"But calibrating that response raises questions of principle, practice and priority. Businesses will go their own way. Some, such as PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, which handled donations to WikiLeaks, and Amazon, which provided web-hosting services, have dumped it as a customer in response to American outrage. More may follow. They risk attacks from its fans, just as those that refuse face hostility from their customers in America. Too bad: business is full of hard choices."
Every single time there’s a HN discussion about censorship and I comment about how we shouldn’t be okay with censorship of anyone regardless of how offensive they might be or whether or not it’s some private corporation and usually it gets downvoted.
When the wind starts blowing the opposite direction, only then do people wake up.
No, they demand a principled balance between the two freedoms, that's independent of the content of the speech. What you're talking about is what's status quo - freedom for private businesses to not serve someone, except when it contradicts certain narratives, at which point it becomes a national news story about bigoted business owners.
Saying the balance should be predicated on ignoring the content of the speech makes sense only if speech itself was a pure function without side-effects, only if saying something truly had no other consequence than it being said can we safely ignore the content.
But the precise content of speech is exactly the part that matters! If a death sentence is read out aloud in verse, or just sent in via a short text message (that is via two very different types of speech) is clearly not very important if the end result in either case is an aid worker being blown up with a Hellfire. Speech very often triggers actions, to ignore this fact is to state nothing may be prevented because judgment is only possible by examining actions committed to reality.
The "balance" is based on something that, while explicitly stated, you somehow disregarded: that some--and, by and large, the current legal landscape--considers the freedom of speech right of the platform to censor people, and so to obtain "anyone can say anything" we have to take away "the freedom to not say something"... which we actually already do in various instances (often involving protected classes) and so, personally, I consider that to be a tractable goal to regulate: some things are "utilities" or even "quasi-governmental entities" and should be forced to be something like a common carrier.
So, if i would manage to besiege the city of rome, conquer it and declare the forum romanum mine, and to throw out all the romans. Does that make writing "Romanes eunt domus" an act, that forbids you forever the usage of my conquered streets? M i the conqueror allowed to sentence a citizen to house-arrest, by defining social negative space?
Social media companies which are actively working with the government to censor opposing view points while also enjoying legal immunity from lawsuits. You think there’s a fair balance of “freedom” here? Should telecom/electricity/railroads also get to ban whoever they like? Did you support net neutrality?
I guess they started blocking things The Economist care about.