[xaa]

This viewpoint confuses the legal meaning of the First Amendment, which indeed only applies to the government, with its rationale.

The rationale is the theory that having a diversity of viewpoints, including some that are dangerous or repugnant, is the best approach towards a robust civil society and intellectual growth. If you disagree with something you hear or read, you can ignore it, or you can criticize it, but banning speech causes two undesirable outcomes:

1) The speech will continue anyway, but not in the public eye, where it can be criticized

2) The popularity of an idea is different from the correctness of an idea. It has happened many times that an unpopular or even heretical idea has turned out to be right.

Almost certainly these people are no Galileo. But this approach to free speech is intended to protect the Galileos of the world. It should be kept in mind that talk of revolution in the U.S. during the late 1700s would have been considered extremely dangerous and repugnant by many as well.

[lordCarbonFiber]

This is historical revisionism in the extreme. That rationale is younger than a good number of people on this board, not the golden ideal in the minds of the founders. You're literally posting to a forumn where certain speech is moderated; it's because of that moderation that you post here, otherwise it would be a cesspool of off topic memes and spam (a la /r/programming et al). A private company or even a cabal of private companies cannot ban speech. Nothing is stopping anyone from hosting which ever content they'd like. You are not entitled to the walled garden that Google and others insist is "The Internet".

Private businesses and lay people not wanting to do business with you is fundamentally different from official prosecution. I will gladly fight for any group's protection from governmental over reach; I can't even begin to understand the rational behind choosing "private businesses can't have moderation" as the hill you choose to die on.

[xaa]

Hmm, perhaps instead of "rationale", I should have said "philosophy behind" the 1st Amendment. Obviously the 1st Amendment is not directly intended to cover entities other than the government. But almost everything in the Bill of Rights is essentially intended to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority, whose representative is the government. It is not necessary to protect popular views, from either the government or from others.

This philosophy is as old as the university and modern science. It is certainly no younger than the "free speech, but not consequences" argument, which I read as a thinly-veiled way to threaten unpopular views with unspecified "consequences".

> "private businesses can't have moderation"

I wasn't arguing that they can't. Only that it can be unwise and a net negative for our society for them to choose to do so. I would draw a distinction between trolling/spam and someone honestly espousing an unpopular view.

It is true, some kind of filtering is needed, because there's too much information for any individual to absorb. The question is, who (if not me myself) is doing the filtering and what are their incentives? dang's incentives are aligned with mine: good-quality technical discussion, and people aren't blacklisted purely for espousing unpopular views.

The incentives of corporations are not. Google, Facebook, and in this instance, Namecheap, are presumably taking these actions to safeguard their image and maximize profit, not to actually make their users maximally informed. There is a conflict of interest here.

Finally, I think all this becomes much more important when it comes to political speech, because people have a marked tendency to want to shout down, ignore, misrepresent, or otherwise not engage with political views that make them uncomfortable. Look how the media misrepresented the Damore memo. I take no position on the memo itself, but do assert that people are better off knowing actual arguments from all sides, rather than side A blacklisting side B and then giving strawman representations of what B thinks.