Maybe freedom of speech went up, vertically, meaning more people can publish than ever before, but it got extremely narrow at the same time. If you publish the wrong thought your life or business can be literally destroyed within a day. (or as long as it takes to fly to Africa)
And let's be clear: nobody gets "literally destroyed", nor even figuratively, for publishing "one wrong thought". Parler had been peddling in low-effort violence-porn for the lowlifes that make up their userbase for what.. two years? That's hundreds of thousands of terrible... "thoughts". And nothing happened, until something happened, which happened to be peoples' deaths and a crisis of democracy.
For comparison: reddit got into hot water at some point, and managed to clean up their act. The porn websites are in a similar process. It's all just actions-have-consequences, really. And the public's ire is actually the more nuanced, soft approach to do it, compared to the blunt tool of criminal law.
Jewish and female authors were absolutely commonplace before the invention of the Internet.
(Switching to "counts" makes it more obvious)
Yeah, no. Any time before the internet, getting any sort of publicity was a thousand times harder with lots of very real gatekeepers.
Include anyone but white/male/hetero/christian/upper-middle-class-or-better people in your consideration, and the idea that freedom of speech went anywhere but up, almost vertically, in the last decade or two is laughable.