The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.

And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.

Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.

Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.

This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!

As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!

Assuming the factual premises of what you're saying are true, the problem with the lab-leak thing was that it was bandied about by Trump and his supporters as some kind of excuse for his poor handling of the pandemic (which began before the pandemic even started via his dismantling of certain government functions meant to deal with such outbreaks). They also were people who wanted to downplay the severity of the disease overall, act like everything could continue as normal (for largely selfish reasons), etc.

Don't get me wrong--I think the initial response to Covid was probably overzealous, and it has lasted way too long (once we had vax, everyone should have been done with it).

My point is simply that they wielded the info/idea in an ideological way, and this led to it being dismissed, whereas if the idea was discussed and established among experts first, it would have been taken more seriously. In other words, bare, unregulated, irresponsible free speech did harm in advancing this idea.

You are clearly differentiating between Trump's experts and current experts. You either believe in the infallibility of experts or you don't. There can't be "poor handling of the pandemic" unless you are willing to contradict the infallibility of experts.

Fields of expertise have their own internal ways of determining authority; the Trump side of things has tended on the whole to not go with the most authoritative of thought-out views of things.

The only way it works is if people have some skin in the game.

To go the "free speech" route everyone should have to use their real identity. I realise this excludes people under repressive governments where free speech has really been lost, and you can be thrown in jail or worse for a seemingly mundane opinion.

But for those living in a democracy make them use their real identity. Otherwise everyone is just trolling with zero consequences.

Yes. Just like an absolutely free market promotes warlords and cartels.

Someone will ALWAYS try to game the system.

What if the loudest and nastiest voices are the only ones speaking the truth?

That would be great but it's a hypothetical.

How would you prove that's happening?

That's the point - you can't tell.

They aren't.

Atheism is probably considered very nasty in Saudi Arabia. Support for LGBT rights as well. Depicting Mohammad in a cartoon too.

If anything, with a majority of the world population living in illiberal or semi-liberal regimes, we need free speech absolutism more than before.

That doesn’t follow. In an illiberal country they’ll just ban any large platform that allows anything. How would free speech absolutism on a platform or in some other country have any impact on a state like that?

Banning a platform outright isn't as easy. Some countries like Russia are absolutely willing to do that, but a lot of smaller illiberal countries still need to curry favours with their own population and banning a popular platform will cause some unrest.

For example, Turkey banned and unbanned Facebook several times.