I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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Notes -
Good thing you bring up those two terms, they're making the difference. I'm saying that the internet is privately owned, and that the fact that real life isn't, is the main reason we have any sort of freedom at all. The rest of the difference is purely mentality. It doesn't feel weird for people to say "We shouldn't allow people on the sex offender registry on our website", and yet, you don't hear of sex offenders being banned from walmart, or blacklisted from electricity companies, and for some reason, this doesn't lead to either company being accused of aiding sex offenders. If we ran the real world like we ran the internet, then you could easily kill people just by making them unpopular. They'd be unable to buy food, to drink water, to find a place to sleep, to get a car, etc, with the argument that anyone who provides a service to criminals are criminals as well. Which is why that idea is insane.
I recall reading that a company should either act like a platform or a service, rather than try to enjoy the advantages of both but admittedly not in dept.
You won’t find me disagreeing that the privately owned internet is a bad thing. Protocols such as SMTP and HTTP are sort of owned by everyone, but log in to Facebook.com and everything you do there (or even, for a long time, everything you do ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET while your Facebook-logged-in cookie was active) is owned by them. Mass adoption of public social media protocols is long overdue.
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