I'll be very clear about what I want. I want companies that facilitate speech to be forced to tolerate all legal speech on their platforms. It's that simple.
In the 1700's, when we were having the debate over speech protected from government interference, someone could have easily said "yes well if you don't like the government's policies you should go to another country!"
The existence of alternatives is irrelevant to the fact that freedom of speech is sacred and forums for speech - public or private - must never infringe upon its freedom.
I’m afraid the basis on which your argument is made is shaky. The First Amendment was not rooted in concerns about the government controlling speech in general. It was rooted in concerns about criminal liability for contra-government speech as reflected in the seditious libel laws in England that had been in place since the 1500s. Like, you could go to jail for criticizing the government.
If you study our jurisprudence you’ll find that no free speech cases were decided by the Supreme Court despite plenty of common law surrounding speech such as civil libel, commercial regulations, etc. for nearly 150 years (!) until the early 1900s. Debs v U.S. (1919) was the first case and it was about - surprise, surprise - an anti-war speech.
> I want companies that facilitate speech to be forced to tolerate all legal speech on their platforms. It's that simple.
I don't think it's that simple. Taken at face value, you want it to be illegal for someone (say, a game publisher) to have a discussion forum which facilities speech around a particular topic (say, their game) while banning off-topic discussions (say, porn). I'm therefore going to assume you're just thinking of companies which facilitate all kinds of speech, such as forums like Reddit and Twitter and infrastructure like Cloudflare, but excluding Hacker News and lobste.rs and /r/factorio which focus on a particular subject area.
The problem with your approach is that, invariably, a discussion forum which doesn't get rid of despicable content ends up repelling people who dislike that content and attracting people who like that kind of content. A great example is voat.co, which looked like a fairly good Reddit alternative until its free speech absolutism ended up attracting all kinds of hateful people and content.
If a platform isn't allowed to reject legal speech, we would need much stronger laws regarding what counts as hate speech and what doesn't. I don't know if that's what you want.
In the 1700's, when we were having the debate over speech protected from government interference, someone could have easily said "yes well if you don't like the government's policies you should go to another country!"
The existence of alternatives is irrelevant to the fact that freedom of speech is sacred and forums for speech - public or private - must never infringe upon its freedom.