Greg Lukianoff also suggested drawing the content moderation line at legal speech [1].
> Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs.
Saying this does not convince people who are concerned about hate speech. Such individuals imagine that the government or the platform will, or can be coerced, to simply remove whatever they do not like. These folks, who consider themselves among the majority, never imagine that they will one day be a minority, or that such power will then be used against them. The truth is that all of us are being moderated all the time on social media, but that's hard to demonstrate in all cases at all times, which is why the secrecy of such moderation tends to be effective for a period.
Drawing the line at legal speech is important is because words are not violent, and moving it anywhere else leads to more disagreement. Other people's words, which you may find offensive and which may cause real psychological harm, are still discretionary. Some may find them harmful, others will not. Laws aren't supposed to be subjectively interpreted. The exception for when speech can be punished by law is defined by Nadine Strossen as words that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm" [2].
> No one values spam, so no one writes hand-wringing essays about whether it is ok to kick spam and spammers off social media.
That's not really what happens though. Spam is a useful mechanism to get platforms to build more tools that secretly remove content. I mention it in my talk at 28:00 [3]. These new censorship tools are mostly used to suppress speech from individuals, not spammers.
> Most people recognize that porn, even if they like it, is not something that should be in everyone’s faces all the time, so there is little existential concern for free speech as a whole when porn is excluded or hidden from some contexts.
That's not true, "obscenity" has always been under attack. Look up Anthony Comstock [4] [5], a largely successful crusader against all things he found obscene. He didn't stop at pornography, he went after literature describing contraceptives, abortion, and even people who just criticized him. It was just like how today's radical trans movement seeks to remove voices of detransitioners from social media [6]. It doesn't fit their world view, they find it offensive and they don't want you to see it. That said, there is broader agreement about keeping pornography away from children.
The vast amounts of censorship today, most often secretly done, cuts out the middle and enables both extremes to isolate themselves in their own bubbles. Instead of trying to baby-proof our world, we should be world-proofing ourselves [7]
> You cannot expect to make sense of free speech if you try to ignore other values.
Nobody's saying we should ignore other values. If you hold this view then you've misinterpreted the constitution, whose 9th amendment [8] states that rights are not to be held in conflict with each other.
What should be said here is, you cannot make sense of free speech if you do not examine its history and how it's been relentlessly defended, not just in the US, but everywhere possible for arguably the whole of human history, with varying degrees of success.
[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/op...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c...
[3] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Comstock
[5] https://play.google.com/store/books/details/The_Mind_of_the_...
[6] https://archive.ph/1NeiV#selection-1513.7-1513.57
[7] https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/76283/world-proof...
[8] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/?...