> the fundamental reasoning is to allow the people to have varied political opinions or to disseminate them.
Not quite, the fundamental reason is that a government of the people requires the people engage in civic dialog. It would be logically contradictory to try to set up a nation governed by the people in which they can't speak about the issues facing that nation.
(There are also the artistic and commercial aspects of free speech, but there's a similar hypothetical imperative underlying them as well.)
> This does not cover private companies nor commercial activities.
That's not entirely true. If a private company gets special exemptions from the government, as in the exemptions from liability that a platform enjoys, it can be required to allow speech, or lose those exemptions.
> YouTube already prohibits certain content on their platform, and limits ability to profit from certain content.
They're exercising another right companies have: the right to enter into agreements, which then must bind those company to those agreements.
Companies also have the right, under 1A, to market their services, and if they falsely market their services, they may be liable for fraud.
Broadly, Youtube can't set up terms of service that promise to uphold free speech and then turn around and say, "LOLJK, we're banning flattards."
> Furthermore, please consider that there is no absolute right to say anything you want, it has always been a balance.
No, there's not a balance, at least in the moral sense it's black and white. Speech works like every other right: your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. And it has to work like that; you can't have the right to suppress another person's rights because then rights would be pointless.
The government has a balance to consider, but that's because justice is a blunt instrument.
In the case of speech, the government makes it unlawful to commit fraud, defamation, and conspiracy as those all cause immediate, demonstrable harm. They are well defined in case law and have clear penalties associated with them.
But there's a lot more speech that is morally wrong. You don't have the moral right to shout someone down, nor do you have the right to cause someone pain by deliberately saying hurtful things to them.
We typically don't make those things illegal because they're generally better resolved by softer mechanisms like social opprobrium, and they're difficult to write clear laws on and to try in court. In particular, the government should avoid laws that can be gamed and weaponized.