No, you were free to speak whatever you wanted and always could do in history within certain societal norms and community.

Today you have to adopt some other contrary narrative. It is the absolute worst it has been in decades and centuries. Where it manipulates literally everything, searches, and opinions to exploit its control, often by bombarding opposing advertising. Opposing, you will comply. As it seeks to dominate what is said, and advertised importantly, because you have inadvertently broadcast when using a medium and means that supposedly granted you freedom to connect and express, but all it did was enforce control over you. The day the music died. They policed the airways, no more pirate radio, replacing the bard and the minstrel with a mime artist, and all they do is repeat an advert singing for a label. Meanwhile they sooner banned speaker's corner. Until it doesn't matter if you sought to learn, by getting it wrong, made a common mistake on some irrelevant fact, or simply expressed your own opinions and speech. You're questioning an inhumane platform and it has locked you into a construct that it controls for those that it profits. Literally employing bots to project the narrative. Until it is so invasive it polices your thoughts and opinions up to the point it can prevent you speaking entirely. You might as well have had your tongue removed and be sent to a leper colony, or imprisoned for speaking. Never before in modern history at all, in nations with free speech. It is so machiavellian it sooner wants to jerryrig hooking your very brain into it. What has been even more machiavellian, it is sooner stopping all other thoughts, people are getting dumber, talk to them, they simply repeat advertising or another opinion without question, despite of all the presumed access, where autism and every other neurological disease is at critical mass. Because the only innovation has been control putting everything into it.