Isn’t freedom of speech and expression an absolute right?

That’s not how it works.

According to the Supreme Court, freedom of speech (and all of the other rights in the Bill of Rights) are explicitly NOT absolute rights. If your speech directly causes harm to another, then laws can be made to restrict or prevent that.

Even protests or other forms of political speech are still subject to a time/place restriction. You can’t block a freeway whenever the fuck you want, because you feel that strongly about your political ideology and want others to pay attention.

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And that’s just covering the laws that the government is allowed and not allowed to make. Be aware that the right is actually the government shall not pass laws that infringe on free speech. Nowhere in that right is there a right to compel publishers (including social media) to publish your speech and expressions. If there were such a right, Facebook would look exactly like 4chan. Because porn, ultraviolent content, hate speech, and whatever else could—by this hypothetical right—not be banned.

And if you go back to a time before the internet, this nonsense gets even worse. How are publishers supposed to be forced to print your content? Printing isn’t free. Publishers only do it with carefully selected or in-house written content that they are certain will generate income. Your supposed right would make it impossible to be a publisher—you’d go bankrupt printing crazy manifestos that no one wants to read.

Fraud, false advertising, libel, child pornography, conspiracy to commit a crime, inciting a riot, excessively loud noise outside of daytime, copyright and trademark infringement. These are some of the one or two dozen laws that infringe on an “absolute” right to free speech.

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Internet users show an outrageous amount of entitlement. They feel entitled to have the audiences that were built by Facebook and the rest. They feel that somehow being forced to create your own website is insufficient for their right of free expression; that instead they can use someone else’s website. That their rights are infringed if content that offends the website owner is taken down.

That world doesn’t make sense. Clearly you want Instagram and TikTok to censor some speech. Just not yours. Unclear why you think that you and not the social media site gets to decide what stays and what goes. And why a pornographer doesn’t have the same decision making power as you.