My view on freedom of speech is different from most I found, but I think it’s the one that is consistent and stays true to actual definitions of words.
Human freedoms are about what the human can do. Right to bear arms. Right to speak. Right to assemble. And so on. That is how the Bill of Rights seems to intend it.
Note that the freedom to physically say anything and not get carted away is different than that of an organization.
Corporations may be “persons” for the purpose of suing and being sued in court etc. But when it comes to freedom of speech, it is quite another level of indirection!
When Sinclair TV buys a bunch of local stations, and makes them say something, they are not really free. They are saying whatever they are being told to say:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433...
But here is the proper description: freedom of speech is different than access to a megaphone that an organization with a large audience gives you.
And I prefer that our news and announcements would be run more like Wikipedia than FOX, CNN or even Twitter. Because the latter tear apart our society. News outlets were disrutped by the Internet so they adjusted by locking in an audience by choosing a side and publishing clickbait. And social media in their race to the bottom for advertising dollars herded us into echo chanbers around this content. The current political fever pitch is NOT an accident or a plan by any one person. What can we do instead? Run it like Wikipedia.
Think of concentric circles. The smallest circle is what certain groups of mutually distrusting / disagreeing experts / pundits discussing things. They are the ones to go and publish dissenting opinions. This is analogous to the Talk page on Wikipedia.
This circle of people get a notification every time that one of them posts, so they can add their 2 cents.
Then once enough of them have weighed in, the next level is opened up — which is either the public or an intermediate circle of fact-checkers or news organizations.
I do not think the public should get stuff unfiltered from the megaphone of anyone with a Twitter audience of 50,000 or a podcas audience of 40,000. Sure, we are not used to this kind of society, but it is NOT a FREEDOM of speech issue. It is an issue of access to megaphones.
The current understanding of “freedom of speech” leads to contradictions and idiosynchrasies where one side claims that Facebook, Twitter are private platforms and aren’t covered under the Bill of Rights, while another side says that they are larger than many countries and are directly distributing speech on their platform. Whether these are “online countries” or not and whether they are subject to the US Bill of Rights because they are located here or operate here is up for debate. But under my definition the forced restructuring of how information is disseminated to wider and wider audiences wouldn’t be a Freedom of Speech issue.
PS: By the way, what I described is how news desks used to be run, with various editors being involved before things went to press.