I think there's a difference between being cancelled and not being "free to speak." When people wail about not being "free to speak" while posting on a public forum, it seems pretty histrionic, if you ask me. Hence:❄️, snark well earned because the non-right-leaning voices on here were routinely called snowflakes for four years.
People get cancelled because they act like assholes in one way or another. (Do we need to define asshole?) That cancelling often has involved being removed from privately-run communications platforms that have their own publicly-available codes of conduct and are, typically, subject to corporate calculations of the profit to be gained from the audience and/or controversy vs. the losses to be sustained both real and to share price. In that world, which is America, these cancellations are often brief, in part because there is always another for-profit platform, people's memories are short, and America loves a comeback story.
Your OP said this, "We are no longer free to suffer the consequences of our spoken word." These cancellations are literally that: sometimes a two week slap on the wrist, sometimes a permanent twitter ban, etc. And while these are consequences, they are still not the equivalent of not being "free to speak." It is not the government making these determinations in most cases. It is corporations and other private interests, who make it their business to gauge public sentiment, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. Yes, there are examples of both protected speech and illegal speech (swastikas on doors, child pornography, death threats) with which the government does concern itself - and I even agree that public health misinformation is a shady, grey area - hell, that's been a profit center in American life since the days of the Confidence Man).
Say Spotify finally makes the calculation that Joe Rogan, for instance, is going to cost them either subscribers or share price.
Do you think they shouldn't be allowed to cut him loose?
Do you think he won't land on his feet somewhere else?
(I have never listened to his show.)
