1. not qualified or diminished in any way; total.
free adjective: free; comparative adjective: freer; superlative adjective: freest
1. not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes.
hmm I wonder what 'free speech absolutist' means. maybe that one's freedom to speak is not qualified or diminished in any way? their freedom to speak is total?
What's the alternative? Does a free speech absolutist need to never make judgements on what he hears from someone's free speech? If I hear a person say he wants to murder me and my family, do I still need to invite him over for Thanksgiving dinner? Aren't I exerting some form of control of over him if I say you can't come into my home?
I think your view of the term "free speech absolutist" may make sense when analyzing the individual word meanings, but doesn't make sense as a phrase, and doesn't align with how self described free speech absolutists view themselves.
Most people aren't free speech absolutists, though, and I agree that they'd think there's a fundamental difference between employer-employee relationships and user-provider relationships as a whole. But it should be significantly harder for an employer to fire an employee than for a service provider to ban a user.
Being a free speech absolutist is meaningless if you are going to fire people the moment they say something you don't like.
If you are a free speech absolutist, it would mean believing in no consequences.
Yes. Like not getting banned from the public square for giving your speech, or not getting arrested by the government for your free speech. No one has ever argued that truly free speech means no one can judge you on what you are saying.
> If you are a free speech absolutist, it would mean believing in no consequences.
It would mean either that, or that you are using the phrase in a different manner than other people who use the phrase.
I find this whole exercise silly. I view it as
1) I don't like someone
2) Someone says he is X
3) To me, X means Y
4) Someone is not a Y
5) Therefore, someone is a hypocrite and (1) is justified.
Words have meaning, if they didn't then there would be no such thing as hypocrisy because everyone could just have their own little definition for a term or title they want to adopt but not be burdened to live by.
To Elon rules apply to thee and not me, these firings are text book hypocrisy.
1) The meaning of a phrase is the same as the meaning of stringing together the individual word definitions of the phrase.
2) There is a universally accepted, obvious definition of a phrase
I think you could reasonably call yourself a free speech absolutist, because you will never kick someone out of the public square for saying their peace, but you are still be allowed to not invite that person to your house for dinner.
What you describe is just regular ole free speech.
It's a situation of monopoly. If consequences to speech prohibit one from an entire category of human need (one's life, ability to earn a living, ability to find housing, etc), then those consequences are in fact limiting speech. A 'cancellation' that makes someone unemployable is much more a prohibition on speech than being fired from a single job without affecting one's general ability to get hired. If Musk were to now work to get the signatories of the letter blacklisted from broader employment this becomes an issue.
The problem is that platforms on the internet benefit from network effects and become quasi-monopolistic. If there were platforms with similar reach as Twitter that allowed the speech that Twitter does not allow, whether or not Twitter censors would be kind of a moot point.