> Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago.
I'd say what changed is that a lot of people started realizing the power of speech is asymmetric. It's far easier to spout bullshit than to disprove it, so debunking only works if there's very few people spouting bullshit.
And the internet made this a lot worse, because one person can invest a trivial amount of time in spreading misinformation and never caring about anything afterwards, while anybody trying to counteract it must invest enormous amounts of time to do so effectively.
> You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it.
Well, I think that's one of the big ones. Almost everyone already recognizes that speech must have limits to it (eg, defamation, inciting panic). Therefore saying it's an "unalloyed good" is nothing more than a nice sounding fiction.
This is not like say, being against killing people because we can actually have a society where legitimately nobody has to die for any reason. We can just put them in prison forever instead.
Free speech I suspect is a value most people hold as a means to an end. Meaning you hold it not because free speech itself is desirable, but because we believe that it has desirable outcomes. This makes it easy to reject if we ever end up living in a world at odds with what we like.
Do a mental experiment, imagine living in a place where every time somebody opens their mouth it raises your blood pressure. Whether because of politics, or threats to your life/your loved ones, any reason you like. How long would it remain being an "unalloyed good" in your eyes?