It's complicated - that's Free Speech as a right, but Free Speech as a virtue has a history in liberal thought that goes deeper than just protection from the government - most notably, Mill in On Liberty. There's an unfortunate but understandable tendency to conflate these two things.

It gets further complicated so that if you tell a joke in poor taste or in haste without considering the future and other implications you can get retroactively "cancelled".

So today you say something that is acceptable. But maybe tomorrow, after you turn 18, someone discovers your statement and they cancel you using today's judgements.

The solution is for the metaphorical adults in the room to stand up and proclaim "cool story; we don't care" when someone comes knocking at their door with evidence of misdoings of one of their employees. Just claim it's a faked screenshot and your internal review processes do not act on false information.

I’m not really conflating them here. The bad actors argue that having access to algorithmic amplification is a right. As an aside, how do we fit bots into JSM’s framework?

Exactly! Free speech is to protect you from being jailed or executed by the state for publicly held opinions. It has absolutely nothing to do with twitter, and I believe anyone arguing that it does is arguing in bad faith or out of ignorance to the actual purpose of the free speech clause of the first amendment.

You have this completely backwards. The first amendment is the US' constitutional protection of free speech. Free speech itself is an inalienable right. You would have the right to free speech regardless of whether or not your government protects it (which many don't). Governments do not grant rights.

Free speech on Twitter is a matter of values. It is not a matter of whether or not Twitter is legally liable to protect free speech (they're not) but whether they should protect it because it's something that is worthwhile protecting.

Given the ubiquity of social media and its current massive role in communicating and share ideas, what role should the companies behind these services play?

If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right? Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.

OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.

> If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right?

Yes, but only to the extent that you're capable of protecting it yourself. This is why the second amendment exists in the United States. I don't really care to get into whether or not this a valid point of view since that could be its entire own discussion, but that is at least partially the rationale behind protecting people's rights to procure weaponry.

> Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.

I get what you're saying but unless the government does some minority report type thing where they arrest you before you exercise your rights, most people will still get to in the real world exercise it at least once. A person doesn't lose their right to free speech just because they are dumb or otherwise incapable of communicating their speech, either.

> OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.

This is in fact where I think the most interesting discussion can occur. What values should social media platforms be enforcing? I personally think that censoring speech broadly on the platform is in most cases inappropriate — Twitter and the like can make tools to help people insulate themselves from people they don't wish to see or interact with. Some of these already exist, but they could expand them. They could even create features that allow users to preemptively take action on types of speech they find objectionable (advanced filtering techniques).

I find this preferable because it allows the broader community to maintain discourse (even if some people find it abhorrent) and importantly grants individuals agency over the type of speech they engage with.

This conflict isn't just about people's feelings being hurt, which is what having the ability to enter a bubble where you don't hear anything that would offend you would protect against.

It's bigger than that - what if these ideas become popular and we elect a leader whose primary drive is to go "death con 3 on the jews"?

This is how I look at it as well. The government can't come knocking because I have opinions. It doesn't mean I get to espouse those opinions anywhere I please (hotel lobby, shopping mall, concert, stadium) where it becomes a public disturbance. I'm free to write about whatever my opinions are but I'm not free to force someone to publish them.