Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

Between this and the UK Online Safety Bill, how are people meant to keep track?

Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.

I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?

Any physical business has to deal with 100s of regulations too, it just means the same culture of making it extremely difficult and expensive to do anything at all is now coming to the online world as well, bit by bit.

Websites aren't necessarily businesses; they're speech.

A blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech. That said, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this law.

Speech isn't just shouting into the void; it's dialogue back and forth between two or more different people. Social media sites such as Hacker News and the WELL facilitate this, even when they aren't businesses, in much the same way as a dinner party or a church picnic does.

Sure, speech happens on and is facilitated by social media sites, but that doesn't imply that operating a social media site is a form of speech any more than operating a notebook factory is.

If having a dinner party at your house gets you busted by the police, you are not living in a liberal society. If notebook factories are under tight surveillance to ensure that their notebooks are serialized and tracked because bad people might use them to plot crimes, you are not living in a liberal society.

I agree, there are better grounds to oppose such measures than "this violates the notebook factory owner's freedom of speech" though.

No, it violates the potential notebook buyers' freedom of speech. The factory owner's freedoms don't come into it.

Sounds like we are in agreement then, the root of this was

>A blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech.

I agree in that narrow sense—but shutting down social media sites denies the sites' users their human right of expression, as well as other basic human rights*. The fact that the site operator doesn't necessarily suffer this harm† seems like an irrelevant distraction, and I have no idea why you brought it up, or why you keep repeating it, if you agree that the site users are being illegitimately harmed.

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* See UDHR articles 12, 18, 19, and 20. This is not an issue limited to the provincial laws of one small country.

† Unless the site operators also use of the site, in which case they too do suffer it; this is in my experience virtually always the case with the noncommercial sites that it is most important to protect.

I don't follow.

If social media sites are shut down but I am free to post my opinions on my personal blog site, how is my freedom of speech affected?

Did I not have freedom of speech before social media existed?

Is there an implication in freedom of speech that any speech facilitating service that can be offered must be allowed to operate? That's at least not obvious to me.

I echo what others said: There are good reasons to oppose all this, but blanket cries of "free speech" without any substance don't exactly help.