They are absolutely a thing, and are the current law, but I can and do disagree with them from first principles.

A group of individual persons, associated for a specific purpose, are not equivalent to an individual person in matters of fundamentally-owed rights.

So in your ideal world, all you have to do to avoid "deplatforming" is to find one other person who shares your viewpoint and form a group? Isn't that literally how it already is regardless of your "first principles"? Or am I misunderstanding?

I'm arguing that platforms (aka groups aka corporations) deserve fewer free speech rights than human individuals.

So if I talk to my neighbor and we agree on something and form a group of two, suddenly we deserve less free speech rights because technically that is a platform somehow? I can't understand what you mean here, please clarify.

If you're trying to say businesses should be required to file with the government and get subject to business regulation, they already are?

If you and one neighbor form a group, why should your group-of-two be entitled to any more free speech rights than those the two of you possessed before forming a group, and still individually possess after forming the group?

Groups are entitled to greater-than-zero rights, in order to support their accomplishing their purpose in an efficient manner, but I'm curious why they should be owed person-equivalent rights?

>why should your group-of-two be entitled to any more free speech rights than those the two of you possessed before forming a group, and still individually possess after forming the group?

It's not? If I throw my own party I can decide to uninvite the other bad neighbor down the block who always gets drunk and trashes everything. If I form up with my other neighbor and throw a block party, we can also decide to uninvite that same drunk neighbor. Are you saying that because it's a block party and not my personal birthday party, we should be forced to invite this person and have the party trashed, because uninviting them is a person-equivalent right? Or maybe I'm not allowed to do this at a personal birthday party either, because my wife and brother and I all formed a group to plan it? Please help me understand here, maybe this is a bad analogy.

> Are you saying that because it's a block party and not my personal birthday party, we should be forced to invite this person and have the party trashed, because uninviting them is a person-equivalent right?

To use this analogy, yes.

Or perhaps better, the block party shouldn't automatically have a right to not invite them, because a block party is not a personal party, and the right of the block party to not invite them should be weighed against other rights before being granted.

Because, as you noted, equating block party group rights with your personal rights ultimately leads to "just form a group."

Which, in US law, also clashes with the fact that some core rights we give legal groups (in corporate form) to allow them to operate efficiently are limited liability (with respect to their members as individuals) and limited transparency (with regards to their internal workings and ownership).

So free speech + limited liability + limited transparency = problems.

Doesn't this infringe on my individual right to enforce my own boundaries?

If I dislike someone, and I host an event, it's by definition a "group" thing, there's no real way to distinguish a personal gathering from a group gathering. But under your proposed system, I, an individual, can't exclude any person from a group gathering. Being unable to choose who I associate with is a fundamental infringement on my right of association. If I'm forced to associate with everyone, I'm not free.

Ok, to me what you've proposed just means that nobody in my neighborhood will throw block parties anymore because they don't want to get stuck with the bill when drunk guy breaks a window and urinates on the upholstery.

Edit just to respond to something:

>Because, as you noted, equating block party group rights with your personal rights ultimately leads to "just form a group."

I don't know how you got that, this seems to be very backwards. The group was formed before the rights were even considered.

A group of two is not necessarily entitled to more rights than individuals, but I don’t see why they should entitled to fewer rights. The idea that groups and associations of various forms can have the same rights as individuals has been a legal principle going back to the Middle Ages at least in the west, and even further in some other cultures. I see no good reason to change that.

It seems to me that any scheme for depriving people of the ability to exercise their rights in various contexts, for example because they are trying to do so as part of a specific group, could be subject to serious abuse.

I am a free speech absolutist. I believe anything else would be decadence living in a first world nation. My country still does restrict speech and did so for centuries now, has spawned multiple dictatorships and still believes it to be a working concept. But that is another topic.

Platforms that promote certain content are absolutely free to do so and should not be forced to do anything else. But it should be understood that this is their motivation and their choice. They do not practice freedom of speech or freedom of opinion. They advertise for something and it is not about any intellectual discourse and probably more about advertising.