> - Private companies' interest should have little, if any, control over the ability of the public to speak
> - Speech without a platform isn't speech at all
These seem to me to be in conflict: if I don't have access to a particular platform (let's say, the New York Times), do I have access to freedom of speech?
And there's a ton of hypothetical situations that show the contradiction of those two points.
First, if having a platform in a specific company's garden means speech and forcing someone to shout on a street corner to only a handful of people is silencing them, then how can they provide different size platforms to me versus anyone else? Is limiting my post to the millionth spot down the list any different then making me shout on a street corner to the same number of people? If they limit the view of my posts to just a handful of people rather than the front page, I"m being just as silenced as being forced to shout on a street corner. If they provide one person a spot on their front page and not me, am I being silenced? I demand my time on the front page or top search results. Are you going to regulate how companies are permitted to design their algorithm? Would you disallow algorithms that buried certain groups?
By designing the algorithms that put some people on the front page and not others, they already have made editorial decisions and are silencing people. So my question to any of the people who are against the companies not allowing some speech, why are you not against the algorithms that already silence people?
And second, if twitter can't deny users due to the type of speech, are christian forums forced to allow themselves to be overrun by 4chan type atheists or members of another religion?
These are a couple just off the top of my head, it's easy to come up with examples that show the original posters two points are in contradiction.
Yeah for me it’s akin to being mad about being kicked out of my house if you spout off anti-Semitic things. It’s my house. My domain. My rules. You can go elsewhere and speak that garbage. Scale that idea up and you get where I’m coming down on all of this: Twitter, Facebook, AMazon, Apple etc are all for profit companies that can limit speech as they see fit and not be in violation of federal free speech guarantees.
Tolerance of anti-semitism? How can that ever be right? I picked that specific hypothetical for a reason because I think the speech being “censored” here is inherently wrong, I.e it has no place in public discourse.
> - Speech without a platform isn't speech at all
These seem to me to be in conflict: if I don't have access to a particular platform (let's say, the New York Times), do I have access to freedom of speech?