>The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.
I thought it was to protect citizens' rights to hold their governments accountable.
>On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean.
Hilariously, I agree with the wording but am willing to bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is. Everyone remembers the stronger emotional reactions.
Free speech and its protection predates the modern concept of governments. Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.
> bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is
I don't have a horse in the race. All I'm saying is that there is a bias due to the existence of a controlling demographic, and this undermines free speech when that demographic is able to censor what's visible to the average internet user. As a proponent of free speech, I'll fight for it even if it means that it unleashes views that I disagree with - that's the exact purpose of it. The most terrifying part about accepting censorship because you happen to agree with the censors, is that the censors will change over time and you will eventually find yourself on the receiving end.
> Free speech and its protection predates the modern concept of governments.
But it doesn't predate the concept of government or the idea of government’s accountability to it's citizens; it appears to have emerged directly attached to that concept in Athenian democracy.
> Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.
No, it's really about preserving the proper subject relation of the government to the citizenry, as opposed to the inverse.
It's not against coalescing around consensus ideas, it's against the state dictating where that consensus will fall. There's obviously situations where nominally private institutions are de facto arms of the state, so you can't simply ignore formally private institutions, but just because a private actor has a powerful voice doesn't mean they stop being a free participant in the marketplace of ideas and must be constrained in order to preserve an artificial absence of consensus.
Free speech's western society roots come from ancient Greece. The whole point now and then is to protect people from political persecution by the government.
I feel most people arguing for "free speech" applied universally to governments and private parties don't really understand the classical nature of it very well and how it functions as a pillar of democracy. If they did they would understand the paradox it would create when the restrictions placed on government are applied to private parties..
I thought it was to protect citizens' rights to hold their governments accountable.
>On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean.
Hilariously, I agree with the wording but am willing to bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is. Everyone remembers the stronger emotional reactions.