As much as the words "freedom of speech" and "first amendment" get thrown around on the Internet, the concept itself never gets talked about. In fact, I can't remember the last time anyone brought up free speech because they actually wanted to talk about free speech -- seems like people bring it up only when they want to scream some shitty thing as loud as they can and don't want anyone to get mad. I'm going to talk mainly about the Confederate Flag debate here, but I'm increasingly worried that this applies to every discussion involving free speech for as long as I've been alive.

On Thursday, TouchArcade broke the story that Apple was banning some (all?) games in their iTunes library that depict the Confederate Flag. Though the story completely forgot to mention the nine deaths that inspired Apple to make this call, it got picked up by Forbes, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, TechForbesnica, Forbes ArsniCrunch, Kotaku, and the general Internet hype machine, and the reaction many people had is that this is censorship and Apple is rewriting history, and also comments like this:

Except that's not what happened at all. TouchArcade and everyone who took their side don't actually care about free speech. And it's surprisingly clear why, if you go through the arguments one by one.