Free speech doesn't just mean the first amendment. The first amendment is a law protecting free speech in the context of government intervention. It protects us from legal recourse for expressing our opinions and ensures that we're not censored in public arenas. Public schools have frequently been the subject of free speech cases.

Why do we do this? Well it's a pretty basic idea that we probably shouldn't be locking people up for what they say, but as you can see our own free speech laws go beyond that. They're geared not only at guaranteeing legal safety to speakers, but at preventing censorship. That would seem to go beyond merely ensuring that people are able to speak without going to jail, there seems to be some other motivation here.

That motivation is the acknowledgement that the free exchange of ideas leads to socially positive outcomes. Issues are raised and discussed even when they might seem heretical or silly to contemporary thinkers. We have educational institutions where we're protected against censorship and the right to protest peacefully in public without molestation.

That's not the only place free speech exists, though. That idea that free exchange is socially positive is carried into other places as well. You might have heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Blue Ribbon Campaign. I don't think it gets as much attention as it once did, but this was a pretty big deal when I first got online in the late 90s. You'd see these little Blue Ribbon banners plastered across half the sites on the internet and 90% of geocities. A lot of what they did was securing legal free speech online, but another part of it was encouraging the culture of free speech.

You can certainly be in favor of legal free speech but not in favor of a culture of free speech, but pretending the later doesn't exist isn't an argument, it's just nonsense.

Personally, I'm not terribly concerned with what people are allowed to say or do on reddit. If anything reddit becoming more restrictive might cause its userbase to fragment, leading to a more decentralized internet (a good thing). I am concerned with professors who are censored with title ix charges for things like not putting trigger warnings in their syllabus. I am concerned with blackballing and anti-competitive business practices (like threatening to pull your product if someone else's is picked up), on any grounds, but especially on ideological grounds. I am concerned when one of the cleanest comedians of our era feels like crowds have gotten too PC. I am concerned when social fear of ideological backlash is to the point that Boston's Museum of Fine Arts shuts down kimono Wednesdays for fear of offending people who apparently have no idea how Japan sees foreigners wearing kimono.

When we're at a point when people are walking around on eggshells and you can lose your job for making a joke about USB dongles to your friend at a tech conference, yeah, I'm a little worried about the cultural climate regarding the idea of free speech. When people are openly mocking the very idea of free speech, that's not a positive trend.