“I miss having freedom of speech.”

“I miss having freedom of speech.”  That's Scott Adams, who is censoring his own blog posts from fear of online reprisals from (generally left-leaning) web sites.  He's vulnerable to this because he's a celebrity; he has good reason to fear economic damage from them (by, for example, managing to get his cartoons dropped from newspapers).  He doesn't propose any particular solution, but rather is simply telling his readers what he's doing, while bemoaning the fact that he feels compelled to do it.

It's a classic free speech issue: our Constitution allows us to speak freely, but there is no guarantee that we can do so without negative consequences.  I'm glad to see that Scott didn't propose curtailing the free speech of others to allow his own free speech to be free of consequences – that's the traditional stance of the left, with their attraction toward laws preventing offensive speech.  Scott implies (though he doesn't directly say it) that he'd like to have a way to sue the trolls who actually lie about him (libel).  That's an especially challenging thing in the anonymous world of the Internet, where it may not be possible to know who is saying something – though this sort of thing isn't actually new to the Internet; newspapers have published anonymous letters to the editor for centuries.

I've never heard a good solution for this problem.  Every solution I've ever heard proposed is fraught with either free speech issues or legal morass issues...