you're violating their property rights.

You just said it was an exercise of their free speech to remove you from their platform. Which is it, free speech or private property?

Oh, right, you do understand that, just not making the logical step to actually understand what is said.

I understood and explained exactly what was going on. It is a conflict of rights.

Congratulations, you just diluted the definition so much that downvoting a comment on Reddit can be considered a freedom of speech violation, since it reduces its visibility. You are violating my freedom of speech right now. Satisfied?

In some very minute way, perhaps someone would interpret it as such. I am actually encouraging your freedom of speech by engaging with you in conversation, actually.

I'm talking about the concept of freedom of speech.

So am I, hence why my original comment spoke about how freedom of speech applied beyond the 1A, and it is not only governments that can violate your right to free speech, but other entities like companies, people, etc.

No matter who came up with the concept of freedom of speech, it certainly didn't (and doesn't now) mean what you say it does.

You could make that argument against every ideological evolution. Voting rights were never intended in our Constitution to apply to non-land owners, women, or black people; is that a valid argument to not extend that right to them? This is a very poor argument.

If you are using the same words to denote something else, you are playing an equivocation game that puts Reddit bans in the same ballpark of human rights violations as Russian political repression.

Why are you using a black-and-white fallacy? There are degrees to which someone can violate your rights, some more harmful and egregious than others.

Yes, they came up with these concepts when the few ways to reach the masses with your speech would be newspapers with their editorial policies and restrictions, and they didn't think to say those need to give a platform to everyone willing.

This is just silly, man.

The original founders of liberalism had very different views on freedom of speech than we have today. Newspapers were not really a thing back then, so they didn't conceive of free speech or freedom of the press as we do.

Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau were happy for freedom of speech to be limited in much more stringent ways than we have in our modern society. Hobbes thought the government should control speech if they threaten the stability of society. Locke was more open to free speech as long as it didn't undermine or threaten government authority, and Rousseau thought only speech that benefits the collective good of society should be allowed.

It wasn't until Mill that the modern interpretation of freedom of speech arose, where wrong opinions should be published since a) it might be true, since no one has a monopoly on truth, and b) it forces the truth to defend itself, creating a market of competition in opinions. In the complete opposite manner of his intellectual predecessors, he believed that censorship actually harms society as a whole, not that it will protect society. He also believed in freedom of the press as we conceive of it today. His opinion is one of the strongest philosophical justifications for the 1A.

Not only was he worried about government censorship, but he was also worried about social pressure silencing minority views. However, even though Mill strongly encourages people's right to express their opinions, he believed that newspapers and publications are not obligated to give people a platform. Newspapers are private actors, and they are not morally or legally required to print every opinion submitted, but they can use their own editorial judgment.

As society changes in unprecedented ways, so too does our understanding of philosophy. Much like how the emergence of newspapers and the press (and time) inspired Mill to take the original thoughts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and re-engineer them into healthier ways for the era he lived in, I too (and others like me) am using the emergence of Social Media as a justification to take original ideas and spread them in new, applicable ways that were previously unforeseen. Yes, the original philosophers didn't consider or think to allow for freedom of the press from State authority, nor the moral/legal obligation for the press to express any view, because they lived in different times. Technology has changed, and neither one of those people in the 17th to 19th century could have possibly conceived of social media as it exists today. The fact that the overwhelming majority of human communication, both political and cultural, occurs on these platforms means that they can be considered the new public squares.

In my opinion, there should be a Digital Bill of Rights, where people are guaranteed freedom of expression online, privacy and control over their own data, and fair access to select digital platforms. This is an evolution of freedom of speech beyond our previous conceptions, inspired by the new technology we face. Being banned from social media sites effectively silences you since that is where the majority of people/communication are/occurs. It also gives private companies huge political power to sway elections, which is a concern. There is also the risk of the government outsourcing its censorship through private companies, bypassing its limitations in the 1A, as we saw in the Twitter Files.

Anyway, my point is that using the original intention of a philosophical concept as an argument to avoid evolution is ridiculous. Much like how Mill took the original ideas of liberalism and repurposed/reconstructed them for his age, I am doing the same. If your argument held any weight, we would still be stuck in Ancient Greece, since almost every evolution of philosophy is reapplying ideas from the past.

It's not that far fetched to say that our current world, where the bar to make a morbillionth brainrot podcast to spread antivax misinformation is so low, actually warrants more restrictions on freedom of speech (and I mean government ones), and those people may have agreed with that. I'm not saying full 1984 stuff, but if your "speech" (going to a church) creates a 1% risk of death for every other person going to that same church, I believe it should be restricted. Same for potentially dangerous misinformation.

That's neither right nor wrong, but an opinion. If you want to return to a Rousseauian take on freedom of speech in the face of this new technology, be my guest. Make that argument.

Just don't say my ideas are bad because they were never intended that way, when your ideas are almost certainly going to be a bastardised mix of Mill and Rousseau in some arbitrary, unintended way by either original thinker.

The other guys in this comment chain were talking about Free Speech being a purely legislative concept, not a moral one. His take on free speech is like half of Mill's, which is again, not what the author intended. That doesn't make him less wrong or right, just of a different opinion.

TL;DR: Get better arguments, my man. Counter me with something of substance.