Free Speech! Gerunds! Death!

Tying into my most recent post, apparently (as Jim MacDonald at Making Light put it) Time Magazine has discovered Internet comments. It always amuses me when mainstream media picks up on something that’s been around for ages and treats it like it’s something new and shiny (actually, my whole note was about how user-generated content isn’t quite as shiny as people seem to think). Of course, it was John Scalzi weighing in on the issue that made me particularly gleeful.

He brought up one of my pet peeves: uninformed cries of “FREE SPEECH!” when the the concept is completely irrelevant. I think that free speech is one of those nebulous things that everyone knows about but not everyone actually understands. This came up a lot when I was following the Livejournal censorship fiasco. A common refrain from outraged users was that Livejournal was squashing their freedom of speech by deleting communities that it deemed as having “inappropriate” content. However, there’s a fundamental difference between censorship and trampling your first amendment rights. Private entities are allowed to censor. They can censor you all they want. Livejournal could decide tomorrow that it’s going to delete every user who blathers on about their cat because it has decided that cats are inappropriate. All it takes is a tiny edit to their terms of service. Likewise, John Scalzi can edit the comments in his blog all he wants to, and if he decides “Death to Gerunds!” well, too bad for gerunds.

The first amendment applies to government action. So if Congress passed a law saying that there will be no more blog entries about cats on the Internet, and then forced Livejournal to delete users or face the consequences, then that would be a violation of your freedom of speech. Similarly, your boss can fire you for calling him names… but he can’t have you arrested for it. And of course, there are all the kinds of speech that aren’t free–defamation, copyright infringement, threats, etc.

What this all boils down to is this: You can have all the free speech you want, and you can do it by starting your own blog. But if you’re in someone else’s, then they can censor you all they want.