In one sense, I'd argue that the feeling of censorship is misguided. People are more free to communicate now with a larger audience than ever before in history. Before if you had something controversial to say, unless you were an extremely well-known academic or politician, it didn't get any further than your barstool or bridge club. Now your thoughts can be instantly transmitted to an audience of literally millions. Ideas are being hyper-amplified, not hyper-suppressed.

However, it comes with a catch. In pre-Internet days, when your verbal blurts potentially reached dozens, you felt fairly free and unimpeded to reach the limits of your communication bubble, tiny as it was. Even if you were roundly condemned, the area of effect was likely small and the duration transitory. Now that your verbal blurts can reach millions, so many more people can take issue with your words, and they remain part of your dreaded "permanent record" forever. Consequently the stakes have become much higher. Speech doesn't feel free and unimpeded, even though in practice structural impediments have been greatly reduced.

It seems to me unfortunately that the lowering of structural impediments to communication ineluctably goes hand in hand with the raising of social impediments. People are becoming cautious because we simply can't take for granted that any speech we generate will stay safely within its intended audience. Private emails can be dredged up years later. Screenshots can be taken without our knowledge. Phones can record videos of us saying and doing things we thought were personal and confidential. Information just wanted to be free, and got its wish, but it's turned people into prisoners in a panopticon. My point being, these are two sides of the same coin. Blaming "Marxism" or "cancel culture" and the like isn't going to change that fact.