With respect to the current US political situation, a good deal of it can be traced back to the last major upheavals of the late 1960's to early 1970's. The preordained approach to and discourse around economics, race/ethnicity, and feminism(and likewise many sacred cows of the computing culture) all have some birthing around these dates, and their post-hoc developments have tended towards intensification rather than realignment, a thing which has become more jarring and explosive over time and is likely to precipitate our next political era(or perhaps the current one depending on how you see it).

And this goes for how we talk about and express "free speech" as well, since the era prior had just seen the Red Scare, various forms of media censorship, military drafts, and a "government man" approach to solving all sorts of problems. Everything moved in the direction of libertarian, market-driven ideology, and Facebook is an ultimate result of that.

My suspicion is that the "compete with China" narrative is actually the most powerful thing shaping this discourse. The authoritarian end of US politics will seize upon it as a way to take power, but will always suffer the handicap of their solutions being "too much like China". When combined with the free speech principle it animates arguments for allowing free speech on Facebook and throughout the Internet, while simultaneously also fueling arguments for breaking up the company and decentralizing its functionality in the "users have a right to privacy and should own their data" sense. In that sense it's like the motives that produced the Apollo missions, and a politican who approached it that way, as a "defense of our digital property rights requires the investment of our brightest minds" kind of issue would probably be very successful.