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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

This xkcd comic makes the mistake of conflating the right to free speech and the 1st ammendment. The 1st ammendment exists to protect the right of free speech from the government, but the right is god given.

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Whoever you think gave you the right to feee speech, it cannot extend to forcing others to relay your speech or THEY don't have the right to free speech.

That's the problem with pretending it's merely a legalistic right rather than a general principle.

If a big chunk of your society make a habit of censuring people for disliked speech, organizations that are in the business of relaying speech make a habit of dropping customers over disliked speech, etc? Then your society is not practicing the principle of freedom of speech.

The thing is, there is a fundamental disagreement ablut what the “principle of free speech” is. The 1st Amendment is not, in fact, a restricted-to-government application of a broader principle that there should all speech should be treated equally and unimpeded. It was very much an implementation of a theory that speech should succeed or not as a result of decisions of others to choose to hear more of it or not, choose to repeat it or not, and that the government putting its finger on the scales go suppress or compel speech was a distortion that interfered with that. You seem to adhere to a very different principal that you call free speech, but which is not the same principal which animated the First Amendment. Which is understandable, there are an array of different principals people adhere to, and only a finite number of ways of arranging words to name them—but it is important not to conflate your principal of free speech with the one underpinning the Constitutional right, or to treat it as universally what people are talking about when they talk about “free speech” as a principal when it is different, and incompatible with, one of the more common understandings of not only the legal right to free speech, but the animating principal behind that right.

"the right is god given"

The stupidest thing I've read today

It's a human right. Some principles are so fundamental that they supercede governments and so-called norms, and free speech is one of those. You don't have to be religious to know that these rights are as fundamental to human life as breathing and something worth fighting for, rather than something that we merely practice at the pleasure of some privileged people who think they're better than us.

So is the right not to hear someone. Say anything you want in your own house, but if you spout vileness in my living room, I’m tossing you out the front door.

Why are these companies forced to carry your speeches?

I feel like the XKCD perfectly reflects the free speech arguments I see online.

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