Free speech in corporate-owned platforms has all sorts of limits- just like what one says at Susi’s home may be different than what one cay say at the Anarchist Clubhouse. Tolerated speech and free speech seems to be the primary division. The internet apparently is a bunch of corporations plugged in to fiber optic cables, satellites and other digital data infrastructure corridors. If a writer uses something like Google to write he has entered that particular corporate twilight zone and is subject to the corporate determination to allow something to be viewed by the public or not. It is as if google were a vast neo-leftist garage and everything that goes in to that space is subject in some sense to their will. Lawyers would need to elaborate on the complexities of private property rights of non-property owners who use some one else’s space for business, vacation or whatever- including writing.
I believe the government has a need to create its own server for citizens to write their opinions and ideas in order to allow democracy to exist with the marketplace of ideas it requires for meaning. Unfortunately I think the elected people don’t really understand the problem or how the Internet is constructed- most people don’t. Right now Google has the inertia for more than a trillion dollars worth of deep pocketed public use. Free speech cannot just occur within platforms entirely owned by vast deep pocketed, networked investor private corporations and be remain free. and I am not referring to the dollar value in some sort of a stupid ‘freedom is not free’ Orwellian double entendre.
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