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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know what you're getting at here. Nobody is stopping anyone from saying things. If I want to say the sky is orange, I can write a post about it on my blog, send it out to my E-mail list, distribute it as a printed newsletter, write a book about it, or walk into town and tell people as I walk by them. Nobody is being muzzled.

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.

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Freedom of speech is irrevocably tied to how information actually spreads in a society. Inhibiting someone from accessing the superhighways of information is effectively suppressing their speech. In practise, if not in pedantic principle.

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?

There's a couple lines of argument to go down here, but to stick with the one I was already on, how many of those need to disappear before you're sufficiently satisfied that somebody is allowed to object to it?

>I don't have the right to do is force Platform X, Y, and Z to publish my 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.

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