I recently had a conversation with someone about Cloudflare and how the company's CEO claims to be a "free speech absolutist". This should be a major red flag but it isn't, and I'm not sure why not. Elon Musk also claims to be a "free speech absolutist", and look how many detractors and critics are still active on Twitter. Matt Mullenweg also claims this, and look how many transwomen he bullied off Tumblr and how quick he was to silence WordPress Engine when he decided he wanted their money more than their presence. Mark Zuckerberg also claims this, and Facebook is known primarily as a gathering of white evangelicals and MAGA republicans.
The problem lies in the conservative idea of what "Free Speech" means. So many websites and forums allowed the fascist right to gain a foothold by extending "Free Speech" to mean "no speech censored". What ends up happening is fascist brain-rot; to a fascist, any complaint about what they say is tantamount to deplatforming. Thus, anyone who complains about a user named "ihatejews1488" openly displaying Nazi regalia and espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories is attempting to suppress "Free Speech" and is, themselves, censored. This is unavoidable. No matter how much you claim to have an open mind about all viewpoints; if you accept hate speech in any amount, you find it increasingly easier to take complaints as censorship, until you begin spouting hate speech yourself.
The 1st Amendment only protects your free speech from the government. It protects you from being arrested, not from having your post deleted or your account banned from a website.
This is ancient knowledge amongst forum moderators: you cannot allow hate-speech to get a foothold in your community, because, once it does, it will fully take over your community and will become impossible to get rid of. Every billionaire tech CEO considers themselves a "free speech absolutist", and look at their social networks. The internet is full of fascist strongholds because of "free speech absolutism". Just imagine someone declaring himself to be a "microbial absolutist", never washing his hands, never wiping his arse, never showering, and then he dies of dysentery because he wants to give all microbial life the same opportunity.
Some speech has no useful function and must be suppressed. Some speech, if left to its own devices, will suppress all other speech. In other words, free speech absolutism is the first step on the road to fascism.