Michael Knowle's book: Speechless, controlling words, controlling minds, covers this topic extremely well. Unbridled free speech has never existed and never will. There will always be standards of speech. The question is always: what are those standards and who is in control of them?

For this particular comment thread, the issue people are discussing is a relatively recent and very dramatic shift in power over speech. Today, a handful of high-tech oligarchs are controlling and enforcing standards of speech with far more efficacy than governments. It gets even scarier when you realize that governments know this and are now pressuring these tech companies to do their bidding.