I did not imply that a newspaper or facebook or twitter have to do anything.
That said, if you want to read things into what I said and actually have this conversation, does my hosting provider have to host my website? Does their ISP have to not cut them off if they do? Under a narrow reading of "free speech" as "stuff protected by the First Amendment", obviously not (unless the ISP is run by a government entity, of course). Under a reading of "free speech" as "the ability of society to not have entities with overwhelming power (governments, but not only them) suppress speech they don't like", the situation becomes more complicated.
And I would argue that a narrow legalistic focus on the First Amendment is not the right way to approach the problem. The First Amendment is a means to an end, not an end to itself. For an 18th century analogy, if a private company has the power to go around destroying all printing presses that don't belong to them and refuses to print views it disagrees with, that is just as much a problem for free speech as if the government were doing it. This was just not a realistic scenario in 18th century North America (unlike, say, contemporaneous India), so wasn't a big concern for the framers of the First Amendment.
Is this a scenario we have to worry about now? It's not clear to me that it's an imminent problem right now, but I can easily see it becoming one in the next 10-15 years. Might be worth thinking about norms (and laws, as needed) now so we're not playing catch-up when it does.
I believe in free speech, I spent 10 years in the military trying to defend it, but I also believe that the President caused this invasion of Congress with his constant disinformation and lies, so this is fine with me. Next time, I may think it's overreach.
I don't think we'll agree there, so I won't argue further.
Edit: It's going to be a big job to reconcile this country and get people working together again, I hope you don't take this as an assault, I just don't feel like arguing today, but I appreciate your thoughts.
I am absolutely not taking your comments as an assault, and I suspect we largely agree on specific cases.
And specifically, taking down explicit incitement to violent illegal actions by someone already in a position of power does not seem at all unreasonable to me; I can see very little redeeming value in such. Also reasonable is a basic "cooling off" period of "we're not letting you post anymore for a bit, until people calm down".
And I fully agree that there is a long job of getting people to talk to each other, much less be on the same page ahead of us. I hope we succeed at it. Facebook and the like are not going to be helping much with it, unfortunately, because outrage is just so monetizable..
That said, if you want to read things into what I said and actually have this conversation, does my hosting provider have to host my website? Does their ISP have to not cut them off if they do? Under a narrow reading of "free speech" as "stuff protected by the First Amendment", obviously not (unless the ISP is run by a government entity, of course). Under a reading of "free speech" as "the ability of society to not have entities with overwhelming power (governments, but not only them) suppress speech they don't like", the situation becomes more complicated.
And I would argue that a narrow legalistic focus on the First Amendment is not the right way to approach the problem. The First Amendment is a means to an end, not an end to itself. For an 18th century analogy, if a private company has the power to go around destroying all printing presses that don't belong to them and refuses to print views it disagrees with, that is just as much a problem for free speech as if the government were doing it. This was just not a realistic scenario in 18th century North America (unlike, say, contemporaneous India), so wasn't a big concern for the framers of the First Amendment.
Is this a scenario we have to worry about now? It's not clear to me that it's an imminent problem right now, but I can easily see it becoming one in the next 10-15 years. Might be worth thinking about norms (and laws, as needed) now so we're not playing catch-up when it does.
None of that has anything to do with the factually inaccurate claim about the narrow constitutional right that was made in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673573