If a newspaper declines to publish a letter to the editor, is that censorship?
If a publishing company and writer negotiate a contract which includes a "morals clause", allowing the publisher to choose terminate a contract in case the author is accused of immoral, illegal, or publicly condemned behavior, then is that censorship if the publishing company decides to exercise that clause?
If a company has terms of service which prevents issuing threats of physical violence, and a user of that company violates those terms, so the company drops the user, then is that censorship?
If I'm asked to speak at a Python conference and at my talk I instead talk about child slavery, causing the organizers to cut the microphone, stop the talk, and eject me from the conference - is that censorship?
Generally speaking, these all fall under freedom of association, and are not forms of censorship.
Now, there's also government censorship, but most of the talk about "censorship" these days seems to conflate negative criticism and social consequences as a form of censorship. But as John Stuart Mill wrote:
> We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.
Saying that, I don’t necessarily agree with your definition of “censorship”, but without a common starting point nobody gets anywhere. Getting to that starting point through discussion always pays dividends...
But what if free speech isn't helping? What if free speech is spreading lies far more than truth? What if free speech is poisoning the discourse instead of enlightening it?
In current context, what if free speech is being used to spread lies that are causing violence? Do you take away the liars' megaphone, or let them keep it?
But, steelmanning a response to myself:
For every case where lies are being spread severely enough to cause harm that warrants censorship, there are some large number N of claims that some speech crosses the line and needs to be censored. Almost anything you say can get someone upset, and they can claim that you should be censored. And liars lie, and one of the things they lie about is whether their opponents are lying. When people decide that social media should censor, they're giving powerful, connected, and/or manipulative people a bigger gun to attack their opponents with. Don't think that gun won't be (mis)used. And that misuse will exactly harm the public discourse - which protecting that discourse was the rationale for the censorship.
Seriously, when I lived in my bubble with fellow geeks, it seemed nothing was worse than censorship. I think a censorship by a government is still wrong.
But think like this, in social situations, people stop inviting assholes to their homes. And if they don't stop, then other guests start to avoid that host. So why cannot businesses avoid shitty businesses. Is it really censorship if your local coffeeshop won't let you put a your band's flyer with sexual images? Is it censership if you brother don't want you to bring up some controversial topic at a dinner party?
I would not want to do a business with Amazon if Amazon was openly doing business with ISIS. Not many people would like their business partners to be Nazis.
Some time ago, people were avoiding black people from their establishments, because otherwise their customers start to avoid that establishment. With your logic they did nothing wrong. But actually they did.
Then we invented protected classes, cause we couldn’t manage to say, if you are providing a service to public, you should provide everyone.
It is much more complicated then your asshole guest example in reality.
First of all, I think there might be 2 sides to this. I'm not sure which you are referring to. 1) whether a centralized platform is allowed to moderate/censor. 2) whether a centralized platform must moderate/censor.
The best argument I have in favor of 1 is that the owner of the servers gets final say on what they host. It's their systems, after all. Most times it's not like members of these platforms pay to have their posts hosted, so the platform owner doesn't owe them anything.
I'm not in favor of 2 (with the exception of content that's explicitly illegal, e.g. pirated content, of course).
If however this question relates to recent events.
If you're concerned with platform censoring, then I would say the concern is misplaced. There needs to be a new definition for information monopolies. If any one platform decides to censor you, and you can realistically interpret that as a freedom of speech violation, then that is actually an antitrust problem. You can look at how this plays out in federated networks. The gap social network, try to join the activity pub federated Network. Each individual community in activity pub was able to make their own decision as to whether they had to listen to what gab was saying. Gab was effectively silenced, but not by the hand of a dictator. Each individual community had their own rules, gab decided it wasn't worth continuing to participate in activity pub because they weren't gaining traction. This reflects how free speech behaves in auditorium. Free speech does not guarantee free audience
The reason that freedom of speech is used to protect you from your government, is because your government is guaranteed several monopolies over your life in some very consequential ways.
As a third answer, freedom of speech as a context has not been tested at scales like this before. There are some very interesting ethical questions to be studied and grappled with. A downside to using politically correct terms, is that it's very often nothing is actually being said. However, when you deviate from politically correct terms, the opportunity for your words to be misinterpreted significantly increase. The use of things like dog whistles, even if unintentional have an effect on the population. So let's say that you are giving a typical speech but use words that are not precise and not politically correct. If 001% of your audience interprets your words as the most radical interpretation, this used to mean nothing. Megaphones weren't large enough to reach a radicalized population. Those population members had no coordination infrastructure that They could organize along. And as I said, none of this has to have been intentional by the speaker. Because of scale ethics and network effects the resulting consequences of the words you use scale (Little C) exponentially with your audience size, when edges are provided for free