Free speech is a right against being stopped, not a right to be carried on someone else's platform

SDG target 16.10 calls for public access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms, while social media platforms are criticised for “censoring” user content. Does a platform owner deleting a post or suspending an account actually violate freedom of expression?

A step-by-step argument in political and legal philosophy. It separates freedom from power as Rothbard sets it out, alongside Locke's conception of liberty; then separates negative rights (which ask only that others not interfere) from positive rights (which require someone else to act or pay before the right is real), following Berlin; and then ties communication freedom to property rights. No data is collected and no empirical case is examined.

• Freedom is not the same as power. A person is not “unfree” to leap an ocean — they lack the *power* to. Lacking power is not being deprived of a right, and confusing the two is where tangled arguments begin.
• Negative and positive rights ask different things of other people. A negative right asks only that others refrain, so it coerces nobody. A positive right means someone must be compelled to act or to pay before the right exists in practice.
• Free speech is not a free-standing right but an extension of property rights. The question usually skipped is *where* — speech always happens somewhere, either on your own property or on property whose owner has agreed to host you.
• On that framing, a private platform declining to carry content is not censorship but the exercise of property rights. The article draws a sharp line between a private party refusing to carry someone's ideas on its own property and a government forbidding speech on property the speaker legitimately owns.
• The conclusion inverts the common criticism. The author argues that compelling platforms to abandon their content policies would threaten freedom of expression *more* than deleting posts does, because it forces property owners to do what they do not wish to do.

The platform-and-speech argument returns every time a newsworthy post is removed. Whether or not you accept the conclusion, the article supplies a way of splitting the question: before asking “is this censorship?”, ask whose platform it is, and whether the demand is that someone refrain from acting or that someone be compelled to act. Those two questions separate cases that look identical, and they apply to any medium, not only social media.