Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

In past times, nonviolent forms of 'cancelling' that would seem familiar to us today were also employed. It was/is called 'shunning.' Our modern term is just a euphemism for that.

You are invoking exploitable core tenets. If one is arguing in bad faith the FIRST thing you'll do is invoke free speech, invoke the principle of charity, call for the strongest possible interpretation and insist that good faith MUST be assumed.

For instance: I neither said nor meant that 'everybody' who supports free speech was doing this. That's half the trouble: it's protective coloration among people who are acting in earnest. I'm stating unequivocally that SOME folks in this camp are acting in bad faith: not just hypocrisy, but pursuing calculated behaviors akin to people coaching their peers to 'not reveal their power level' so as to better influence the communities they're operating on.

I don't know how many of 'em there are, but I find it a catastrophic failure of a community's intentions to assume charity. It's nothing more than an exploit, and there are some topics, political topics, that bring this out.

> "Any government regulation of speech or published material is destructive to free society."

Things go off the rails right off the bat by conflating the First Amendment with freedom of speech, which almost always bodes ill for the remainder of the arguments presented. Anyway, the 1st Amendment is a subset of the general principle of freedom of speech that happens to bind the government. The formulation in Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a bit clearer about what freedom of speech is:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"

This encompasses individuals, organizations, businesses, and, yes, governments. This is why the deplatforming of Parler (which in some sense was a happy thing) is still a freedom of speech issue despite not being a First Amendment issue or illegal; third parties stepped in to interfere with those who wanted to impart legal (albeit deplorable) speech and those who wanted to receive legal (ditto) speech. What can be done to one set of people can be done to any other, bad or good, and that's a hazard.

> "Hopefully you immediately think of exceptions..."

Sets up the unfortunately all too common "speech that causes clear and immediate harm is illegal so you don't _actually_ believe in freedom of speech" argument which, much like attacking a point nobody was trying to defend, is neither interesting nor persuasive. Such speech is seldom the core issue of the controversial freedom of speech cases we're discussing in the first place. For example, neither the ACLU's Skokie or even Charlottesville freedom of speech cases had known expectation of immediate harm to others, despite the odious nature of who they were defending.

> "The grey area is why people who are knowledgeable are unsure and people who know nothing are confident. One sees complexities, the other is blind to them."

A pleasant appeal to HN's collective intellectual vanity. Let's see where it takes us.

> "Every person on the planet being able to publish a message that can be read by every human (twitter) is something the human race has never had to face before. Facebook can choose to promote hateful speech with algorithms and incite hatred through doing so, gaining them engagement (addiction) in the process. Is that healthy for society? Is fox news healthy? On the other side is CNN (fake news?) healthy? Should China/Russia be able to purchase American airtime? Should American celebrities and businesses be protected from having their speech coerced by foreign powers?"

Let's substitute for your final paragraphs, a statement I feel is equivalent (please let me know if you think it's an unfair characterization):

"The knowledgeable know better than the ignorant so it's justifiable for the knowledgeable to protect them from themselves by limiting fake news/hateful speech from what they see, with the understanding that what constitutes fake news/hateful speech is decided on by the knowledgeable."

While seductive to a certain type of mindset, the paternalistic and ripe for abuse nature of this idea should be self-evident. It is the progressive equivalent of Kipling's (deeply racist and colonialist) "The White Man's Burden", only here the it is the progressive who are being exhorted to bring enlightenment to the benighted ignorant.

But let's go further and suppose that it were justified somehow, we'd still be faced with the problem that we not know the truth now and, even worse, we don't know what the future will determine the truth to be. Permitting suppression of "hateful speech" would have suppressed the civil rights movement (immensely unpopular in its time), LGBT rights movement (same), and other social movements now deemed important steps in improving human civil rights.

So, in the end, there is nothing new, insightful, nor persuasive to be found here.

(I await the inevitable reply where I'm accused of being a conservative.)

The first amendment in America protects speech (etc), while freedom of expression in Canada has stricter limits on speech w.r.t. hate speech. I'd argue that Canada's limits are more reasonable. I also accept that rational people could argue the opposite. I trust in the democratic process to deal with these issues.

The limitations on hate speech are something I agree with strongly, and would vote against someone wanting to reduce them. So I guess you'd find my position bizarre.