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Free speech is also a technological (or lack thereof) outcome. In 1700s, if you had a misguided evil thought, your chance of realizing full effect was still low because your thought must travel through multiple hops, each hop evaluating your idea and possibly terminating the propagation with some probability. So in societies without technological advancements, bad ideas and their damaging effects can stay contained in small groups. But what if technology can directly inject any bad ideas to entire population all at once instantly? Is free speech still viable or do we need new philosophical principals on human communication?

The often left unsaid basis of free speech is that each member of the audience is capable of rationality evaluating the argument, willing to invest in fact checking and is educated on background material. When these conditions are not satisfied, there will be members of audience who will make suboptimal choices based on misinformation with some probability. When scale of audience becomes large, even small probability can uproot sane society.

All these are very interesting questions and honestly I don't think anyone has answers.

Good ideas were also suppressed under those conditions. Look at Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Socrates.

Allowing all ideas a fertile ground to grow and gain followers is important.

Allowing individuals with a small social reach (e.g. live in a small, conservative, remote town) to access a wide range of ideas is important.

Yes, there would be false positives and false negatives. The problem is that false positive can kill people while false negatives often causes just short term inconvenience.

Just wanting to clarify -- are you likening the shooter's manifesto to the works of Socrates?

I'm not on the side of the shooters. Violence is extremely rarely the right option and I'm not aware of any mass shooting cases that were even close to "justified."

One thing I learned by watching US culture warfare in recent years, is any value have a limit to it. If it has been codified or been treated as absolute and untouchable, then it becomes its own weakness.

So does free speech. Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully. In which case, if 8chan has popularized itself as the platform to announce when and where to kill innocent people, and broadcast such message to its susceptible audience to follow, then to me it feels like indifference or dysfunction of a community to have it slip through under the umbrella of 'free speech'.

When you know you are ill, just take medication, not just set in vain to wait for your immune system to ultimately cure yourself.

>Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully.

Which speech is that, exactly? Do you have a list of all the problem topics we need to ban?

- inciting violence and/or hatred

feel free to add more

Speech like “Republicans are killing Americans by not passing MfA?” Hmmm I dunno I think that should be allowed.

Free speech also includes the freedom not to support speech you disagree with.

Neutrality is not support

Rebroadcasting the message across the internet is supporting it.

If a message and its opposing message has equal access to the platform for rebroadcast, the platform is not supporting any particular message.

Rebroadcasting a message, regardless of whether or not the opposite message has equal access, is still tacit support for that message, or at least a lack of desire to get involved.

Cloudflare has decided that, for the most part, they won't get involved, but that there are some things that do actually cross the line (a line they are perfectly free to define for themselves), and they refuse to rebroadcast.

If you don't like that, don't support CF with your business. Otherwise, I'm not sure what horse you have in this race.

I am arguing that if you believe in free speech, it must be admitted that that it is deeply immoral for them to get involved. It is up to their users to define what does and does not cross the line and respond with counter-arguments.

It's not immoral. Belief in free speech includes the freedom to choose which speech you want to support with your private resources. If anything, it's immoral to force private citizens to carry messages they disagree with. If the owners of CF are ideologically opposed to the ideas that 8chan represent, they should not be forced to be a vehicle for those ideas. Of course, booting people from the platform is bad for businesses, so it is wise for them to be as neutral as possible, but they have no moral obligation to support ideas they view as reprehensible. In fact, complicating normal business operations to take a stand against reprehensible ideologies is the moral thing to do.

Even private property rights have limits: a factory owner cannot pollute a water supply for personal profit. If you believe in free speech it can be argued that it should not be OK for a company like Cloudflare to pollute public discourse by injecting the biases of its leaders into it. They should not be allowed to ban certain types of speech by fiat.

> Even private property rights have limits: a factory owner cannot pollute a water supply for personal profit

That's not a limitation on property rights. A farmer polluting the water supply is an example of the farmer damaging a shared resource that does not belong to him.

> Cloudflare to pollute public discourse by injecting the biases of its leaders into it.

This has nothing to do with "public discourse". CF is a privately owned business refusing to provide a service to a privately owned website. CF is not obligated to do business with them for any reason, and frankly, it's pretty reasonable for a company to want to have nothing to do with a website where domestic terrorism is regarded as funny at best and actually put into action at worst.

I am saying that public forums like the Internet is a kind of shared resource. It is the new town square.

I don't accept your town-square analogy, but even if it were apt, not everyone is welcome in the town square. If you're endorsing visions of racist violence and supporting those who actually act out racist violence then you'll be removed from the public square.

If you believe in the principle of free speech you might be better positioned by saying that everyone is welcome to come to the town square, but if you make poor speech then you will be refuted.

Gather in the middle of "town square" and start screaming racial slurs and threats of violence at minorities and the cops will remove you for disturbing the peace.

Again, if you subscribe to the principle of free speech, it would be wrong for the police to remove people trying to advance new or even repugnant seeming ideas.

Direct threats to violence though will likely not be protected as it would stifle free speech. But, saying that some speech could "maybe" or "potentially" lead to violence down the line is usually not an argument against allowing it.

Besides, it should ideally be a democratically elected civil government who decides these matters, not for profit private companies and its leaders.

> or at least a lack of desire to get involved

This sounds like the very definition of neutrality. Neutrality in a dispute is about not getting involved.

Neutrality is the store owner who chooses to ignore two customers who are loudly arguing about something. He will sell his wares to either customer, but he doesn't want to alienate either one by stepping in. Maybe one of the customers is obviously at fault, but as a neutral party he stays out of it.

It sounds like what you are implying is that there is no such thing as neutrality, either in this specific case or more broadly. Or you could be saying that neutrality itself is "wrong" in some sense, that's a philosophical argument and you could try to make a convincing argument. But if you accept the existence of neutrality as a concept, claiming that a clearly neutral party is not actually neutral because they are acting neutrally is a hard sell.

"[...]The idea is that good ideas should win adherents and bubble to the top while bad ideas sink to the bottom as they lose followers.[...]"

OK, but what if the good ideas sink to the bottom and the bad ideas bubble to the top, and people die? Because someone found the psychological triggers and the technical means to turn around the expected functionality of the good idea?

We all get the nice, philosophical, humanistic idea of free speech. But in the moment, it doesn't work so well. When something doesn't work so well, we have to fix it. So, what is the fix, in your opinion?