Freedom of speech is being replaced in the discourse by misinformation and disinformation.

Matt Taibbi: "Now, freedom of speech is a beautiful phrase. It's strong, it's optimistic, it has a ring to it, right? But it's being replaced in the discourse by misinformation and disinformation. And these words aren't beautiful at all, but they're full of a small, petty-fogging bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain, the busybody, the prohibitionist, the nosy Parker, the snoop. H.L. Makin defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere is happy.
That streak of our early European settlers survives in us and surfaces periodically through moral panics. 400 years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then it was the devil's music, then it was comic books, then it was booze, then it was communists, and now it's information.
And because freedom of speech is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination, the phrase appears less and less. Speech is mentioned in reputable media really only as a possible vector for the disease of misinformation or disinformation. And for most people, the only thing that will remain of this issue soon is a little flutter of nerves reminding them not to think about it.
That's why it's important to understand the endgame of the censors is not controlling speech. They're already doing that. They're already removing speech. The endgame is getting us to forget that we ever had anything to say and that was the bummer part of the speech.
Just small thinkers' speeches are just the wilderness of threats. The people who look outside the window and they see nothing but ticks and bugs and germs and bats. The people who built this country, whatever else you can say about them, they weren't small thinkers. They were big thinkers. By that I mean not just intellect, but arrogance, gall, brass, audacity. Kurt Vonnegut... That's all right.
Kurt Vonnegut called the founding fathers sea pirates and he wasn't far off. These guys stole a continent from the king of England and got away with it."