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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

> the concept of "free speech" in the US is not relevant at all to the question of whether a private entity can remove you from their platform for saying something they don't like.

You seem to be confusing "free speech", the concept, with "free speech", the legal right.

Most codifications of the legal right limit themselves to protecting against certain types of government interference.

However, the concept itself is absolutely not limited to contexts where censorship is imposed by a government. To try to impose this limitation is 1984-style thought policing that tries to remove existing language to control what can be said.

I'm not talking about some colloquial meaning, but the core meaning of the concept of "freedom of speech".

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I think we are actually saying the same thing, and my language was imprecise, so I apologize.

My point is that in the US, the narrower legal/constitutional concept of free speech is often implied, inadvertently or deliberately, when people are actually only referring to it in the broader sense that you describe. For example, a banned Twitter user might say things like "Twitter is a disgrace to democracy"[0] which confuses others into thinking there is some constitutional or legal harm being done when in fact there is none.

I have no problem with having a debate about whether the core concept of free speech is a universal right that should be guaranteed everywhere (surprise: I don't think it should be a universal right and I think it's downright dangerous to society to force all private entities to respect it). But I see the two meanings get confused so much that I felt a need to call it out.

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-news-twitter-marjorie-...

> and I think it's downright dangerous to society to force all private entities to respect it.

I would whole heartdly agree with that, but only because you added "all".

I think just as there is a balance in placing limitations of corporate freedom of association just like placing limits on free speech.

I do think that free speech is valuable enough that we should carefully consider placing restrictions on how and why large, oligopolistic corporations can exercise their right to freedom of association.

I think a lot of this can be solved with a "user's bill of rights" that protects users from arbitrary and capricious enforcement of nebulous terms by service providers.

I think most of the rest of this would be ideally solved by narrowing or eliminating the types of moderation a corporation can engage in while maintaining liability protection under section 230. Possibly with language giving special exemptions to community run moderation.

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