>One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the ability to go places where they can ignore the people they've chosen to ignore is an important part of why free speech works at all.
That's not how it works. The "public square" is supposed to be open to all opinions. If you want protection, you have to retreat into the cloister of a private establishment that disallows this. In the past, it was not possible to bypass the public square, and thus to avoid exposure to the sentiment of anyone who cared to stand there and hand out his papers or cry his opinion. This was a necessary part of travel between private establishments that used their limited property rights over a small piece of land to exclude such stumping within that small parcel only.
The internet is blurring the lines of the public square. We no longer need to traverse the public streets where all views are free to be expressed; via the internet, people are instantly teleported from cloistered space A to cloistered space B. People are starting to feel it is their right to go about their businesses without being exposed to things they dislike, which, whether they realize it or not, is a very worrisome disavowal of the principles undergirding our freedoms. The effect of this on discourse, democracy, and all of our freedoms should not be understated.
Ironically, rather than unifying mankind and increasing sympathy and understanding, we are using network technology to maximize comfort by crafting artificial "safe spaces" where patrons never even have to be exposed to thoughts they dislike. That's bad.
The divide has never been more palpable than during the last election cycle. Nearly half the country was so misinformed that they didn't even believe the outcome was possible, and hostility and misunderstanding are reaching frightening heights, in some cases escalating into violence (post-election rioting, Berkeley).
Whatever is creating those circumstances needs to be fixed, and my belief is that a generation that is used to muting and blocking anything they dislike and spending most of their time in hyper-sanitized environments safe for corporate sponsorship and being coddled in public spaces to minimize corporate liability is no small part in this.