This is the sort of article which would usually garner a few hundred comments on HN in which the same arguments are exchanged back and forth, usually around a very small number of central themes (stated as follows in the most neutral way I can think):
- Who decides what's true and what isn't?
- Who decides what's hate speech and what isn't?
- Freedom of speech isn't only a legal principle, you're thinking of the first amendment.
- Should YouTube or other platforms be forced to carry certain content? There's simply no other way to get your message heard. Why does YouTube/Facebook/Google get to decide what's the truth?
- Hacker News has a pretty strict moderation policy. Is that censorship too?!
- Ah yes, but Hacker News is niche. Nowhere near the scale of YouTube or Twitter.
- So you're saying scale matters? Who decides what the scale is?
In the end, a lot of these questions seem to focus around a common denominator: "who decides?". In my judgement, we already have a pretty good idea of "who decides" in most matters that affect the whole of society, but not in some others. It's the government, which is supposed to be accountable and elected by the populace, or at least take into account their wishes. This kind of democracy largely does not extend to the economic sphere, which several economists through history have described as the "anarchy of the market".
If the answer to the central "who decides" question is a country's government, whether or not the government is competent enough to make those decisions. This is at least in part a subjective question, as people evaluate all policies depending on their ideological views. But bear in mind that saying "the government decides" is not necessarily an argument for regulation.
There is usually a lack of sources being cited, perhaps because they're philosophical or legal arguments and this is a very tech-oriented forum. I'll provide a few I know of, ones likely to be the most surprising, and if anyone has better pointers I'd be happy to find out about them.
- Susan Brison (2018), "Free speech skepticism" in which the author discusses and attempts to rebut several arguments in favor of a special constitutional amendment to free speech[0]
- Susan Brison (1998), "Speech, Harm and the Mind-Body Problem in 1A Jurisprudence" in which the author provides several compelling arguments that the harms that can be caused by speech can be no less involuntary and in fact can be more severe than physical hurts in a variety of situations. To that end, it's worth asking why "harm" in the interpretation of laws on speech is defined in such a way that it only includes physical assaults. The author argues that to separate "mental" harms from "physical" harms rests on a theory of mind-body dualism, which is generally rejected by philosophers of mind today.[5]
- Brian Leiter (2016), "The Case Against Free Speech" in which the author argues that certain places speech is restricted in the search for truth (such as in the courtroom) offer insights into how speech can be regulated in society as a whole[1]
- Rae Langton, "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts" in which the author argues that the free speech of pornographers interferes with the free speech of women (if speech is to be interpreted more than 'scrawls and sounds', which all protections of the right to freedom of speech are based on) in a way that classical liberals should care about[2]
- The Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy article for Freedom of Speech, including a discussion on Mill's popular "harm principle" and the lesser known offense principle[3]
- Steven D. Smith (2004), "The Hollowness of the Harm Principle" in which the author argues that the harm principle as it is frequently invoked on the principle that governments should only regulate acts which cause "harm" is a vacuous principle which the holder can fill with their own "baggage" simply by equivocating on "harm"[4]
[0] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Bris... (With apologies to the author for citing this draft paper. As far as I know it has not yet been properly published, but it is available publicly at berkely.edu.)
[1] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
[2] http://web.mit.edu/langton/www/pubs/SpeechActs.pdf
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/
[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=591327
[5] http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...
(Quick edit: Looks like I took too much time in writing this comment back when the post had 0 comments, and the discussions I anticipated have already started :))