> Which is protected by constitutional rights in the country Mozilla’s nexus exists in.
Good thing it is not the government telling Mozilla to remove the plugin then, otherwise there might be an actual problem here.
What makes free speech useless is pretending that someone else has a responsibility to promote your message or provide you with access to a printing press. Neither are true. This does not even appear to be the case that Mozilla is preventing anyone from using the plugin, they are just deciding that they aren't going to make any effort to promote it.
I guess it is not too hard to see who the real snowflakes are...
Militant leftists wanting to outlaw certain speech are no different then the alt right. It’s not as if more reason is necessary for regulating tech. You want to be the new commons, you get the responsibility of the commons along with it. Can’t have it both ways.
Note we heavily regulate private companies in many US industries when we deem it necessary.
>Militant leftists wanting to outlaw certain speech
Uhh, Mozilla didn't outlaw anything. Do you want to force Mozilla to put that extension on their site against their free speech rights? The only thing guaranteed by the first amendment is the federal government cannot prevent you from saying what you want. It says nothing about preventing you from using a 3rd party platform. Feel free to get a literal soapbox and preach your truth wherever you want in the real world, no one is stopping you.
It would not be against Mozilla "free speech" rights, it would be against their free association rights.
I want to hold Mozilla up to their public advertisements, and commitments they made to the public at large, these are a contract if you will to the public. Both because of their Tax Exempt status, and a truth in advertising issue.
If mozilla wants to exercise their right to free association as censorship platform, then they need to give up their Tax Exempt status, as well as cease all public advertisement around "Our mission: Keep the internet open and accessible to all.", Clearly this is only true to people that share the ideological worldview as Mozilla. AS such this is a false statement.
There is no such thing as a "contract if you will to the public" nor do any "commitments" that Mozilla has made to the "public at large" (whatever those are supposed to be) constitute a contract in any legally binding sense.
>If mozilla wants to exercise their right to free association as censorship platform, then they need to give up their Tax Exempt status, as well as cease all public advertisement around "Our mission: Keep the internet open and accessible to all."
Losing tax exempt status and being barred from mentioning a mission statement sound like legal, not social consequences. My impression was that the parent believed Mozilla was breaking some actual law regarding truth in advertising or something by claiming their mission was to "keep the internet open and accessible to all" while also curating plugins.
>Which is protected by constitutional rights in the country Mozilla’s nexus exists in.
Your understanding of the first amendment's protections is fundamentally flawed. The first amendment protects individual freedom of speech from prosecution and silencing by the government. It does not preclude private businesses or individuals from choosing to ban or prevent certain thoughts and opinions from a service which they provide. If Mozilla gets enough complaints about the speech that can be found on Dissenter, they have every legal right to choose not to host that app.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of said speech. Dissenter users are perfectly free to find another home on the internet to voice their opinions.
>It’s not necessary for a bloated non profit to remove access to an extension for political reasons (versus technical deficiencies).
Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons, rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigrants, it's another thing to use that same platform to say stuff like, "Fuck those worthless lazy piece of shit beaners coming to this country and stealing white jobs" (not my opinion, btw).
I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned.
>Free speech is useless if you’re not willing to defend that which you find most disagreeable.
I go back to my point above. It's one thing to have a political opinion, it's another thing to be a horrible human being to other people just because you disagree with them. I still think that people should be able to say whatever they want, but if Mozilla doesn't want them to do it on their platform, then the rest of the internet is literally wide open for them to go and find another place to say whatever they want.
If Mozilla is a "bloated non profit" then they have no constitutional obligation to defend Gab's free speech. When you act like tech companies have the obligation to promote free speech you're actually giving them more legitimacy than they deserve because you implicitly accepted the idea that if speech isn't being propagated by them then it's impossible for it to spread.
In a way they do... They are tax exempt which means there is a case to be made as being Tax Exempt comes with Strings
For example we do not allow Churches to comment on politics they have to remain neutral or they lose their tax exemption
The same should apply to Mozilla. They need to be politically neutral, up holding Legal Speech, or they need to shutdown the Mozilla Foundation and become a for profit organization
This is an avenue I had not considering exploring. I will have to research constraints on non profits and when they can be reported to the IRS for possibly violating those constraints and an evaluation can occur to consider revoking their 503c status.
