Remember when "I disagree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" was a thing? I certainly do. How far we've fallen as a culture since then.
Freedom of speech means that the police can't raid your house for what you think or say or a judge cannot rule against you for what you think or say.
But freedom of speech doesn't mean that other people are forced to either listen to you or provide with their own private means (like content hosting or bandwidth) for you to express your ideas.
What I am talking about is the culture of defending free speech. The cultural value of defending the right of people you dislike to express ideas that you disagree with, because the value and importance of free expression goes beyond the short-term unpleasantness of ugly opinions. This is what we are losing / have lost and it is extremely dangerous for democratic society and civil liberties. It has nothing to do with the legal definition of free speech.
This is the paradox of tolerance. Some ideas are worth debating, some are not. We all have limited time and energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Edit: the irony of getting downvoted while trying to have a discussion about being able to express ideas...
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
Crazy people thinking that the Earth is flat doesn't prevent you from circumnavigating it.
Crazy people believing that vaccines are a Democrat/BillG/CIA plot will prevent you from achieving herd immunity, if they are numerous enough.
Crazy people who think the Earth is flat will deny your circumnavigation project government funding, if there are enough of them.
In any organisation that is not a totalitarian autocracy, crazy people hurt the organisation's goals. The more numerous and organised, the bigger the gridlock.
Anyway, you've listed three things and one of them isn't like the others. I'll give you a hint: hate anti-vaxxers or not, there have been vaccines in the past that had extremely severe side effects. That is an absolute fact. Everything from that point on is about risk tolerances, tradeoffs and group safety vs individual freedoms, i.e. things debated for thousands of years.
Lumping people who are scared of vaccines into the same category as people who think the earth is flat is the kind of tactic that makes so many of us think ... fuck it, just let everyone say what they want. Total freedom of speech everywhere. Why, because trying to institutionally determine what's "true" is a complete waste of time. Everyone who thinks it's easy ends up causing massive collateral damage by shutting down legitimate and important debate. See how Wojcicki at YouTube has been deleting videos of epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winning scientists for "misinformation". See how she's been forcibly upranking outlets like CNN in recommendations, even though people don't want to watch it and it makes Google lose money. See how Facebook has shut down groups for people who think lockdowns are a harmful policy. See how Google is now censoring "communist bandit" globally.
This kind of childish behaviour doesn't make the tech industry look smart, it makes us look like arrogant fools.
Why would it be strange to have values that go beyond what is legal?
At the same time, certain people have views that are morally abhorrent. Or, heck, even just not very interesting. It's important to NOT to shoehorn some kind of homesteading right over public attention in the name of free speech. In the past, society's way of protecting itself against this was mainly that speech was expensive, and extremists frequently lacked the money to impose themselves on others' attention. This was in some ways a horrifying way to solve the problem, since it suppressed the disadvantaged, and didn't work anyway. In any case, it's gone. Speech is no longer expensive.
What remains to see how we can regain some semblance of sanity in a world where all public communication devolves into people shouting at each other. I'm sick of living in that world. I don't particularly care whether Facebook takes down Trump's comments; they've already been heard. But I do care about notions of free speech that prevent tech companies from trying to solve the pressing social challenge of how to let people regain control over their own attention spans.
(Sorry, you can’t just say you’re tired of an argument and then continue with only your side of that argument.)
If you accept that you'd never let some soapbox rando yell politics in your face just for the principle of the matter, the discussion will inevitably boil down to the role social media plays in society.
I am not talking about the Constitution. I’m talking about a cultural value. Not the same thing.
Now if your argument is (as often, theirs is) that those platforms are fringe, not nearly-as-popular, I would theorize that that is because a larger majority of people have heard some of these things and have zero interest in hearing more.
But they can still say it.
And at that point, I ask, what is the cultural value of requiring people to hear things they've decided they do not wish to?
Even then, I’d still prefer a totally open system that lets me decide what I want to see/not see, because it avoids any potential censorship.
None of that prevents me from hosting my own website, or going to a public space, and saying whatever I want.
You are really missing the point though. Part of the balance is that one still cannot escape the consequences of their free expression. That's the backpressure that makes it work.
Email is a medium with which lacked that kind of backpressure and suffered by massive amounts of spam. Filtering out spam is preventing "free expression".
If you don't have backpressure, you won't get the free expression you imagine, because the noise will overwhelm everything else.
facebook not using its right to kick violence-mongers off their platform is an implicit way of supporting them.
Facebook doesn't have to support trump or to spread his hate speech. Facebook is choosing to do so.
"The First Amendment" is the law that protects us from the government stopping free speech.
"Freedom of speech" is a principle that civilized cultures adopt so that people who disagree aren't shut out of the conversation.
Look at the AOC law suit. She tried silencing people on her private social media but because she is now in government she got sued immediately.
The same guy who's every tweet is reported in every online publication within minutes? Are you sure you understand what freedom of speech means?
I'm not sure somebody's "right to say [something]" is directly equivalent to being able to tweet something on a privately owned platform.
There are plenty of platforms that would host Trump. Or PETA. Or neo-nazi groups. Or anti-abortion groups. Or radical animal rights.
They may not have as large a reach as Facebook or Twitter. But that is likely a factor of the general public's interest in what they have to say.
So "ever being seen or considered" is fallacious.
It comes down to "I have the right to be heard by as many people as _I_ want to be heard by."
It's no different to saying that ABC/CBS are required to air your views, but choose not to, and ignoring the fact that you can go on Public Access TV or a smaller market, and still claim "I'm being censored!". It's not an accurate reflection of the state of affairs.
>>> You do not have the right to either a forum (Facebook) or an audience.
You said:
>> I’d rather find a world where humans do have that right than stay in the ruins of this one.
"Right to an audience" is part of what was being discussed. That part I was disagreeing with you on.
Now,
> I’m the one who’s entitled to be able to hear them
I agree with that in principle. In practice, that winds up compelling someone (some company) to carry their speech. That part I have a hard time agreeing with.
In his book Mark Bray writes: "It’s important to note, however, that the vast majority of people who oppose limiting speech on political grounds are not free speech absolutists. They all have their exceptions to the rule, whether obscenity, incitement to violence, copyright infringement, press censorship during wartime, or restrictions for the incarcerated. If we rephrase the terms of the debate by taking these exceptions into account, we can see that many liberals support limiting the speech of working-class teens busted for drugs, but not limiting the speech of Nazis. Many are fine when the police quash the free speech of the undocumented by hunting them down, while they amplify the speech of the Klan by protecting them. They advocate curtailing ads for cigarettes but not ads for white supremacy."
In my opinion de-platforming fascists is indeed infringing on their right of free speech, but this infringement is justified as it protects the the safety and well-being of marginalized populations.
However, and where Facebook crosses a line, is that when you allow someone to post unabashedly false things to drive emotions. Saying "Trump is a weak leader" isn't wrong or false, just an opinion. Saying that Nancy Pelosi murdered a baby deer with her bare hands on the floor of the House and pushing it as absolutely true is where we currently are.
You don't have a right to push verifiably false information with no recourse. You have a right to say your opinion. Just like you can't yell fire in a movie theater, or bomb on an airplane.
As I said, our culture has become so insecure that people are begging for censorship of ideas they don’t like. It’s a dangerous road to go down.