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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech.

Given that every government in history which has recognized the concept of "free speech", including the United States, has regulated and even outlawed some forms of speech, and given that "consequence" is a natural, emergent property of societies and the fact that humans are social, emotional animals who don't process speech as mere passive data, one must come to the conclusion that free speech has never existed at any point in space or time.

That being the case, one wonders why everyone is so concerned now about something that, clearly, humanity has never needed up until this point?

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If you continue being okay with every loss of speech, then the only endpoint will be to have no speech at all.

When did I claim to be okay with every loss of speech?

Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. Despite common arguments, sites like Twitter are not the public commons, nor do they hold a monopoly on human communication, nor do they control public discourse.

Even Benjamin Franklin sometimes turned away people who wanted to publish slanderous material in his newspaper. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate all platforms to carry your speech - it never has. Twitter being able to moderate content and ban accounts - even the personal accounts of Presidents of the United States - does not violate freedom of speech.

> Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not.

This is false. As you said in your previous comment the government has always had a very heavy hand in regulating what people could and couldn't do, it's very much regulated who you can do business with and what you can stock and sell and to whom. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a society that protects the rights of both the buyer and seller as much as possible.

Your two comments contradict each other in such a stark way it quite frankly makes my head spin.

None of that really follows, the idea that because something hasn't existed until now proves it isn't necessary is again a reductive argument that simply doesn't make sense.

There are many things that didn't exist and thus, were unnecessary for "modern" living and yet once they were invented and adopted it would be hard to go without them.

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