If we want to fight for a change to the various laws in various countries, then that is a conversation I would be very willing to have. But let's not pretend that any of these companies have ever offered their services as a place where you can exercise whatever version of free-speech laws your country has.
Interestingly the places that tout "free speech" as a feature tend to descend into pretty grim places full of racism, anti-semitism, conspiracy theories and more besides (hello, 8chan/kun!).
Slinging insults, hate, disinformation, or just posting plain nonsense is easy. Explaining how things work properly takes a lot of effort and is hard. Eg, saying "The moon landings were a hoax" is easy. Explaining why that makes no sense, and how exactly humans did land on the Moon takes a good amount longer.
There's also that the valuable, accomplished people in a community are a scarce resource. What would you prefer the resident rocket scientist to do, provide useful information for the community on something new going on, or try to reason with the newly arrived conspiracy theorist?
1. Tout free speech to great success and become a dominant platform
2. Get advertiser and political blowback
3. Ban unpopular speech
4. Now "free speech" platforms only have unpopular content
As a tangent, pre 2010, the best argument I had with conspiracy nuts was "if all this shit you're saying is true, then why is the government / corporations not trying to silence you, like you say they are doing to all the people involved." Can't use that anymore.
Unfortunately I think this strategy is doomed, it relies on people who have rejected reality to use basic common sense. I don't even know if there is a good strategy to calm a conspiracy nut, thankfully I don't really talk to such people.
Freedom of speech
You do not have a right of free speech on Google's platforms.
But nonetheless in this case it seems they removed someone who _didn't_ violate TOS, which bodes rather badly for the all of us because it means we are subject to the whims of whoever possesses the banhammer at any given time.
And with that I'm out. I cannot deal with this thread any more.
The way you break a network effect is adversarial interoperability. You build a new (ideally open) network by bootstrapping from the old one. But companies use the DMCA and CFAA and other laws to stop competitors from doing that, so it doesn't happen.