Why is it axiomatic that the protection of freedom of speech is always a good thing? It is in the American constitution, sure, but how many others have it? Is it really a good idea? Do we not also have to protect weaker members of our society from charlatans and manipulators?
> It is in the American constitution, sure, but how many others have it?
FYI, it's in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in most countries legislative corpus.
A better way to frame the question would be "what is the speech that is free", which is much more nuanced and interesting (e.g. is hate speech ok? religious blasphemy? stuff putting personal or national security at risk? Gossip? Holocaust denial? Lese majeste?).
But, in every case I can think of, freedom of speech is a right except for cases explicitly forbidden by some law.
So if reddit's defense is "we permit everything unless it's illegal" the case would be the same in most democratic countries and some non democratic ones, just shifting whhere the legal bar is set.
Why? Because there's basically no-one that can be trusted to decide which kinds of speech can be outlawed. In particular, I'm deeply familiar with the main group that's trying to get /r/CreepShots shut down and their views on how speech should be cracked down on, and they're pretty much identical to the ones that lead to the BoingBoing fiasco described here: http://www.popehat.com/2012/10/09/frankly-i-dont-care-how-du... In fact, their main subreddit at r/ShitRedditSays has a policy of doing this to anyone that points out when posts are outright lying through their teeth to get people riled up.
>Why is it axiomatic that the protection of freedom of speech is always a good thing?
Why are you making that assumption? Nothing was said about the goodness of it. The fact was simply stated that reddit considers it important, so they uphold it. You don't have to agree with reddit, nobody is saying everyone has to uphold free speech everywhere.
Just saying.