It's exhausting to me that there are huge swaths of commenters that immediately jump on the legal protections for free speech and lecture us on how that First Amendment only protects you from
government retaliation.
Everyone knows that. Nobody (except the most ill-informed) dispute it. But the First Amendment is not and was never intended to be the end-all and be-all of free speech. Freedom of speech is a value held by society. The First Amendment is a legal protection afforded that value in law.
When people and organizations start clamping down on speech, yes, that is a violation of the principle of freedom of speech, even if it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Yes, there has to be a reasonable balance between your freedom to associate with people who say obnoxious things and their freedom to say obnoxious things. Nobody disputes that either.
But there's been an increasingly clear trend of people being banished from workplaces, universities, and other spaces because of their speech, people who would not have been so punished in the past. Part of it is the Internet puts our words in a public space, accessible to everyone. Part of it is the Internet foments mobs of offended people who come after you. Part of it is that people seem to be becoming more and more intolerant of dissenting views.
This is an extremely dangerous long-term trend. It points to a more factious, divided populace. It points to eventual government restrictions on speech. Authoritarian governments rarely start out by banning speech everyone supports. They start banning speech everyone finds dangerous and offensive. Having Brownshirts beating up Communists for their speech ends with Nazis rounding up Communists.
> There are already numerous hate speech laws covering the fact that the first amendment does not mean that you have a right to say whatever you want in a private space.
Care to point these laws out?