Free Speech Absolutism

Free speech absolutism, as the term is used about digital platforms, is the position that dominant platforms should not remove lawful speech — that their scale gives their moderation decisions an effect comparable to censorship even though they are private companies.

This page records the position and the legal facts it operates against. It does not adjudicate it.

What the law currently is

Two things constrain the argument, and both are documents rather than opinions.

Section 230(c)(2) shields a provider from liability for restricting access to material it considers objectionable “whether or not such material is constitutionally protected”. Moderation of lawful speech is exactly what the provision protects.

Moody v. NetChoice, decided July 1, 2024, addressed the other side. Florida and Texas had enacted statutes curtailing large platforms’ capacity to filter, prioritize and label third-party content, and requiring individualized explanations when a post was removed or altered. The Eleventh Circuit held that restricting content moderation triggers First Amendment scrutiny under the cases protecting editorial discretion, and that the Florida provisions were unlikely to survive it.

So the position that platforms must carry speech runs into the platforms’ own asserted speech rights. That does not settle the political argument, but it is the legal terrain the argument is conducted on, and the earlier version of this page did not mention either document.

What deplatforming does in practice

Rogers’s study followed deplatformed accounts to the services they moved to and found that reach falls: the alternative destination is smaller, and audiences do not transfer in full. That is relevant to both sides of the argument — it is evidence that removal has substantial effect, which is the movement’s premise, and evidence that the alternative-platform answer to it does not work, which is the movement’s usual remedy.

Collection note

This page overlaps substantially with anti-censorship-advocacy, free-speech-platform-movement, open-internet-advocates and alt-tech-movement. The overlap is recorded as a merge candidate in reports/citations/movements.md.

What was removed

The previous version carried a chronology from 2015 describing specific unsourced moderation disputes, campus incidents and deplatforming actions, and asserted impacts on Section 230 debate and platform policy. None was sourced. The founded field, which read 2015, has been removed with it: the position is older than the platform disputes the page dated it from.