vitus979 wrote:
But even so, that sort of thing is likely to chill her free speech, which
is significantly harmful to her, imo. ...But it just reinforces an ethos contrary to free speech and an open exchange of ideas in society.
You keep saying that. You seem to have some vision of "free speech" as being like some university debate club ideal where everyone should feel free to voice any opinion free from any consequence other than classily-posed opposing viewpoint.
Yes, in a perfect world the battle between differing ideologies would take place entirely within gentlemanly debate along the lines of the
Letters of the Royal Society. That's often not how speech works in the U.S. We've decided to be allow a much wider range of consequence to speech. That's a freedom. Just about anything is fair game short of things like threats of physical harm, slander/libel, harassment...I'm probably missing a few of the exceptions we've carved out. You could maybe try to argue that something like the social media-born boycott of something like
Jim Beam is civil or criminal harassment. But I think you'd have a really hard time doing that.
We have a lot of freedom. That's the downside to freedom. Our Founding Fathers basically said, "Here's a lot of rope, everyone. A shit-ton of rope. You can use that rope to do great things. Or you can use it to hang yourselves by being toxic social media douchebags."
But starting to reel that rope back in is a really dangerous thing. If you start allowing people to sue each other for a relaxed definition of harassment, or you start allowing the government broad leeway to prosecute harassment, then free speech starts
really being eroded. That's why free speech is usually defined in terms of government involvement. Because we have the freedom to intimidate or even coerce each other short of the "carveouts" I mentioned above. That's life. Democracies with broad civil rights are the worst, except every other alternative.