If you were in a small town a couple hundred years ago and wanted to get your message out, you could have letters published in the local paper.
If the paper decided it didn't want your message to get out, maybe because a powerful local politician didn't want your idea out in society so the paper got "influenced" and stopped publishing your letters, you could probably go to another paper-- hopefully, a paper owned by a different individual. Even if it were in the next town over, your message can still be read where it can make a difference.
What happens if, in fact, all the papers available to you in a real-world sense are owned by the cronies of that powerful politician, or politicians who share his agenda? He doesn't want your message to get out, and his friends help him so to it that it doesn't. Not effectively, anyway.
If no one would publish you, you could start your own paper, even if you had to write each copy by hand. So you decide to print your own flyers.
But no one will sell you paper for the same reason-- all the paper sellers are buddies with the political enemy. All the ink sellers, too.
If you point out the problem, some people might say all those businesses have a right to refuse to do business with you. Even if it means your message goes unheard. After all, you have a right to speak and write; no one is obligated to let you do so using their medium.
You could learn to make papyrus and ink, or start inscribing clay tablets. And your message's reach gets smaller and smaller.
And you can still stand in your living room and speak as freely as you want, 24 hours per day. (in that era, anyway, maybe not today.) Your words can neither help nor hurt anyone this way, but you can speak them.
You still have your freedom of speech... right?
Not really.
No, the local paper is not the government, but what if it were owned by the local politician's best friend? Or a political crony of some sort? Someone who isn't technically an agent of government but acts in that capacity anyway.
And, it's not "censorship" to stifle your freedom of speech as long as it's not being stifled by government through legislation. But that's who is stifling it, due to conflicts of interest. The politician doesn't want his buddies to allow you to have a platform, so they don't. Or, maybe the people who can keep your message hidden just have their own agenda that meshes nicely with that of the politician.
Others may claim you still have freedom of speech, and that you aren't being censored by government, but what's the reality of your situation?
About the same situation with regard to your freedom of speech as is going on today.
No, Twitter, Facebook, and Google are not "private businesses"-- they are corporations run by government-supremacist cronies of (almost exclusively) Left-Statist politicians, or who coincidentally share the same government-supremacist agenda with those political parasites.
Even if they were "private businesses", it's not OK to violate people just because they accepted an invitation to your yard and you only violate them while they are there and because they are using your property.
I would never do that to someone, and I can't respect anyone who does.
Just because you aren't a "conservative", don't think you aren't going to be targeted. If you are anyone other than a w0ke Left-statist, you are in the crosshairs. Maybe you think by saying the correct, supportive things they'll eat you last. Maybe.
This isn't a good situation. It is dangerous to stifle speech, even if you can dishonestly, but with technical accuracy, claim it isn't censorship and that people still have freedom of speech, just not where it can make a difference. I hope those who are trying to stomp out free speech in this purge suffer the consequences. Hard.
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A little note on Section 230 or whatever. You know the thing...
I'm opposed to legislation. ALL legislation. As I understand it, that particular legislation protected social media platforms from being held accountable for what their users said-- as long as the platforms didn't edit those comments (becoming the publisher of said comments in the process). Once they started editing what their users said, the legislation no longer applied to them anyway because they had become, essentially, the writers, not just the platform.
I'm probably wrong about all of that, but it seems to me to be a moot point either way.
