I think you may be confusing “government infringement upon free speech rights” and the much wider concept of “free speech” in general, which is the ability, provided by common spaces and a soap box, or printing presses, and now by the internet, that permits someone with something to say to reach their audience who wishes to hear them.
There are a lot more people who have the ability to shut down a website, regardless of hosting company choice, than have the ability to shut down dissemination of a flyer or stop a speaker from speaking.
Yes, a TOS is freedom of association. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for society when unpopular speech gets banned from every web host they use, in order.
The issue at stake: governments telling private businesses what they can and can't host on their servers.
Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.
I don’t see how it’s an infringement of free speech at all.
A companies TOS form a contract between the user and the company, this law is just requires that companies follow what’s written in a contract they will fully entered into.
To claim that this is an infringement of speech is to claim that there’s no situation where a court can force someone to perform, as required by a contract they entered into. In other words, it’s to say that any court enforcing a civil contract is defacto infringing upon that persons right to free speech. Clearly that’s ridiculous because it would totally undermine the value of any signed contract.
This is a very strange idea of what Free Speech is. The reason Free Speech is related to government is that government has a monopoly on violence. Government can turn up with guns at your house and stop you speaking in a way that no other body can. What is happening here is very different.
Cloudflare isn't preventing anyone from saying anything. All that is happening is Cloudflare is using it's freedom of association not to associate with this website. This has nothing to do with 8Chan's ability to publish what they want - only their ability to use Cloudflare's services to do so. As the article mentions - because the US has the principle of Free Speech enshrined in law, 8chan has the ability to go and use other services, or to develop the services that Cloudflare provided. This will not impact 8chan's ability to publish whatever they like.
Now there is a theoretical point of view, that if a company has a monopoly - it is effectively able to police speech, but that's absolutely not the case here, as is demonstrated in the past by companies going elsewhere to exercise their right.
What is being proposed as an understanding of Free Speech is not allowing private individuals from refusing to service to you. This would seem to be mandating someone to act - which is a principle quite far away from any law I've heard of.
You are free to speak and exercise your freedom of speech no one really disputes that. You are not, however, anywhere guaranteed or granted the liberty to a platform for your dialog. That is the problem that we are encountering today, people are thinking that there are attacks to freedom of speech and confusing that with the freedom of an establishment to defend their property from damages. I think we can all agree that art is a medium for free speech but if you graffiti private property without the permission of the owner of said property than the owner of that property has the right to remove the graffiti. Likewise the operator of a website has the same right to remove content they may consider damaging to the value of their property. The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make. It does not preserve the right to defame, demean, or slander others or their property or to damage the property in a way contrary to the desires of the owner of that property. No one is stopping you though from making your own platform to spread your own message. Although it is also the right of those you may purchase services from to terminate those services if they feel that it devalues their property. For instance if a dns provider decides that website is offensive it is their prerogative to terminate services as a private owner. Same with any content provider, isp, hosting service or social media website. No where in the law does anything grant you an unlimited ability to say anything you want in a private forum and any private forum is entitled to moderating the content on its properties. I wish people would stop conflating free speech as some sort of absolute. It is not. The only case where a platform must provide services outside of the strictest sense of an intended audience is in through US Code Titles that may be applicable by law such ADA accessibilities (these codes are of course regional and may not apply outside the region in which that service is provided).
Edit: Free speech absolutists, isn't down-voting my comment
moderation? Ironic. How about just replying instead. I'm willing to engage in debate.
EditEdit: I'm trying to reply to everything as quickly as I can but HN is telling me I'm posting to fast.
You are free to speak and exercise your freedom of speech no one really disputes that. You are not, however, anywhere guaranteed or granted the liberty to a platform for your dialog. That is the problem that we are encountering today, people are thinking that there are attacks to freedom of speech and confusing that with the freedom of an establishment to defend their property from damages. I think we can all agree that art is a medium for free speech but if you graffiti private property without the permission of the owner of said property than the owner of that property has the right to remove the graffiti. Likewise the operator of a website has the same right to remove content they may consider damaging to the value of their property. The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make. It does not preserve the right to defame, demean, or slander others or their property or to damage the property in a way contrary to the desires of the owner of that property. No one is stopping you though from making your own platform to spread your own message. Although it is also the right of those you may purchase services from to terminate those services if they feel that it devalues their property. For instance if a dns provider decides that website is offensive it is their prerogative to terminate services as a private owner. Same with any content provider, isp, hosting service or social media website. No where in the law does anything grant you an unlimited ability to say anything you want in a private forum and any private forum is entitled to moderating the content on its properties. I wish people would stop conflating free speech as some sort of absolute. It is not. The only case where a platform must provide services outside of the strictest sense of an intended audience is in through US Code Titles that may be applicable by law such ADA accessibilities (these codes are of course regional and may not apply outside the region in which that service is provided).
Anyone can spin up a website for negligible cost and put in place whatever legal content they so choose. If government interferes with that, then you have a claim to censorship.
