But it IS an important point, Pat. The COVID debacle is an example, but the discussion is all about slippery slopes, freedom of speech being one of those slopes.
I have said this many times. I am not a religious person when it comes to miracles and spirits and such. However, the Bible does contain good advice for personal actions, and one gem in particular is found in several places and specific to several contexts... that gem is "moderation." It speaks about moderation in food, in drink, and in behavior to others. Free speech as a matter of principle, needs to be moderated. (In the Biblical context, self-moderated, not in the forum moderation sense!) Excessively biased speech sends us down to a landscape where everyone bickers and disagrees. Which is why I try to be a moderator but since I am human, sometimes I am a bit immoderate in my thinking. Which gives you a hint about where I got my avatar title.
WHO is the arbiter of truth?
Depends. But usually, unless you are given to gross exaggeration, YOU are the arbiter of your view of truth as you have seen, lived, and known it. No one else can speak YOUR truth as well as YOU can. The difficulty, of course, is that you might have been living within a lie. If you learned something from someone and later learned that the person was mistaken, the question would then be whether you can integrate that new knowledge into your view of the truth. Because we ALL see truth from isolated viewpoints. This is why the refugees in Gaza can say things about Israelis with complete conviction that they are speaking truthfully. To someone who sees the issue from the inside, it would be easily possible for their view to be incorrect or incomplete when reviewed by someone from the outside.
This is why free speech is so important. When two people who have lived totally different lives can peacefully compare notes, both parties might learn something they didn't know - which was the original point of free speech under the USA government. Not that ONE person could learn from the speaker's words, but that the speaker might ALSO learn from the responder's words. Your crowd of people in an exchange of ideas would not learn anything new in the aggregate, but the members of the crowd would learn individually. With that new information, they might then make better individual decisions AND better decisions when voting within the group.