> it just shows how hard you can shut someone down by just twitter outrage.

Your analysis is absurd. First, supposing we only care about "free speech" and no other values is absurd from the outset*. It should be obvious that people can't make use of any right to free speech" if they get swatted and killed, so the idea that free speech as a value exists in a moral phantom zone of its own where no other ethical considerations have any weight is pretty much false.

Let's put aside for now the incredibly insincere enforcement of 'free speech' principles that exists in the US, where black community organisers like MLK and Fred Hampton are blackmailed and murdered (respectively) intentionally by top levels law enforcement for their speech, and put aside the historical record that shows how the anti-war movement of the 1970s was suppressed by an intentionally manufactured war on drugs (as admitted to by ringleaders), a war on drugs that is still costing lives 50 years later. Let's put aside the clear legislative efforts to suppress speech (in the forms of suppressing speech of say the BDS movement) that is occurring at the moment. Let's put aside the decades of law enforcement targeting gay and trans people.

Let's pretend, just for now, that we sincerely felt only "free speech" was the only relevant ethical concern. We still have to ask: Whose? Who is speaking, is it more than one party? Who is being protected for their speech? Against who?

I cannot see a planet on which the speech rights of kiwifarms forum members is somehow relevant but the speech of trans people who they target is either not relevant or is 'less' relevant.

If trans people get harassed, stalked and even have the armed apparatus of state sent to have them intimidated into silence or murdered, for the speech of posting what amounts to "I am trans, and I think that's good", then it is incoherent even for 'free speech adovcates' to place the speech of kiwifarms users (up to and including stalking and harassment) as some noble idea worth protecting while the speech rights of trans people to say even benign things like "i exist" *isn't even part of the ethical considerations*.

Basically, there are two ways of approaching 'free speech' issues. For it to be genuine, it cannot be concerned about protecting the speech of one of the groups, and not the other. It cannot be concerned about the speech of one group and think that the speech of a different second group isn't important if that second group gets killed or is forced to move out of the town or nation due to the clear threat to their wellbeing. Anything less than this sincere interest in all parties and a clearheaded interest in how the abstract moral position plays out in practice and our 'free speech advocacy' becomes an insincere figleaf for perpetuating the violence of thugs.

Maybe I'm just pissed off because kiwifarms users have harassed and stalked people I care about for over a decade, chased them into their homes, accosted them at their places of work, for literally nothing except being trans, and then I come to HN and see people willing to dismiss all that, or dismiss the rebuke of the unfathomable damage that has been done by this site as this as "twitter outrage" without so much as acknowledging the extraordinary grounds for that criticism.

* we should pretty surely concede that further considerations like safety, privacy, health, life, the right to the "pursuit of happiness", etc have relevance here