' right to free speech, it is definitely a difficult problem. Morally I think that you have no right to silence others because you disagree with their opinion. There is some nuance here; if HN deletes a post advertising viagra I don't think this is silencing someone. Similarly, deleting a post containing the results of a football game to a programming forum is also not silencing someone. There is an aspect of relevancy at play. If you choose to operate a general purpose forum, morally you are pretty limited in what it is acceptable to silence.
These are just my off-the-cuff thoughts. I might be missing something obvious here; it seems like a confounding problem.
>If you choose to operate a general purpose forum, morally you are pretty limited in what it is acceptable to silence.
I sort of agree, but isn't this almost tantamount to forcing people to listen? Philosophically, rather than actually of course, there is no clear line.
And why should speech be limited to opinion? It is free isn't it? And where has there ever been any verifiable line between opinion and fact? I would argue fact is a subset of opinion, and that all speech is actually opinion.
That is why I stressed the importance of only limiting the effects of speech, rather than the content. It maintains the rights, but also the responsibilities of the speaker.
Other nations have been more free amending their constitutions. Nations without written constitutions often consider that a feature not a bug. These can bend things out of shape differently. :)
It is perfectly possible to speak against the government, any government, without being racist, or inciting hate. It is not possible to speak against a government if you can't ridicule or caricature the head of state, or party a. Thus you can have free speech without also giving unlimited licence to be an offensive, racist jerk without consequence.
Enabling the spread of terrorist propaganda, like the blocked websites have been doing by hosting the Christchurch shooting video. You'd better believe if websites like Twitter and Youtube didn't self-censor ISIS propaganda like they did in 2014, many countries would be having their ISPs block those sites.
People posted ISIS beheading videos to YouTube and caused a policy crisis (within YouTube). YouTube responded by deciding that the beheading videos should stay up because they were newsworthy. As shocking as one of those videos is, it notionally shows why ISIS is bad.
Or at least, that's what they said. YouTube simultaneously took down murder videos from South American gangs, on the theory that the gangs uploaded those videos themselves and whatever they wanted, YouTube wanted the opposite.
I can't reconcile the two policies. The video shows what it shows. ISIS is, presumably, proud to have its propaganda videos displayed to the world, even if the uploader's accompanying commentary is "how horrible".
And by the same token, when a gang uploads one of their own propaganda videos, that video illustrates how horrible the gang is in exactly the same way that ISIS's videos illustrate how horrible ISIS is. They are equally newsworthy. But policy was that uploads of ISIS propaganda videos for the purpose of criticizing ISIS were good, and uploads of gang propaganda videos for the purpose of scaring the local citizenry were bad. The fact that ISIS's local populace might be scared or attracted by propaganda videos, or that people outside of South America might be repulsed by publicly-available gang murder videos, apparently doesn't enter into it -- it's all about whether the uploader is pure of heart.
YouTube also left up Elliot Rodger's YouTube channel for like three years for similar reasons, until they changed their minds and took them down again.
What it looks like to me, is that they just like censoring things and throwing their weight around, and this moral grandstanding is only after the thought.
IIRC the Australian ISPs refused to even release the list of the websites that they block - what we have is just things that are known not to work.
What happened to checks and balances in a democratic society? Why is the private industry acting on its own on behalf of the government? Where's the oversight?