It sounds like you're talking about the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects your freedom of speech from the government, yes. Your freedom of speech in private spaces is up for grabs, though, and you have to defend it yourself, which is what the users were doing.
I'm kind of on the fence about this one. You have a classic moral dilemma here: the users' right to free speech vs. the site owners' right to run their site as they see fit. Now, if it were something that was clearly illegal, and it would bring the law down on reddits' heads, then I'd be more sympathetic, but this is much more of a grey area. What reddit's leadership was alleging was that FPH were using the platform to coordinate harassment. FPH denies this.
This would probably be less of an issue if it was a site like Facebook, where users don't expect to have free speech, but reddit has a tradition of allowing anything on their site, as long as it doesn't break the law. This is why users were upset: they felt like they'd been betrayed. I can't really blame them, and it does feel like a bad sign when communities start to get the axe, even when those communities are as odious as FPH.
It sounds like you're talking about the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects your freedom of speech from the government, yes. Your freedom of speech in private spaces is up for grabs, though, and you have to defend it yourself, which is what the users were doing.
I'm kind of on the fence about this one. You have a classic moral dilemma here: the users' right to free speech vs. the site owners' right to run their site as they see fit. Now, if it were something that was clearly illegal, and it would bring the law down on reddits' heads, then I'd be more sympathetic, but this is much more of a grey area. What reddit's leadership was alleging was that FPH were using the platform to coordinate harassment. FPH denies this.
This would probably be less of an issue if it was a site like Facebook, where users don't expect to have free speech, but reddit has a tradition of allowing anything on their site, as long as it doesn't break the law. This is why users were upset: they felt like they'd been betrayed. I can't really blame them, and it does feel like a bad sign when communities start to get the axe, even when those communities are as odious as FPH.