Although I know that wasn’t directed at me, it does get me thinking…

The article is about Trump’s censorship, juxtaposed against Trump’s prior false accusations that Biden was censoring. That’s all a matter of government censorship.

But my litmus test can be applied to discussions about the suppression of speech by corporations. If a right-winger complains about deplatforming, ask them if they oppose Tumblr’s censorship of sex. By the way, to my awareness, that was not called “deplatforming”. I think it’s significant that sexual expression is almost always special-cased, and different language is applied. “Deplatforming” is already a euphemism—and the labels for suppressing sex are even more euphemistic. Sex is truly the canary in the free speech coal mine.

<aside>Not to go off on a tangent—I have an observation relevant to the 2018 Tumblr story that I’ve never seen anyone make. I’ll just leave this here: Tumblr censored noncommercial sexual expression: Sex-positive communities of people who were mostly not sex workers, who discussed (and graphically discussed) sex purely for its own sake, without any financial motives. This fits a general pattern of laws, regulations, corporate policies, and social mores that restrict sexual expression to commercial “pornography”—and then attack porn as being driven by greed, as if other commercial enterprises aren’t. When sexual expression is cabined to commercial porn, it’s stigmatized by default; the worst nightmare for social conservatives is for sexual expression to be normalized. (Compare “revenge porn” laws, which structurally perpetuate the shame and stigma that make revenge porn damaging in the first place; alas, most free speech advocates miss that aspect of it.)</aside>

Beyond that, I respectfully disagree with the implied bright line between governmental and “private” suppression of speech. This is a fraught topic, so please excuse the length of the following (and yes, I sort of intentionally buried the lede below where “TL;DR” types will look).

In a world where giant, monopolistic corporations arrogate to themselves control of public communications, that bright line is based on the same fallacy as ancaps, Objectivists, and most libertarians apply generally to monopolies. In practice, the corporations that have decimated the Open Web have de facto privatized some proper functions of government; they have built virtual corporate towns that ancaps should love, and scaled them up to hundreds of millions, or even billions of citizens.

For anyone who claims that people are “free” to move out of those corporate towns, I note that I have chosen never to move into them—and that choice has had an onerous, outright detrimental impact on my life. I’ve never been a user of (Ex)Twitter, Facebook, et al. For over twenty years, I have actively and assiduously refused them. The outcome is that I’m marginalized. I’m excluded from digital society—and I even have my access limited to government agencies, who use these “private” platforms as major channels of public communications. In my judgment, the latter should be totally illegal—or else the platforms should be subject to all of the constitutional, statutory, and regulatory provisions that apply to government agencies (including, but not limited to those that pertain to data collection, retention, and use).

From the history of the Internet’s development, there is even some critical infrastructure that has been delegated by the U.S. government to “private” corporations—to which I think First Amendment should be thus applied. It’s my novel legal theory about some issues that have never had adequate attention; I’ve long wished to discuss it with a First Amendment attorney. I won’t be more specific here, save to note that it is lower-level and more fundamental than “platforms”.

More generally, I have a(n admittedly sort of ad hoc) label-interactionist sociological theory about the use in these discourses of the terms “government”, “corporation”, “public”, “private”, “censor”, “censorship”, and so forth. In my above discussion of Tumblr, my use of labels was deliberate—word by word. When speech about speech devolves into a war over labels, to untangle the issues requires interrogating the labels and those who construct them.

Of course, it doesn’t make any sense to claim that Web platforms can’t or shouldn’t moderate (that is: censor) content. Besides various justifying theories, in practice, the outcome of unmoderated Internet platforms is a dumpster fire, in which all nontrivial discourse is impossible; that’s not free speech, but no speech.

A part of the answer is disintermediation. “Platforms” shouldn’t exist—for many reasons, not only free speech. But as is so oft the case, not all of the answer is technical: It is a social problem.

The Net of yore was suffused with a cyberlibertarian culture—a widely-shared principle that everyone should be able to say anything, somewhere on the Net. After the Web was invented, a dominant proportion of its Nineties-era population consisted of educated liberal intellectuals, and hackers (in the Jargon File sense), who all shared a nigh religious reverence for the freedom of speech. The radicals (including my younger self) even posited that free speech should be protected not only by constitutional law and social norms, but by technical means: Censorship should be made physically impossible, or at least, as infeasible as regulation of the right to breathe air.

From your general bearing, I guess that perhaps you very well may remember all of that. I’m not trying to tell you anything you don’t know. In a public comment, I’m remembering what most netizens nowadays either have forgotten, or are too young to have experienced.

For a handy index of how much the culture has changed: In 1997, when Reno v. ACLU was decided, the EFF’s Blue Ribbon Free Speech campaign was the fourth most-linked page on the Web. In 2025, when FSC v. Paxton pretextually opened a gaping loophole in Reno v. ACLU (without technically overturning it), the Web didn’t even notice—not outside the limited circles of (a) die-hard civil libertarians, (b) sex workers, and (c) on the other side, the various groups who applauded the decision.

In the early Web’s social context, sigfiles and common practice reflected Gilmore’s aphorism: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Let’s please get back to that!

More broadly, far beyond the Web, I observe that for generations, until quite recently, in terms of public perceptions, “free speech” was a left-wing brand that Americans popularly associated with the ACLU. That’s my objective observation, not partisanship. The right-wing hypocritically misappropriated “free speech”—but free speech was also largely abdicated by the left. Largely—partly. I doubt it was a coincidence that Nadine Strossen published her excellent HATE book defending hate speech in February 2018—six months after Charlottesville and its fallout on the left.

Now is the hour when those who consistently, impartially defended free speech in 2017–2018 have the credibility to defend free speech for what I recently called the politics of survival.

As for what you said about moral judgment, of course, the answer to bad speech is more speech! It is a principle beyond the grasp of some deplorable crybabies, who label criticism and condemnation of themselves as “censorship”. The criticism and the condemnation are the more speech.

When defending the right to speech that they themselves find wrong or even reprehensible, free speech advocates have traditionally (mis)quoted what Evelyn Beatrice Hall put in Voltaire’s mouth, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In a world that has lost all nuance, I suggest a revision that perhaps you may now prefer: “You’re a fucking moron—and in the manner of giving you enough rope to hang yourself, I’ll defend your right to show the world that you’re a fucking moron, such that everyone who’s at least minimally sane and intelligent will scorn your sorry ass. Anyway, I’m protecting your speech half to protect myself: The culture and infrastructure of censorship are a face-eating leopard, which I do not want to build as my pet.” (Please do not misattribute this revision to Voltaire.)

YMMV. Some may prefer the traditional wording.