> I still believe in the merits of free speech as regards reasoned good-faith open debate [...] such communication is in fact significantly dangerous.

These two sentences cannot be true at the same time; one is either in favor of free communication or one isn't. There are many ways to name the idea of "I'm okay with speech as long as I deem it to be in good faith/not dangerous", but free speech is not one of them.

It's the entire point: "I might hate what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it."

> If recent events haven't convinced you, I honestly don't know what will.

Why would anything convince me of the idea that something I deem to be the basis of progress in civilization, is actually not so?

To give an example: The church had significant power—even over the state in vast swathes of Europe—in the middle ages, and they were pretty censorious. Yet the renaissance still happened, in no small part thanks to the printing press and the huge boost it gave to the sharing of knowledge.

Interestingly, the reformation also happened around that time, and with it brought quite a few religious wars, with both groups making claims that don't sound all that unlike to "the other side is spreading falsehoods and there's no other way to stop them".

Nowadays, catholics and protestants seem to be mostly okay with each other, and I'm sure today's conflicts will eventually become a thing of the past too. But it will not be thanks to censorship.

> that's without getting into an argument about who gets to judge what is and isn't misinformation.

This is an argument against your point, not in favor of it, I think. Who's the arbiter of what's misinformation? Twitter or any of the other gigantic and "evil"[1] corporations?

> You mean aside from the increasingly violent divisiveness of politics in the past dozen years?

Interesting, many claim that misinformation is at fault of that divide. Just as many instead claim that it's siloing, filter bubbles and echo chambers the real culprit.

> I'm not intending to prove it exhaustively in my post so much as to say that it seems like it might be the case. I welcome evidence to the contrary.

But the burden of proof is on the one who affirms, not on the one who denies. Believing something just because it seems like it might be true and because one hasn't looked for counterevidence can be unfalsifiable. To wit, one might just believe it and that's that.

Which is, of course, one's prerogative. Free speech and all that; everyone is free to believe anything.

> People have many methods to fact check right now.[...] Indeed, the information age has made fact checking more accessible than it has ever been in history

Case in point. There might be many ways to fact check and it might be more accessible, but clearly not enough, for whatever reason. For example, in this case, if it were easier and faster, you could have more readily looked for evidence of your "any society holding free speech as sacrosanct is doomed to collapse" claim, I think.

[1]: Well, they're "evil" as long as the discussion is not about free speech but instead about any of the other unethical things they do. When the subject is censorship, many people are in their favor, it seems.