You skipped a step, jumping straight to a possible solution. But that may not be the only solution, and even if it were, it shouldn't prevent us from acknowledging the problem.
And it gets blurry when the private parties are ISPs or phone companies.
Edit: Alright, taking the hypothetical that the solution is compelled speech, I'll try to explain how it's less bad. First is that there's a distinction between original speech and conveying the speech of others. E.g. it would be pretty awful if ISPs or phone companies started interfering with what they'll transfer through their networks. I frankly disagree with calling what a telecommunications provider does 'speech' - they're paid to move bits, like a moving service is paid to move furniture. And second, if you don't look at it through such an abstract "free speech vs. compelled speech" lens, but through a pragmatic "who can speak and what can they say" one, you'll see that almost no-one has effective free speech. Online, almost all of the audience is on (a small handful of) private platforms, carried by private ISPs, hosted on private servers. Offline, people spend much of their time in privately-owned spaces, such as airports. If you cut all those away, how much speech does the great 1st Amendment buy you? You can yell on a street corner (not Wall street though - those streets are private!), or in the woods, and send a few paper letters through the government-ran post office. You'll reach maybe a handful of people. Meanwhile speech blessed by the platform owners will reach millions. Difference from complete censorship is negligible. That's why you shouldn't legislate in a vacuum divorced from reality, where only platonic ideals of free or compelled speech exist. You'll choose an ideal free speech law, and the effect will be that a handful of corporations will get to decide what can be said.
The First Amendment doesn't guarantee you an audience. It only guarantees you that the State can't constrain your speech without a damned good reason. It is utterly orthogonal to conduct between private parties, and it's specious as hell to bring it up in that context.
For example, even in the case where it effectively limits your ability to sue people for speech you don't like, the actual constraint is on the ability of the State, in the form of the court system, to be leveraged against an individual's speech, not on your ability to sue.
I know very well the 1st Amendment applies only to the State - my whole series of posts is about the problems that arise due to that. Free speech as a concept is not limited to the 1st Amendment.
Your right to make noise with your pie hole in no way obligates anyone else to listen to, or even hear you, let alone broadcast that noise to a larger audience than you would have had without their help. Full stop.
There is absolutely a legitimate, and very, very important conversation to be had around whether, e.g., online censorship or moderation or "deplatforming", or whatever, might constitute something functionally akin to prior restraint, where the edge cases are in those questions, and what to do about all that.
That said, having those discussions about private behavior using terms that are — and historically have more or less always been — used in the specific context of the State only confuses things.
My point being: if we're going to have that discussion, which we for reals should be doing, let's try to do it in a way that doesn't make it harder to have, let alone have productively.
The attempt to expand the specifically and narrowly constrained notion of "Free Speech" (note the capitalization) to domains other than a constraint upon the State is a specious conflation, and ultimately yields more heat than light.
EDIT: I mean, really, how productively can that conversation be had if it's using terminology that enables randos who don't meaningfully understand this distinction to pile on, all, "But the Twitters violated my 1st Amendmentses!"?
> And it gets blurry when the private parties are ISPs or phone companies.
Not really. That's pretty much exactly what the changes to the verbiage in Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the FCC's 2015 classification of ISPs as Common Carriers were for.
And it gets blurry when the private parties are ISPs or phone companies.
Edit: Alright, taking the hypothetical that the solution is compelled speech, I'll try to explain how it's less bad. First is that there's a distinction between original speech and conveying the speech of others. E.g. it would be pretty awful if ISPs or phone companies started interfering with what they'll transfer through their networks. I frankly disagree with calling what a telecommunications provider does 'speech' - they're paid to move bits, like a moving service is paid to move furniture. And second, if you don't look at it through such an abstract "free speech vs. compelled speech" lens, but through a pragmatic "who can speak and what can they say" one, you'll see that almost no-one has effective free speech. Online, almost all of the audience is on (a small handful of) private platforms, carried by private ISPs, hosted on private servers. Offline, people spend much of their time in privately-owned spaces, such as airports. If you cut all those away, how much speech does the great 1st Amendment buy you? You can yell on a street corner (not Wall street though - those streets are private!), or in the woods, and send a few paper letters through the government-ran post office. You'll reach maybe a handful of people. Meanwhile speech blessed by the platform owners will reach millions. Difference from complete censorship is negligible. That's why you shouldn't legislate in a vacuum divorced from reality, where only platonic ideals of free or compelled speech exist. You'll choose an ideal free speech law, and the effect will be that a handful of corporations will get to decide what can be said.