For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?
It only protects you from government, nothing else.
There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.
If somebody speaks in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, do they make a sound?
Yes, they technically have free speech, but in reality not really.
The purpose of speech is that you might persuade somebody else. If there's nobody to talk to, you might as well not speak at all.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
If you can't convince enough people that your message is worth propagating, maybe it isn't. If you can, you will have the means.
You can speak all you want in public spaces, on your own property (whether that be your home, your blog or your mastodon instance) mostly without limit.
But Facebook, Twitter, Google, HN or any other private organization is under no obligation to host or amplify your speech.
The government can't censor you and you may speak your mind in public spaces. You may also do so in private spaces, with the permission of the owners of those spaces.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that certain private actors are required to allow your speech. That's not true. They are responsible only to their shareholders and to a lesser extent, their customers -- and in this case their customers are advertisers and not you. You are the product being sold.
If you don't think that's right or fair, then don't interact with those private actors. If enough people chose not to deal with them, they would lose their power and influence.
I voted with my feet years ago. If you haven't, then you're part of the problem and not the solution.
When capitalism revealed its ability to create abusive monopolies, we created new laws to mitigate those harms.
When the whole worlds discourse flows through a few centralized social media companies, as a society we are free to imagine new legal concepts and regulations to deal with the unforeseeable consequences of these new phenomena.
Where did I say that wasn't appropriate?
I strongly believe that those big social media companies not only have too much power and influence, but that their business models are exploitative and morally repugnant.
Which is why I don't use them. At all.
In fact, I detailed[0] how I thought this issue should be dealt with the other day.
I can't find it at the moment but there was recently a court case where a judge ruled that the constitutional right to Assembly was not infringed by pandemic restrictions (It is illegal in several US jurisdictions to assemble with more than N people in a private space) because people could freely assemble on online platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If the digital public square does not allow for free assembly, and the government forbids you from assembling in a physical public space, then it seems plausible to me that we have constructively eliminated certain constitutional rights.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred...
My right to speak doesn’t override you’re right to ignore me, or refuse to transmit my message.
Now there’s a knotty issue with entities like Facebook and Twitter becoming the primary ways people communicate with large audiences, but people managed before Facebook and Twitter, so they can manage again.
Or the alternative is that we say Facebook and Twitter don’t deserve to have their own speech protected. At which point someone is picking a choosing who deserves free speech.
You can’t have it both ways.
As I had mentioned in another comment a few days ago, it stands to reason that were the government to outsource the censorship to private entities (like Orban is now doing in Hungary, where almost all the media is in his pockets) than everything would be technically legal, even though it would definitely be against the spirit of the law.
As a matter of the fact the US right does seem to say that the same thing is happening right now, i.e. that the US mainstream media is "in the pockets of the left" hence the censorship.
No - 'Freedom of Speech' is at an all time high.
The internet gives every single person a giant soap box to stand on.
You can communicate, in public, with anyone in the world.
25 years ago, you had no voice.
Now, everyone can be a 'journalist' or 'agitator' or whatever.
The level of open communication possible today was unthinkable 25 years ago.
25 years ago most people didn't have access to 'most news'. The NYT maybe was accessible by the elite in most towns, but the LA times was not. Now it's all available to everyone.
These platforms haven't changed that much in terms of their policies.
If you called someone the n-word or tried to coordinate murder of some public official you would be banned.
Bannon was calling for Dr. Fauci to be beheaded a few days ago. That's what got him banned from Twitter.
Gen. Flynn was calling for public officials to be executed. He was banned.
Get it?
Twitter has not really changed that much - the public, and their expectations of 'freedom of expression' in the face of politics has changed.