Like many liberty principles, free speech is a lot more complicated to implement as a ruleset than most proponents like to admit.
Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all.
Same goes for free speech.
The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated.
It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone.
Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement.
For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.
What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform?
This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.
Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all.
Same goes for free speech.
The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated.
It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone.
Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement.
For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.
What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform?
This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.