When that statement gained currency it was about being free to finally be outside of the cage that governments and large organizations made.
Today the old guard have built new tools - mass online commenting - to combat the signal itself.
So while the network may well reroute around censorship - the good censors just use the network to change the signal.
I've been on forums long enough now, and helped moderate enough To know the old naive version of free speech doesn't lead to the exchange of ideas.
It leads to the exhchange of whichever mind virus or meme is most capable of building reactions and structures in brains.
So it's definitely the era of subverting people and mass subversive speech/propaganda.
If I can press the right buttons in a person before you reach them with your facts/truth - what will you do?
That's the question I don't have an answer for just yet.
Now you can get any information if you want it and the problem is that propaganda still exists and some people still believe it.
It's not perfect but it's better.
And with the new tools, in particular the ability to sock puppet and impersonate human behavior in a context poor environment (you can't physical see the person, so can't make out if they are real or not, or body language and other factors we normally have during interaction).
So wouldn't it be fairer to say that they now have stronger control?
If you really want to know what happened at Tiananmen in 1989, you can find a way to "jump the wall" and find out. It's just that most users aren't actively looking for alternatives to the propaganda statements, so their opinion on the state will be formed by enthusiastic reporting on the "belt and road" program or some other party-led initiative.