People have a right to speech. They don't have a right to be heard. You are suggesting that we stop some people from speaking to allow other people to be heard. You are making an argument against free speech and not for it.
Time and place restrictions are perfectly legal.
A school, government fund or otherwise, or even the government itself, is absolutely free to prevent a mob of students, from shouting down speakers.
And they can use the force of their position as the university, or the force of law to do so.
Time and place restrictions absolutely can help promote speech, and are legal.
Take your thought process here a step further. If we establish that speech needs to be heard in order to satisfy the principle of free speech, how many people need to hear something before it qualifies?
>If I intercepted the post you just made and scrambled it with random characters so noone else would understand it, are you still calling that free speech?
Are you arguing that downvoting a comment until the text is gray and difficult to read is HN infringing on a user's free speech?
Similarly, trying to form a barricade and keep people from reaching the speaker and hearing them is an attempt to silence their speech.
Thats an easy question to answer.
The answer would be whoever voluntarily chooses to listen to that speech, of their own free will, without other people coming in to make significant disruptions (especially illegal disruptions, or acts of illegal physical violence) of that voluntary interaction between speaker and hearer.
> Are you arguing that downvoting a comment..... is HN infringing on a user's free speech?
A better example would be a 3rd party going to the server room where Hacker News is stored, destroying the servers with a hammer, and then saying "Your speech isn't infringed on! You were allowed to say whatever you wanted! You just don't have the right to be heard, because I the uninvolved 3rd party broke into the server room and destroyed the server hardware!"
Yes, if this is what happened, this is starting to get close to censorship. Especially if it is not a one time thing, and is instead continual or illegal.
Also, if you want a better explanation, just go look up how free speech works in the US.
All these crazy hypotheticals, that you think are somehow gotchas, have mostly been settled by the US court system.
And the US court system has side strongly in favor of protecting free speech, while also being able to deal with these very limited and rare exceptions, to prevent extremely damaging content, like direct and immediate calls or violence, or the like.
This has all been covered before, mostly, in a good way, by the US legal system and court precedent.
* with defamation (edit: and false advertising, perjury, etc) exception, for things you know are lies when you say them.
This is a direct contradiction of "unconditional free speech". Once you allow the manner of speech to be restricted, free speech is no longer unconditional. You just want to believe in "unconditional free speech" because freedom is great and being pro-freedom makes us all feel warm and fuzzy inside. That ideal can't stand up to the complexities of the real world when the rights of multiple people come into direct conflict with each other. There need to be restrictions in both the manner and the content. The only content restriction you listed was defamation, but I have a feeling you would be against at least some of the following: fraud, perjury, false advertising, copyright infringement, threats, incitement to violence, coercion, blackmail, revenge porn, child porn, and the list goes on and on. Suddenly there are a lot of conditions on that "unconditional" and it becomes less clear why some further restriction such as outlawing hate speech would be a monumental infringement on freedom of speech.
These, like defamation, fall under "things you know are lies when you say them." I should have phrased that differently, edited.
> copyright infringement, threats, incitement to violence, coercion, blackmail, revenge porn, child porn
Not expressions of opinion, so don't fall under my definition of free speech. (Fair use ensures that copyright law doesn't conflict with free speech/expressing opinions).
> outlawing hate speech
Unlike all the extant restrictions you mentioned, this would make it illegal to express a particular opinion or belief, that you don't know is empirically false.
> complexities of the real world
I do believe this is a nuanced issue with answers that are not always clear-cut. Specifically, it can be hard to tell where government (which has to be fair and neutral) ends, and private organizations (which have the right to their own opinions) start. Everyone interacts with the government in some way, via road system, taxes, regulation, grants, public contracts, etc.
Also, I don't know why you are categorizing that group as not expressions of opinions. It is certainly possible to frame opinions into those various categories. The most obvious examples are the old "it would be a shame if something happened to..." threats that you see in every bad mob movie.
In theory, this law, if perfectly applied, would not be incompatible with my view of free speech. In practice, such a law would be too broad, because determining whether something is true or not, and whether someone believes it or not, are hard problems that the justice system can't solve in general.
> It is certainly possible to frame opinions into those various categories.
It's possible to frame an opinion into any action, including straightforward murder. But no opinion requires an action in that group to express.
For the "it would be a shame if X" example, the crime is not the words or opinion. In fact, it's perfectly possible to use those same words legally, to express a genuine opinion that X would be bad! The crime is communicating a threat (which is not an opinion) via implication.
Either way, it doesn't refute my original point. People are asking for certain people's free speech rights to be curtailed in order to protect the free speech rights of others. That is effectively the same argument that the students are often making in these situations. Speech should be restricted when it infringes on other people's rights. The pro-free speech side just likes to play no true Scotsman games and redefine stuff they don't like as not really speech. But if the audience members heckling the speaker can be speech unworthy of protecting because it infringes on other people's rights, then we also need to evaluate what the speaker on the stage is saying and whether their words infringe on the rights of anyone else.