If we enshrine free speech as a social value, we should all be concerned when good-faith political discussions are removed from these platforms, no matter how repugnant we find the actual views expressed. All views must be allowed to compete on the marketplace of ideas. Forcing legitimate policy positions into hushed tones only builds a tension that leads to a violent snap.I feel this paragraph goes to the heart of your argument so I'd like to dissect it a bit.
Enshrining free speech as a social value is essentially arbitrary, and that's fine - because values are what we really care about and choose to establish the rest of our utility criteria.
But having adopted free speech as a value, it does not follow that all speech must then be upheld. It's interesting that you use the phrase 'good-faith political discussions' here, because that has significant ramifications for judging what we find repugnant.
Let's suppose for a moment that I really can't stand people in the XYZ group. Under the doctrine of free speech, I might write all kinds of things to promulgate my opinions, from asserting that the XYZs are boring and stupid, to opining that XYZ people are going to hell, and so on.
But what if I say that XYZ people shouldn't be allowed to post on the internet? Well now I'm not upholding free speech any more, in fact I'd be asserting an intention to deny it to one group of whom I don't approve. Am I really discussing my views in good faith in that case? What if I say they should be killed? OK that doesn't go directly to free speech, but since it's impossible for people express themselves freely if they're not alive I'm certainly limiting their free speech indirectly.
What I'm arguing here is that there's a qualitative difference between my saying 'I think you are bad (in some way) and I dislike you' and calling for people to have their rights curtailed because they occupy a category that I find repugnant. In the first case I'm expressing my emotional hostility, but in the second case I'm making a positive proposal that their freedoms should be reduced relative to mine.
I'm quite opposed to fascism and similar authoritarian ideologies, and lately I keep running into people who raise this free speech argument, and ask if I am not being worse than the fascists myself for arguing that their views should be driven out of mainstream discourse and marginalized or shut down as efficiently as possible.
But to mind mind, people who espouse such authoritarian ideologies are not arguing in good faith. They're not saying things like 'it's so bad that [this group] won't sign onto my ideology, oh well live and let live.' They're saying things like '[this group] is morally/ culturally/ physically deficient and should not be allowed to participate in society, or maybe even in life.'
To put it in a single sentence, I do not feel inclined inclined to defend the liberty interests of those who have expressed an intention to do harm to me - not necessarily me personally, but because of my membership in various social categories of which they disapprove. To use historical examples, it's not like if some Jews went to Nazi rallies thy were welcomed with open arms as converts to some new intellectual current; their Jewishness (or membership in some other 'degenerate' category) made them ineligible to participate in the Nazi project.
I fail to see how you can justify giving free speech protections to those who make no secret of their desire to limit other people's liberties. I don't hate Richard Spencer because he's white, male, and has a particular haircut, I hate the fact that he's actively exhorting people to join him in a project get rid of people who are not white enough.
I'm a-OK with people punching Richard Spencer precisely because he has dedicated himself for the last several years to promoting a narrow and aggressive policy of racial supremacy that includes reducing the liberty of others by killing them or driving them out of their homes. If he were to popup in public tomorrow and announce that he'd renounced fascism and that people should be judged on the quality of their behavior towards others then I would no longer support people punching him as randomly and as often as possible. But while he's advocating systemic violence against others, he is not to my mind arguing in good faith because he is not willing to uphold that free speech principle for everyone else.
The other argument I hear from some people is 'well the solution to hate speech is more speech.' That's bullshit spoken by people who don't actually know what it's like to feel that their safety is at risk. Obviously I don't reach to interfere with someone's free speech every time I hear something I dislike - a person might be crazy or just angry and offensive by announcing the fact of their prejudice or suchlike, and in most cases they're best refuted, mocked, or ignored.
but where someone is knowingly and systematically arguing [out-group] are inherently terrible people - not the same thing as saying that people in [group] have inherently terrible ideas - then I'm not willing to guard a place on the platform for those who are using that position to push others off the platform. I simply do not owe anything to people who are actively promoting harm against others.
I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to invalidate your position so much as to more fully define my own.