The idea that Freedom of Speech is just a thing from the US constitution is particularly odd if you're not from the US. Freedom of Speech is, surely, a measure of how free you are to communicate your message to other people.
The two ideas are certainly related but they are also different in very significant ways. Conflating the two makes discussion of these concepts imprecise and muddled.
The notion that the government should have limited power to restrict communication is quite different from the notion that private entities have some legal obligation to publish content (i.e. that individuals can assert the right to publish via platforms that they don't own).
Legal obligation, of course not. I don't think anyone involved in the current incident was arguing for a legal obligation for Facebook to do anything in particular.
Moral obligation, now that's a different beast. Assuming that free speech is valuable to society as a whole, one might argue that everyone (including Facebook employees) has a moral obligation to promote it, or at least not inhibit it too much.
Your response is somewhat an example of what I was talking about. By not clearly distinguishing between the different concepts you end up with muddled arguments.
You've clarified here and said that in the private case there is a 'moral obligation'. Really? What exactly is the obligation? Falling back on the generic notion of 'free speech' doesn't actually clarify the argument.
For example, if I managed a public forum for discussion of roller coasters, am I 'obligated' to accept all user generated content? What if a controversial post was about labor practices at an amusement park. Perhaps that is tangently connected to 'roller coasters' but maybe I don't want my site politicized and so I moderate/delete that content. Is that some sort of ethical violation (I'm assuming for this thought exercise that my terms of service say that I'm going to moderate content, i.e. this isn't a surprise to the participants).
What if my forum is oriented around a concept, such as regulatory reform? Is there an obligation to accept and publish content that is inflammatory, off topic, superfluous, or perhaps just contrary to my goals? What guidance would help me decide when I am 'morally obligated' to publish the content?
To be clear, I think there is value in healthy debate, I just struggle with the unqualified appeals to 'free speech' to put 'moral' requirements on publishers and unfortunately I think the power of the concept of 'free speech' is often wielded in these cases to advocate for legal requirements, which I think goes way to far.
I agree with you for the most part, but I also think that we can expect organizations above a certain size or influence to have a bigger moral obligation than the little players. Unlike law, morality is a gradient.
It doesn't sound unreasonable to say that the more power you have to shape the world around you, the more obligation you have to use that power for the greater good. This kind of noblesse oblige is not a foreign concept to most people.
It might also make a difference if a company is actively trying to become the platform for everyone to express their thoughts. Whether or not your actions actually impede free speech or not depends a lot on whether or not there are alternatives of a comparable size and influence. For example, I have no obligation to let random people put up "TRUMP 2016" signs on my lawn, because they are free to put up signs on their own lawns, windows, cars, etc. But if all the HOAs in the city banned election signs, that could be a problem even though HOAs are not run by the city.
The closer you are to having a monopoly on deciding what people can or can't say in their daily life, the more your moral obligations will resemble that of a government. This becomes so extreme in the case of the government itself, that smart people in the past have decided to codify some of the government's moral obligations into a legally binding document.
It is particularly odd if you're in the US too though, but yes that is accurate.
Freedom of speech is not a measure of those things, it is a concept we, in the US, exported to conform other democracies to our will, with mixed success.
It became a meme amongst private persons. And it is still a meme, virally spreading words that have no congruence with the reality the words are used in.
Freedom of speech is a limitation of the government retaliating on a person solely on the basis of their speech. It is not a limitation of private persons using the government's courts to create a consequence for someone else's speech, it is not a limitation on private persons for restricting or censoring other people's speech.
