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Free speech is at least the ability to express unpopular political opinions unmolested. If it does not include this it is useless.
Given twitter fads have led to legislation and formal and informal organizations that target people with specific opinions to destroy their lives, I find it hard to call buy in to the public square a fear of missing out. Yeah it's fomo alright, of missing out on your ability to use your natural rights because your declared ennemies will punish you for it. Not to mention all the people whose business requires online outreach.
And unlike your characterization, people are indeed mad about Austrian blasphemy laws and the general tyranny of the British State in this particular area.
Define 'unmolested'. If you go out and say "I think eating babies is good and we should legalize it" and as a result everyone decides you're a creep and ostracizes you, have you been 'molested'? If the answer is no, we're just quibbling over what should get you ostracized. If the answer is 'yes', how do we reconcile a conception of freedom of speech that requires people to listen you with the listeners' own freedoms?
Twitter is not the public square. It is a popular private forum. You have no more 'natural right' to use it than you do to use the bathroom at the Carlton Club. If Twitter wants to ban people - whether for transphobia or orchestrating harassment or criticizing Musk - that's their prerogative.
It can be economically beneficial to have access to Twitter for business purposes, but that doesn't oblige Twitter to grant you access any more than Amazon or FB or spacebattles.com. Today Twitter unveiled a policy prohibiting linking to other social media. This is probably going to be a mutually harmful policy, but it is well within Twitter's right to make.
In the United States, which we were clearly talking about, discourse around free speech revolves almost entirely around the moderation policies of social media sites and only very occasionally touches on actual legal restraints or state violations of free speech. I am not a fan of British policies but they are not the policies of the United States.
My answer is yes and it doesn't require you to listen. It does require you however not to destroy the lives of baby-eating supporters by refusing to do business with them. Ostracism without due process I don't see as a legitimate form of punishment.
There are only two equilibriums I see here: either we go for the no and do pure libertarian contractualism and abolish the CRA, you don't have to bake the cake and "niggers need not apply" is allowed. Or we go for the yes, which is my preference, and the State actively prevents you from dissolving things like employment contracts on political grounds as it does in my country.
De jure nonsense. It is the public square, that you refuse to acknowledge it has become so because it is privately structured means nothing.
Besides, I don't recognize the difference between public and private institutions as meaningful. Especially at that size. Twitter, much like the NYT, is a part of the US government.
You easily forget about obscenity and "prurient interest".
These are contradictory statements. If I can't disassociate from baby eaters because I find them objectionable, I am in effect required to listen to them.
The US has an equilibrium on the subject: there is a defined list of protected classes which you cannot use for a basis for discrimination. Despite the hand-wringing over Twitter's moderation policies from people like Hawley or Cruz (or Trump), there is little appetite on the American right for making political affiliation or views a protected class. You may see it floated occasionally in an op-ed, but no one in Congress has taken up the torch. Likely because making political affiliation a protected class would be materially costly to Republicans in ways far more substantial than the gains (making political affiliation a protected class isn't going to stop you from getting banned from Twitter for violating content policies or inciting harassment, but is it going to effectively require non-partisan redistricting).
Expand on this. What makes it the public square? This invariably seems to be made as an unsupported assumption. As far as I can tell, the unstated argument is that Twitter providing access to a large audience, but the same can be said for almost any successful social media platform or traditional media outlet.
(To say nothing of the idea of there being a singular public square being ridiculous)
I'm not sure what your point is here? My list of legal exceptions to free speech rights in the US was not intended to be exhaustive, and Obscenity is not a major element of contemporary discourse around free speech.
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Hilariously Wikipedia included "without fear of social sanction" in its definition of freedom of speech. This was eventually narrowed to the current definition of only legal restrictions to prevent reactionary elements from using it as cover
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