Short of that though -- if a private company like Facebook or Twitter declines to host your content, that is entirely their right. It's not a public utility.
Free speech means you can say whatever you like. It doesn't mean you have a right to a platform and an audience.
Supposing it was New York Time, sure something quite unimaginable, but supposing this web host decides to terminate their contract and no other host in the country would provide them with a hosting service, would that be an infringement of freedom of speech?
Perhaps if we view it from the perspective of the black letter of the law, that is the constitution, the highest law of that country, it might not be an infringement. However freedom of speech goes beyond the constitution, it is a principle ingrained in our society and culture.
To address your differences between private and public, a newspaper of course has no obligation to give him space in their platform, nor the television, but the internet is different. The former two are selective, the internet is free for all. If private bodies are able to go around policing the kind of content that is to be found on the net, the difference between them and the government is a mere technicality.
An American can exercise their government-protected right to free speech on their own website. This right does not apply to someone else's website, since it would be infringing on the website owner's property rights. Freedom of speech doesn't grant the speaker the right to occupy someone else's private property.
The problem with this narrow definition is that in it you don't have the right to create your own website, nobody is forced to sell you the IP, hostname or bandwidth, and to the extent that they are it's because letting private companies dictate public discourse is a bad idea.
There's a fine line between not amplifying someone and silencing them, and when the choices of very few privately run websites affect who gets heard and who not then we should be wary about them amplifying harmful speech and equally wary about them silencing speech harmfully.
You are confusing free speech with trespassing. You can say whatever you want on private property, but you have to be invited onto property in order to not be trespassing. The invite can be rescinded and you can be asked to leave. You can’t literally trespass on digital spaces as the law is written. If people violate the TOS I have no problem in removing them. But when things like saying that men cannot get pregnant is hate speech, you are simply going to get some pushback that is not hate speech and people shouldn’t be removed.
There is a reason to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn't need protecting.
However, that's not the issue that concerns me. My issue is the conflation of TOS, applied as is expedient, on a resource that is treated in the same way as a utility.
I've never understood why people think "Freedom of Speech" applies to private enterprise. Freedom of Speech provides, as far as the internet is concerned, that the US Government (if it has jurisdiction over your hosting provider or domain name) will not censor your material unless it violates a federal law (including the National Security Act or Atomic Energy Act.)
If you post instructions for an exploit of software X on their own forums, they'll probably remove it. If you post it on a website that doesn't care, you will most likely be "safe" in that the material will not be removed. It would take a federal case to remove that information, if it was illegal.
But some people, it seems, believe that "Freedom of Speech" applies to everyone, as in "If I like X, you shouldn't be able to remove X." Unfortunately, many times, that person dislikes Y and seeks to actively remove Y from any site he's active on through various means -- downvoting, flagging as spam, offensive replies, disinformation, etc. al.
Controlling what content is rendered on a site is speech itself. Government making rules infringes on my right what my software can and can’t display. It would be like the government telling Wikipedia can’t edit their articles.
I was going to say, refusing to host on your own platform something you find objectionable is not in any way an infringement on speech, but forcing someone to host it tramples all over free speech.
It's not a disconnect, you are simply not understanding because you are clearly very authoritarian minded.
The right to free speech is a God given right that the Constitution is the highest law of the land that prohibits the government from infringing on. Through the legal supremacy clause, the laws of the Constitution apply and supersede all other inferior laws and jurisdictions.
I actually agree though that the tech tyrants should be allowed to censor if they wish … once they built a private internet that is not using or funded by public resources. Problem solved, censor away. That would be akin to censoring someone in your own home, but you cannot censor someone outside of the home, because you are infringing on other's right to free speech. What you are actually doing is rationalizing that Google and all the other tech tyrants have the right to censor what you say in public … because the internet is public … it is not private unless it is operating solely on private resources … which NONE of them are. You are advocating to control others, what they want to say to others, regardless of whether you want to hear it. You are not only trying to control the speaker, but you are also trying to control the listener. It's not healthy.
As to your other authoritarian and tyrannical point; you are literally trying to force someone to do something against their will and yet you still cannot see anything wrong with that. It is not healthy, you are not healthy. You are in fact dangerous and evil in your desire to spread and impose harm on others and want to control others.
Free speech laws mean nothing of the sort. Free speech also (generally) includes freedom of association. AWS should be Free to not associate with entities who do not meet their stated TOS.
That's basically the same thing. The purpose of doing the former is the latter, since everyone does it.
Free speech is like encryption at this point. Sure, it's not technically illegal, but if you actually try to do something for the public to use then the system will find some way to make it impossible and shut you down.
There are a lot more people who have the ability to shut down a website, regardless of hosting company choice, than have the ability to shut down dissemination of a flyer or stop a speaker from speaking.
Yes, a TOS is freedom of association. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for society when unpopular speech gets banned from every web host they use, in order.
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