I think what we saw during the pandemic was chilling. You could not discuss origin theories, you could not talk about Ivermectin, you could not challenge the 6 foot distancing or the surgical mask (lack of) effectiveness. The administration had "embeds" in Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. giving them "suggestions" as to what was questionable. Canada debanked a lot of incidental people in the great trucker protest. Lots of other examples too.
Now, people may agree with the censorship, never the less it is censorship and looking back it was unproductive and now the establishment has lost many regular people who now distrust “the science.”
Then how come I heard about the Ivermectin nonsense, whining about social distancing and masks, and the ridiculous "protest" in Canada? If there was censorship, it wasn't very effective.
Because some of it got through but it's not because they wanted free an open discussion. I don't know if Ivermectin would have helped anyone, but suppressing discussion is not good --especially when the thwarting was at the behest of the government.
The Canadian truckers could be dicks if they wanted to, that's no good reason to de-bank people en-masse.
Suppose the police were targeting red cars and were pulling them over and you have a red car and your retort is, I have a red car and also saw other red cars not getting pulled over, therefore everything is alright.
I heard about all that. I saw it discussed. I saw Qanons push all that obvious rubbish real hard, to the point of dog piling on anyone disagreeing.
Free speech doesn't mean that any obviously false viewpoint is considered as just as valid as the reasonable viewpoints.