Every. Single. Time.

Every time someone mentions that what they are doing is protected free speech, there is someone on HN that feels necessary to make "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" as an argument.

Sure, at it's most simplistic this is true. However, if exercising a right results in you being homeless when your behavior was legal, and protected as a matter of course by the law, then there is something wrong.

What you are missing, and what everyone who makes this argument is missing, is that Freedom of Speech isn't /just/ a law, it's also a social more, and that social more has shifted, which means speech is now a universally dangerous behavior, regardless of whether or not you will be prosecuted. This isn't just a collective decision of society, it's a consequence of our more interconnected world, the concentration of wealth and power, and how that wealth and power unequally is applied to people based on whether or not they're liked by the wealthy and powerful.

Multi-national corporations, that literally hold charters to sit on the boards of central banks, that are deeply interconnected with the US government, while actively extra-governmentally, do not get to go "muh consequences" when they penalize citizens in life-altering ways for doing legal activities. Banking isn't exactly a right, but you should not be stripped of your ability to bank for doing completely legal things. Being forced to be unbanked, being unable to take payment for your work, and/or being fired from your job are not "muh consequences", they are an attempt by the wealthy and the powerful to utterly suppress speech they don't like, and to oppress the people, the individuals, who dare to utter, write, or share things they disapprove of. In many ways, these are more material than government action.

Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities. When making this argument you always envision somebody on Twitter you enjoyed being part of the mob to pillory, but those aren't the people who suffer "muh consequences" the most, it's always people at the margins. It's the lady who is forcibly unbanked because she became an online sex worker to pay for her insulin. It's the guy who turned his life around in the legal weed industry, but has to deal with cash accounting and risk of robbery, and is unable to access retirement services, because he's forcibly unbanked. It's the person who runs the local community center but had felonies, and has unsavory prison tattoos they keep covered up, that's forcibly unbanked. Your "muh consequences" destroy people's lives, people who are just trying to survive, and doing so by participating in legal activities in their own communities, and by saying, writing, and sharing things which are legally protected.

You can always justify "muh consequences" when you create a boogeyman to target it at, but the reality is that free speech that is not free from life-altering consequences meted out by global institutions with near unlimited power /isn't free/. Freedom of association for businesses stops when the business is nearly more powerful (or maybe actually is more powerful) than the government. It's still oppression and it's still immoral, even if it's not the government doing it.