This post is as good a time as any to rant a bit about an extremely frustratingly and commonly forgotten bit of Free Speech: freedom of speech and association absolutely includes the freedom to NOT say or associate with something! It's both a positive and a negative right. This seems like it should be rather intuitive. If someone points a gun at my head and demands I put up a sign support XYZ message on my property, is it not obvious that would violate my free speech rights? By the same token, my choosing to support a single message or limited set of messages, be it for a candidate, cause, or anything else, necessarily means my choosing to NOT support an infinite number of others (and most particularly messages contrary to the one(s) I support). And this is one case where it makes absolutely zero difference that the message is on my blog or website vs my lawn or the side of my barn. It is the essence of Free Speech that each person may direct their resources towards content-specific messages subjectively.

So when Derek Lowe, or Hacker News, or Reddit or YouTube for that matter delete a comment, ban someone, or any other such action they're not censoring, they are ENGAGING in Free Speech. People are free to put out their own soap boxes and argue their cases before the public should they wish. But they don't have a right to other people's private property nor to an audience, and in fact that would be completely contrary to freedom. The point of Free Speech is as a system to hopefully edge closer to truth and react to changing evidence, circumstances and societal shifts by keeping arguments and reactions within the realms of social, economic, and political consequences. Not force.

>but I don’t like it on principle, either.

He has nothing to apologize for. Banning people and deleting comments from his own soap box is itself part of the essence of Freedom of Speech. Everyone may react, and he can react to their reactions, and so on and so forth in a never ending dynamic system, all secure in that nobody may ever legally put a permanent end to the debate with violence. Yet for some reason a lot of otherwise very smart people have allowed a certain class of parasites, misanthropes, malicious/opportunistic authoritarians, and the lazy to make them feel bad about exercising their speech rights and even try to turn that back around on them.

What's truly been worrying is to see that leak into the mainstream Republican Party, one of the two big American coalitions. The blatancy of the anti-Free Speech laws they're now passing at the state level is fairly horrifying.

EDIT: In an interesting bit of timing, arguments were just made in NetChoice v. Moody regarding a preliminary injunction against the recent Florida law attempting to state regulate speech in networked spaces (unless you own a theme park). A number of different lawyers live followed it on twitter if anyone is interested [0, 1 amongst others]. Directly relevant to this discussion though.

EDIT 2: FWIW courts have faced these cases before, and for anyone interested in reading more on the legal side of things, a term to get you started in searches for court cases is "editorial discretion" and the exercise thereof, which were frequently fought in the realm of newspapers. An example covering some of this would be Wisconsin Association of Nursing Homes, Inc. v. Journal Co. (1979). Editorial discretion is a core function of speech, since often choosing what not to say is at least as important as what to say.

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0: https://twitter.com/AriCohn/status/1409563991974817800

1: https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/140956275829159936...