I believe you're misrepresenting the line.
Free speech in the US is about being protected from government-inflicted consequences. I can say "fuck you" all I like, but that's never meant I can say it to my boss and demand a First Amendment right to remain employed.
It's never been an absolute, either. Incitement to riot, fraud, libel, actionable threats; all are speech, but we've long accepted restrictions on it.
It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize that free speech is a universal principle.
The majority of the US is anti-abortion. Would you be fine if they cancelled the other side? Huge swaths are anti-gay. Should coming out mean people are free to cancel you? While the number of churchgoers is around half, the number of Christians in the US is well over 75%. Should claiming to be another religion (or no religion) mean that cancellation is in order?
Once everyone agrees that persecution is acceptable, all that's left is arguing about who to persecute.
The government is by the people and for the people. It reflects the values of the people. You claim that free speech is government only, but why does the government create ideas like hate speech then? Why force private people and businesses to desegregate if your inalienable rights only apply to the government? If rights are inherent in humans, but may be stripped at a whim by the majority, either they aren't actually rights or the pro-cancellation majority are actually despots.
The pro-cancellation argument is all sophistry to gain and increase power.
> Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
I'm not sure when you were talking about; since at least the 1980s the positions have been basically identical—to today, both sides complaining of institutional biases cutting against them (often both accurately, though selectively), both sides claiming support for free speech but disagreeing that what the other side advocated for was genuine freedom. The big change is that the Right recently adopted the phrase “cancel culture” after nearly 4 decades of using “political correctness” in exactly the same arguments.
Sounds more likely that as you’ve gotten older you’ve just gained more sympathy for the right and thus have given more credit to their claims of support for free speech than you used to.
This is an oversimplification to the point of not agreeing with reality in any useful way.
Just a few months ago the party in power was “for free speech” while the party out of power was arguing for “limiting the reach” of certain content.
It might me more true to say that each party wants there to be more speech that it agrees with (i.e. speech that preserves or gives it more power) and less speech that it doesn’t like. There are more strategies than plain old censorship; as we saw recently drowning out the discourse with falsehoods works just as well. Few people care about some abstract ideal of “free speech”.
Why are these portrayed as hypotheticals?
>Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
100 percent. When I was growing up, the Christian Right wanted to pass anti-flag burning amendments, because veterans were offended. Pornography, because children might see it. Bad words. Unpatriotic stuff, defined as socialism or communism, was a few decades before me. Also to protect morality.
Today we ban so-called hate speech and X phobic speech because 'it hurts'. And in the same way, there's a religious zealotry where if you attempt to use reason you'll be psychoanalyzed and motives attributed.
My advice is, don't engage with these people. If someone uses phraseology like words kill, words are violence, silence is violence, there is no such thing as neutrality, megaphone, we need to do better, systemic Xism, and so forth, run, don't walk away. It's a secular religious movement.
My main problem is the secular religious movement of banishing naughty thoughts has taken Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue by storm.
Why should I let you scream "fuck you" over and over again in my coffee shop?
Yeah yeah, maybe social networks are the new town square blah blah. My point is that the line isn't so black and white.