The creator economy needs to be regulated much better, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are all too powerful and can take away your ability to speak online incredibly easily with almost no due process.
Compare that to the gate-keepers that were before: Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers. Those were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies, as well as mostly only accepting creators from wealthy and well connected families, or people who they could rip-off financially or sexually abuse. And this was when creativity was severely regulated.
So with all their flaws, YouTube and friends are still a million times better than the regulated creator economy of the past. Even though they've done absurd things like co-ordinated banning the president of the United States, and much more.
We’ve been casually throwing around the phrase “free speech” so much that it seems to have lost its meaning. Free speech was never about guaranteeing anyone and everyone a platform and an audience. At least within the context of US law, it’s about expressing ideas without government persecution, with some limits.
It’s an important distinction because now it seems some people are less concerned about the government protecting these rights and more about making sure they can still host videos on Youtube.
No matter what, YouTube and social media enables more people to express themselves to an audience than ever before.
In practice, social media brings free speech to the modern mass society, in a way that was very lacking before.