Well a real free speech platform should apply strict automatic moderating rules to political threads and basically tease out the best arguments from all sides,
Patterns of negative conversation defined by fewer quality reply posts get negative points and vice versa for positive or patterns to be encouraged.
As things evolve and how people respond changes these patterns can change.
With free speech, as defined now, low quality arguments hit the same bar as high quality ones.
Yes we should strive to emphasise high quality arguments (even though I fear this is a near impossible task programmatically) but this is not what free speech means.
Tldr: according to free speech the dummies and assholes deserve to be heard.
That we're even having such a high-quality discussion now really speaks volumes to the seemingly effortless way in which the HN team has developed into a great place to have such a conversation or debate. To be honest, I do not think that HN is always fair to everyone, but it does seem like the moderators do try to be.
With that said: Twitter and FB have wildly missed the mark.
Technological discussions mostly stay high quality but any politics(-adjacent) topic turns into an obvious struggle of moderation and quality.
The same goes for Twitter but the balance of topics is heavily skewed towards the latter.
That being said, I do agree with GP on this point:
> To be honest, I do not think that HN is always fair to everyone, but it does seem like the moderators do try to be