I don’t think it sums up the issue - feel free to criticize a private entity for censoring, if you think it’s wrong. But that’s not a few speech issue - it’s some other issue. It still might be good criticism, but if it’s not government using threat of force to shut down ideas or discussion, then it’s not a free speech issue.
I’m kind of astonished that you are explicitly advocating a parochial and legalistic view that the First Amendment aspect is all that free speech is about. Are you really claiming that whether the SDMB should ban someone is not part of a free speech debate?
I mean, I guess it’s partly about semantics, and I do tend to try to use “freedom of expression” myself on this US-centric board to avoid confusion. But the rest of the world (and common sense) do not adhere to this semantic distinction.
Again, look at what proportion of the Wikipedia article on “freedom of speech” is about the First Amendment.
This is pretty much what everybody thinks. If Google didn’t do any spam blocking gmail would be unusable. Going down this path is the reason that content moderation is so incredibly difficult.
What we want is control over the speech that we hear. That can manifest as things like marking messages as spam so Google will block similar ones in the future, or participating on this message board because we agree with its moderation policies.
Unfortunately some people want to go further and use government and laws to control the speech that people can say. That is why we have a first amendment.
A newspaper can decide to drop Dilbert, and then some readers can decide to drop the newspaper, those are all private decisions. If the government jails Adams for the same speech, that is quite a different thing.
Leaving aside the narrow legal meaning of the term, freedom of speech still does not automatically come with freedom from critique and/or consequence.
This is a red herring, since I doubt that you claiming that the SPAM issue implies that everybody thinks Google should be free to selectively deliver email based on whatever criteria it chooses.
That explanation is a fine effort at implying an outrageous straw man, but believe it not I do understand and support the First Amendment. The fact that I think the behavior of private entities is also part of the overall debate on free speech does not imply that I think the behavior of governments is not.
Agree fully w @Riemann.
The folks claiming “freedom of speech” is solely about the US government are falling into the classic Libertarian trap of assuming there are only two kinds of power centers: The Government as a single monolithic entity on one hand and umpteen million or billion totally equal totally free independently acting individual humans on the other hand(s).
This line of thought blatantly falls for the fallacy of the excluded middle. It assumes there are no groups in the middle. No social groups, no volunteer groups, no peer groups, no criminal groups, no small businesses, no large businesses, and certainly no world-spanning multinational megacorps.
How and why any society manages the various middle-level groups say a tremendous amount about their values and about how happy their citizens will or won’t be.
This is very noble, but the xkcd comic already said this part far better, and
(a) nobody disagrees with that;
(b) there is about as much substance to this as saying that “crime has consequences”.
What consequences are appropriate is a free speech debate.
I think it’s semantics. IMO free speech is about rights and government. Free expression is about philosophy. But they’re different - and sometimes it’s appropriate and sometimes it’s not for a private entity to prefer free expression vs censorship; on the other hand, free speech is a moral necessity in all cases (with the usual caveats about threats, danger, etc.).
No, the conclusion is simply that we do not have free speech here on the SDMB. It is, after all, a moderated forum, with people in charge who can control what you can and cannot say. Similarly, those who object to people’s ability to call them out for their speech also do not actually want freedom of speech.
As for the distinction between the “right to freedom of speech” and “freedom of speech”? The former is a shorthand for “the constitutional right to freedom of speech,” which, in the US at least, is in fact a way to refer to that portion of the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech by itself is just a concept, an idea. And, like any idea, it has both positives and negatives. But it has no enforcement mechanism of its own. Hence why a moderated forum is free to not apply the concept in full.
Everyone here on this board has a right to freedom of speech. But that doesn’t mean they have freedom of speech over what they can say here. At the end of the day, people volunteer to be here. They don’t volunteer to be part of a country.
And, no, of course a discussion of whether someone should be banned on the SDMB has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It has to do with whether they broke the rules they agreed to when choosing to post here. Now it’s possible that some of the rules were based on principles of freedom of speech, but that would have been part of the discussion of creating those rules in the first place. Not their enforcement.
But, as a whole, freedom of speech doesn’t apply here. People voluntarily chose to restrict their speech by agreeing to the rules.
Ok, then your semantics are wrong.
Most people (at least outside the U.S.) think they are synonymous.
And if they are not, your distinction makes little sense. In conjunction with your claim that “free speech” is only about government actions, you seem now also to want to impose an incredibly narrow restriction on the term “rights”, as though that word is precisely synonymous with its specific use in “Bill Of Rights”.
If the SDMB bans someone, that is not just a philosophical matter. They have lost their right to speak on this forum.
But no one has a right to use the SDMB. Rights don’t come into play for private entities, except for the rights of the owners. All of us are posting at the pleasure of the SDMB – it’s a privilege granted to us by the owners of the board. The SDMB has the right to kick off anyone they want, up to and including everyone (i.e. shutting down the board).
Probably still more semantics (though I’m still right and you’re still wrong… ;)).
Of course they do. Everyone who isn’t banned has the right to post here. You are simply assuming your conclusion that the only possible concept of a “right” refers to government power.
I don’t understand how that holds. The SDMB isn’t mine – it’s someone else’s property. I don’t have the “right” to use someone else’s property. If they choose to grant me the privilege, then I have that privilege. But it’s not a right. Rights aren’t up to someone else (aside from government/society-at-large) – if I have a right, no one can take it away from me (aside from government/society-at-large if it’s determined that I violated the laws of that society). SDMB can take away my privilege for any reason or no reason at all – that’s not how it works for rights. Rights can only be taken away in very specific and limited circumstances.
I mean, I hate to keep posting Wikipedia articles in proof, but note the very first sentence:
Okay, I don’t see how that conflicts with what I’m saying.
If the SDMB bans you, that is based on a framework of “social or ethical principles of freedom and entitlement” to quote from the Wikipedia definition of “rights”.
We’ve had something pretty close to this discussion before:
If it’s just a philosophical disagreement – i.e. you believe Twitter or some other entity is not behaving in a way consistent with free expression (or free speech) and you encourage criticism to get it to change their ways, then we don’t have a significant disagreement here, IMO. But if you believe Twitter or other private entities (like the SDMB) should be forced by government to better adhere to your preferred philosophy of free expression, then IMO that’s a violation of private free speech rights – specifically, the rights of private entities to determine the speech they allow on their platform/property. That’s a much more significant disagreement.
Sure, after establishing that your semantics are wrong, we can move on to discussing how your philosophy is wrong. [ETA: just for the avoidance of doubt, you know this is tongue-in-cheek, right? I hate using smiley-faces.]
Let me re-quote @LSLGuy, because his comment didn’t get the attention it deserved.
I think it’s important to differentiate these things, semantically or otherwise, because lots of people who don’t really think about it much might instinctively advocate that government power should step in and override the decisions of Twitter (or whoever) because “free speech” (or, in the other direction, to shut down “hate speech” or some other non-preferred speech).
I don’t have a problem with the “philosophy” I mentioned earlier – I think Twitter as it is (Musk Twitter) is seriously broken, morally speaking, and deserves lots of criticism. We might agree on what we think Twitter, or the SDMB, should do. But it’s important IMO to make it clear that we’re not advocating that government step in and take away Twitter, or the SDMB’s, rights to determine what speech they allow on their platform and property.
I’m not advocating it for these specific cases, but I’m certainly not prepared to rule out government regulation altogether. To draw an analogy - antitrust regulation is a necessary part of the economic free market. And (for example) Rupert Murdoch’s excesses suggest that the free market in ideas isn’t functioning too well right now.