Personal opinions about censorship aside, Google aren’t breaking any free speech laws because free speech doesn’t mean anyone can post anything on private channels. No, the law is a lot more specific than that, eg the government cannot censor individuals.
To that end, free speech has been upheld against social media platforms in specific circumstances. Eg when Trump blocked people he didn’t like on Twitter.
I’ll get downvotes for saying this because it’s a popular meme on HN to shout “free speech” but most who argue it misunderstand the law and it’s important to understand what the law actually states if you want to make a complaint about business not abiding by it.
Personally I don’t think the problem is that platforms are legally allowed to censor the content they host. In fact I can think of some legitimate case studies for why a company should be allowed to moderate the content it hosts (eg if it’s a platform aimed at children). I think the real problem is a combination of:
- people repeatedly falling back to the same few hosting platforms for everything, this allows the impact of those company’s hosting terms to be far further reaching than it ever should be. Eg if you know your military studies might trigger Googles bot then don’t use Google!
- and the companies providing a broken escalation process. Meaning what should be a relatively simple review ends up taking a mammoth public campaign on yet another social network just to get a human to look at the case.
Point 1 is really the crux though. This is one domain where boycotting actually does make a difference. Granted not to Google’s financials, but it does make a difference to us. Because the best way to avoid shitty T&Cs is to use a service that doesn’t have shitty T&Cs. There’s no shortage of hosting platforms out there so it really is that simple.