I can't help but recall the joyous cheers during the deplatforming era. "Freedom of speech doesn't apply to companies" is a particularly vivid memory.

The article is not arguing that Facebook must support No Kings rallies.

It's urging/educating people to rely on Facebook as little as possible, since it is not committed to being a neutral platform.

If you support free speech, you should support facebook's right to express their own political views.

But that does not mean you have to support facebook's political views, or the way they exercise them!

When I see comments like this, I despair at how poorly people understand the basic concept of free speech. Hopefully you're just trolling.

I think I understand why people make this connection but I don't actually think there is one. Freedom of speech is possibly the #1 thing people get confused over, due to the similarities between "I don't like your speech" and "I want your speech to stop" and "I want the government to stop your speech."

What I'm seeing is an argument for, "I don't like Facebook's speech. I think you shouldn't like it either. So I think we should all walk away."

That is true. I remember the second of the two inventors on the early mRNA patents had some concerns, and suddenly his interviews got taken down. And everyone seemed happy about it. The first inventor was all in, and had many interviews posted.

For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18764523

It is not hypocritical or contradictory to believe that deplatforming is appropriate in some cases and not in others.

Criticizing Facebook for taking down your content is also free speech.

I think the main reaction (at least in tech circles) is that companies like Meta have the power, the legal protection, the political cover, and the indifference to shut down anyone on their platform. So making them the sole provider for your tech and communication is a huge risk.

And this incident (negligent takedown of a community on an important day) demonstrates the point perfectly.

If only we had all had such principled foresight. Thank you for this great lesson.

Conflating deplatforming hate speech and deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is certainly a choice.

You've erected a strawman. The argument was not "free speech doesn't apply to companies", it was the exact opposite, i.e. a company's prerogative to control speech on their platform comes downstream of their own free speech rights. This remains true today and the article does not argue otherwise.

It is very delicious poetic justice. Some liberals warned repeatedly that deplatforming would backfire but were shouted down and ridiculed by illiberal activists hellbent on silencing their foes.

The Taliban can tweet (pre-Musk) but Donald can't

(I dislike Musk for many reasons but you cannot tell me there were 'no problems' with old Twitter or that every criticism was a 'nothingburger')

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I think there is still consistency between these two things.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.

And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.

If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.

Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.

It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.

I haven’t seen anyone complaining about “freedom of speech.” This is a complaint about corporate power.

Which is one of many reasons why social media, along with the internet in general, ought to be treated as a public utility rather than a private for-profit business.