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> On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.
> In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
This take ignores all the other ways "we" are able to speak whatever we want, online and offline. These corporate entities are not required to publish any old thing that their users want them to publish, and those users have other ways to get their messages out, if their message is not OK on those particular corporate platforms. If "we" were actually being "muzzled" the author wouldn't even be able to publish his article and get it onto HN.
I think you should consider the practical ramifications of the standard you're suggesting, even if you feel like in some abstract way it is correct.
Most tyranny relies on such pedantry, e.g., "you do have freedom of thought, just not the freedom to spread your harmful ideas!", this sentence makes complete sense, but in that example, in what useful sense do you have freedom of thought?
What I don't have the right to do is force Platform X, Y, and Z to publish my speech on their platforms. Just like here. If I write something here that goes against HN's guidelines or if they just feel like moderating it away, they have the right to do it. They don't have to keep this post on their site. This is not tyranny.
If you weren’t allowed to drive on the highway, but everywhere else, would your freedom of movement not be suppressed, to some degree?
If in North Korea they’d allow you to say whatever you want as long as you only shouted it from the top of a mountain when alone, or wrote it on a note and buried it in your backyard, would they have freedom of speech?
Everyone wants their speech to be favored, and everyone wants the speech of their opponents to be disfavored. Wanting these things does not mean you follow the principal of freedom of speech. Following the principal of freedom of speech means you choose not to favor your own speech or disfavor the speech of your opponents when you have ability to do so, and instead relying on the merit of your arguments to win a debate. The US government is generally seen as not favoring or disfavoring anyone's speech because it follows the principle of freedom of speech. The fact that the leading citizens of these United States choose to favor speech they agree with and disfavor speech they oppose on the social media platforms they control means that they themselves in fact do not believe in freedom of speech at all. This should, on its own, call into question the assumption that the government beholden to these leading citizens is in fact such a follower of the principal of freedom of speech as it claims to be.
Is this an equity argument? Is it an anti capitalism argument? An attack on property rights? Mere bellyaching? Aside from the false assumption that the platforms — and not the infrastructure — are common carriers, I can’t figure out why this became a thing.