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Everywhere I go, I feel like I have free speech by default. I suppose it's my privilege that I feel like that, but I digress. When free speech is explicitly advertised, it smells.

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Yes, this, exactly. It's sad that "free speech" currently feels like a dog whistle for the alt right, but it's disingenuous to ignore the reality that social media sites and forums that have sprung up in the last few years explicitly advertising this have very much been going after an explicitly far right audience. The explicit promise is "we won't suppress your speech like those other platforms do," but Twitter, Facebook, et. al., demonstrably suppress very little speech: there are high-profile cases of people who have been kicked off after repeated warnings, but that's not actually the same claim. The real promise of Parler and friends is "you'll be surrounded by people who agree with you, unlike those other platforms."

(There are lots of anecdotes of individual users who get temporary bans on Twitter for political speech, but I have heard those anecdotes across the political spectrum. I suspect conservatives grumpy at Twitter would be very surprised how much left-wing discourse there is about how Twitter protects TERFs, how they pay lip service to banning Nazis but don't really do it, how Jack Dorsey is probably a crypto-fascist, and so on. The parallel -- "I know of people who agree with me who have been moderated and people who disagree with me who have not, ergo Twitter is obviously biased in favor of The Other Side" -- is kind of fascinating.)

I agree the “free speech” label has been taken over by these content-outcasts and turned into a dog whistle. Today, if a platform markets itself as “The Free Speech version of X” it seems to always mean “The platform that hosts only content so bad it’s banned from X”.

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