To accept the legitimacy of the principle of freedom of speech is to make a value judgement. If you want some pure criteria you can use to make content moderation decisions, then the purest criteria is no content moderation at all.
You can remove obvious spam (e.g. viagra advertisements posted by bots) and still adhere to principles of free speech. Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth. And I mean that very broadly. Even trolling can be done in good faith.
> Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth.
So if Twitter didn't believe that the New York Post article was written by people acting in "good faith in the pursuit of truth", it's okay to censor?
The intentions of the speaker and the value of their speech are subjective. It's fine to argue that we should be okay with censoring some thing you don't like. But at least acknowledge that you're not making an appeal to "the principle of freedom of speech" — you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable.
> you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable
By virtue of operating under the principle of respecting free speech you are making a value judgement and asserting a set of values. There is no panacea or pure criteria you can use besides no content moderation at all. I give the example of spam posted by bots as what I think is an obvious and non-controversial example of content that can be removed that doesn't violate the principle of free speech. Another example might be someone who simply replies "f* you" to every comment on a thread.
I don't know how to further explain this or qualify this. I think you just fundamentally don't understand or haven't actually reflected on what I'm saying.
You are correct, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I agree that there is no panacea or set of pure criteria other than not moderating at all. But there is also no singular principle of free speech beyond that, either — just different sets of tradeoffs that try to cultivate discourse that the moderator thinks is valuable. My issue is that people tend to present their own preferred set of tradeoffs as the One True Set that embodies the principle of free speech.
You mentioned “good faith” before, so let’s say that’s our operating principle: all parties must be speaking in good faith. Now consider that Twitter suppresses the New York Post because they believe they’re publishing in bad faith. Twitter is still adhering to our set of free speech tradeoffs. So why is this comment section full of people saying they’re not upholding the spirit of free speech?
It’s because they want Twitter to make a different set of tradeoffs. That’s fine, and I’m happy to have that discussion. But not when it masquerades as a discussion about whether Twitter suppressing this article is somehow incompatible with free speech as a concept.
It really comes down to whether or not you believe in objective morality. If you do then there is a sensical notion of free speech (or any other principle) even if no one person has a complete picture or understanding of what it is right now (although I would argue that we have a much better understanding of free speech than we do 6000 years ago). It is something we can strive for and recognize since it is an objective thing.
To reiterate my example, I would say a reasonable person living in 2020 would say that removing bot spam from a comment section is a content moderation decision that is in keeping with the idea of free speech.
Even if you believe in objective morality, I think my point about how the discussion should go stands.
Let's say that your definition of free speech is the objectively correct one. You then have to convince people to adopt that framework. You can't appeal to the objective definition; that's a circular argument. So you have to do it on the merits of the tradeoffs, like "bot spam is noise that detracts from a conversation".
To your example specifically, my own opinion is that it depends. I'm fine with removing bot spam from a comment section. But move down to more "infrastructural" layers, and I become less okay with it. For example, I don't think ISPs should try to block spam; they should be entirely agnostic to what content passes through their pipes.
