So then a government telling companies how to moderate their platforms would stifle free speech?

In the same way designating certain market actors (whether they are private or not) as utilities would stifle their free speech. The best examples would be the telcos, water, electricity and post offices. Regardless of criminal past or ideological stance, these entities must serve all members of society, with the only caveat being on the condition of nominal payment.

This is the turning point where as a society, we need to decide where the new line for utilities needs to be, and what parts of the internet and financial systems are fundamental to maintaining the fabric of society.

What ever we decide at this crossroads, may end up haunting us for a very long time.

I don't think companies would save us from a fascist government; if the government falls, everything falls. So, in the meantime, trust the government more than companies (which gives you a higher stake in seeing it and Constitutional protections don't fall) by tax-funding public platforms/news delivery networks that have to abide by the First Amendment. That seems like the only way to cut this knot.

Besides federated dark web anarchy, which is a nice thing to try in parallel.

Can you picture Congress funding any sort of public platform that would be used for porn and spam, and extreme politics of all kinds? That seems very unlikely to ever happen.

>> The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997.[18][19][20][21][22][23] The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson[16] and then called The Onion Routing project (which later simply became "Tor", as an acronym for the former name), launched on 20 September 2002.[1][24] The first public release occurred a year later.[25] In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[16] In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.[26] The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.[27][28][29][30][31] Prior to 2014, the majority of funding sources came from the U.S. government.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)