That’s changing now that they find their speech running afoul of tech-company rules. One problem with private companies’ holding the ability to deplatform any speaker is that they’re in no way insulated from politics — from accusations of bias to advertiser boycotts to employee walkouts. “But the winds of public opinion are a terrible basis for free-speech decisions! “I’m afraid that the technology has upended the possibility of a well-functioning, responsible speech environment,” the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says. “It used to be we had masses of speech in a reasonable range, and some extreme speech we could tolerate.

Source: New York Times January 26, 2021 09:56 UTC