That’s what 100% matters.
I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights.
Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product.
Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.
It's like a person smugly telling you their hydrangeas are better watered than yours while you are trying to get them to notice that there is clearly a house fire starting in one of their bedrooms.
What truly matters is which speech ends up being successful and adopted in the broader society. This is why the focus is placed on the availability of platforms rather than the presence of free speech on its own. The argument is never just to let people speak without arrest or restraint, but to let them speak AND give them access to a convenient platform that will help their speech be more successful. The next step is to force platforms to host them and give them an algorithmic pipeline of views.
If freedom of speech is the key ingredient on its own, why is the US on an steeper authoritarian slide compared to the rest of the West despite more robust speech protections? Largely because authoritarian elements there are extremely adept at using speech rules for their own ends, and will then be able to discard most freedoms of any type once they solidify their grip on the institutions.
Does the old laissez-faire approach continue to work when more than half the living population is online?
It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.