Capitalism and Freedom

“Recent events, however, have made me more receptive to the Friedman/Hayek position, particularly the regulation of social media platforms.”
Indeed, while you are pointing to Europe I might add similar is seen in the US because of government entanglement due to operating relatively large pension funds. 
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/desantis-threatens-twitter-with-legal-action-in-elon-musk-dispute/
“During a Tuesday news conference, DeSantis said that the state’s lawyers were reviewing options for legal action against Twitter’s Board of Directors, to “hold them accountable for breaching their fiduciary duty.” Florida, through its Retirement System pension fund, is an investor in Twitter.”
Different tactic employed, but similar could be said of dispute with Disney. A prime example, to borrow a phrase from Pierre, of ‘dirigisme begetting dirigisme’ 

I can’t say I’m persuaded by David Rose:

In ways no founding father could possibly have imagined, we have increasingly come to believe that if we deviate from the government’s approved message, bad things will happen to us. 

Seriously? The initial colonies/states often had state religions, and imposed sanctions on nonconformists. In Massachusetts, only Christians were allowed to hold public office, and Catholics were allowed to do so only after renouncing papal authority. From 1777 to 1806, New York State’s constitution banned Catholics from public office. In Maryland, Catholics had full civil rights, but Jews did not. Delaware required an oath affirming belief in the Trinity. Prior to 1776 things were even more dicey, with Congregationalist Massachusetts executing Quakers. The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution wouldn’t take effect until 1791—and even then, it would bind only Congress, not the states.
Moreover, the Founders OWNED SLAVES. The idea that they could not imagine people bearing consequences for deviating from an approved message seems a little precious.

For example, scientific research in academia is heavily funded by grants from the federal government. Long ago serious scientists who wanted to investigate questions about the climate figured out that if they showed any hint of deviating from the company line on climate change, they simply wouldn’t be funded.

The failure to receive discretionary government largesse is now considered a form of oppression?  

All the government has to do to debase our right to free speech is to make it more costly than otherwise….
In the last century government scale, scope, and discretion has risen dramatically, and no one would argue that we are freer now to speak our minds.

Obviously, anything that would make speech more costly than it is today debases speech. Oh, wait: By this argument, the entire history of the United States is a history of debased speech—right up until the moment that the US government invented the internet. Does anyone doubt that the Founders would be scandalized by the vast range of speech found on a random person’s cellphone?
What about government action in specific? The general rule is “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” See Rust v. Sullivan (1991) (Upholding rule prohibiting grantee from counseling or making refers related to abortion); Nat. Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) (Upholding statute directing N.E.A. to make grants “taking into consideration general standards of decency….”). You have no duty to play the government’s tune, but you also have no entitlement to the government’s money. That said, SCOTUS has narrowed this general rule: see Perry v. Sindermann (1972) (Public school cannot refuse to renew non-tenured prof’s contract merely because prof criticized school; moreover, prof entitled to hearing in which to demonstrate that school had de facto tenure system—and if successful, entitled to receive school explanation for refusing to renew his contract); Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International (2013) (A.I.D. exceeded statutory scope and its own discretion when it declared that it would withhold government grants from organizations that refuse to publicly oppose prostitution).
There’s plenty of room to disagree with government policies and SCOTUS’s decisions–but the “deep-state conspiracy” gets old. 

Scott: Great post highlighting this important hypothesis. 
Hayek’s argument, however, is more nuanced. While Friedman’s argument was between economic freedom and political freedom (tested by Lawson and Clark: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268110000430), Hayek’s argument was capitalism, as defined as private ownership of the means of production and political freedom (tested by Benzecry, Reinarts, and myself and now forthcoming in Public Choice: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4318664).With coauthors, I’m also doing a deep dive into the history of economic thought of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4892215#). For instance, one of the interesting findings is that the socialists Hayek was engaging also expressed a deep concern about the relationship between socialism and tyranny (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4767976). 
Best, Dan Smith (MTSU)

All the government has to do to debase our right to free speech is to make it more costly than otherwise.

Ha! Like the cost of spewing ideas across the world via social media is *so high* today compared to all history! All the ‘rationally ignorant’ of the entire world now for the first time can be reached directly by everyone for free! Thus the flood tide of scammers on every subject: investments, health, romance, politics … Joe Rogan just got himself $250 million by bringing to the rationally ignorant masses the leading proponents of Space Aliens among us, Ancient World-Wide Civilizations unknown to archeologists, Vaccinations Causing Autism (proponents profiting correspondingly) … and Joe’s at the exceedingly reasonable and respectable end. But wait, there’s more!…
 
Wikipedia’s founder and head, Jimmy Wales, was accused of being a child molester, anonymously and repeatedly, online. He has direct access to the heads of Twitter, etc., and asked that the posts be taken down. They told him “Nope, free speech!”. (He eventually got some taken down for ‘spamming’, there were so many. Not for the horrendous libel.) If a Lord of New Media like him can’t protect himself from horrible anonymous slurs, think of all the high school kids, and everyone else.
       The forms or free speech known as willful lying, fraud, slander and libel, used to come with extra costs attached ranging from lawsuits for fraud, libel and misrepresentation, to shame-and-embarrassment when caught and exposed. But no more! Especially all these worst kinds of free speech are today much freer than ever.
 
Maybe these kinds of free speech should be more costly — like they always were. Which gets us to politics, which is crammed to the gills with all the worst kinds of online free speech — and I suspect to Mr. Rose’s real point.
      How to rightfully increase the cost of toxic, deceitful, lying, idiotic political free speech? Use your own free speech to objectively point out the absurd falsities in it. But there is blow-back for this. Take the Right-political side. Righties who actually believed the lie that “public figures who posed being vaccinated actually faked it with retractable needles”, and much worse, don’t like being exposed as idiots by media researchers. And the politicians who collected their votes like it even less. How to strike back?
 
Well, researchers are affiliated with universities  … and universities get government money … and “the government works quietly behind the scenes like a mob boss”. Ergo, the researcher are soldiers of the mob sent to murder free speech using government power. Using this logic, Mr Rose’s allies are bringing lawsuits alleging illegal censorship and suppression of wonton idiocies.       E.g.: Gateway Pundit is suing Stanford, University of Washington and others to stop “the largest mass surveillance and mass censorship program in American history”. Cough. (Watch out, Prof Sumner, criticize someone who says Covid was a weaponized virus funded with money from the USA sent by Fauci, and you may get added as a defendant.)
 
Of course, the researchers don’t censor or suppress anything. They just report what is said. But the most ardent defenders of free speech know nothing says “I support free speech!” like suing to silence those who report what you say.
 
BTW, an interesting chart of 170 years of American sentiment.  (via Tyler)
“We really are living in an era of negativity-poisoned discourse that is (*empirically*) historically unique.”