It does seem to have become a bit of a meme, someone says free speech and a line of replies show up with variations of "That only applies to blah blah".

It would be nice if instead there was a discussion about the intrinsic value of free speech in society, and how the open marketplace of ideas has a pretty impressive track record.

I agree, and you can even disagree in that discussion.

But to not have the discussion in the first place because of this meme of free speech solely being a citizen/government issue and not a concept in itself is a damn shame.

My problem with the discussion of free speech as a societal issue and not a governance one is that free speech will be an effect of a more fundamental shift in society, namely thoughtful consideration of another's talking points.

If you want free speech, you must foster a society in which it can exist without being exploited to coerce masses of people to think in the way you want them to by deceptive means.

So in this way, crying free speech in the streets is useless until people start preventing themselves from falling under the corrosive spells of populists.

You fix deception (edit: originally used 'populism' here in the sense of manipulating the concerns of the average citizen) with more free speech. More and more to shed light on lies before it can become something nasty.

I think you're getting it backwards, you can't reverse engineer a perfect society to cradle free speech, the society advances and becomes less violent through more speech.

Going back to the original point though, I think that it's totally fair to discuss freedom of speech alongside twitter as the company has in the past used it in their PR for positive gain. I actually agree that twitter is private and can enforce or ban what they like. What I don't agree with is thought-terminating cliches like not being able to discuss it because of the narrow view that freedom of speech is solely a citizen/government relationship.

In saying that, thank you for expanding on your thoughts.

There is a certain threshold of gullibility that can swing the society one way or another if you just start encouraging free speech without any tools to interpret and deal with it and its cognitive load. Either you have people eventually start being able to handle intellectually honest discussions, or everyone starts spewing shit and the people just succumb to the most enticing argument they hear and start parrotting it. (The latter is what we are seeing in today's society.)