But this argument works identically with freedom of movement, access to health, ...
For example, it is the people in power how decide and enforce border control and restricted area delimitation. And it is people in power who decide how the healthcare system works.
This argument is basically a slippery slope fallacy: freedom of speech should be absolute, because I can imagine some restrictions being used for bad it means there should be no restriction at all.
I perfectly understand why 0 freedom of speech at all is bad. My question is why people are framing the situation as "it's 100% or 0%" and why they are doing that only with the freedom of speech and not all the other rights.
I don't know, but one explanation can be that with an unrestricted freedom of speech, they can profit of not having to assume the responsibility for their acts while they will themselves not have much damage done to them. It is not the case for the other rights: usually, saying that I want 0 or 100% freedom of movement means that I either can't move myself or either have to accept a migration that I don't like. But if I use freedom of speech to create a dangerous climate upon some minority groups I don't like, I have interest of defending the 100% freedom of speech: they can themselves use the freedom of speech to say whatever they want, it will not convince the majority, because they are in minority.
> It allows people to change each other’s minds in both directions based on who has the most persuasive argument rather than who has the biggest stick.
One remark on that: "the most persuasive argument" can be as bad as "the biggest stick". Between "it's easy, it's all due to this ethnic minority" and "it's complicated, we have to accept we have some part of responsibility in this situation, yet it does not mean the other camp is all innocent, but it does not mean the other camp is intrinsically guilty, ...", the first one is more persuasive, but it is very unjust, and it is as bad as being slave to the biggest stick. The only difference is that with the biggest stick, the common guy is the victim, with this example of derive of the most persuasive argument, the common guy not the victim. But an unjust situation does not become magically just because the victim is not you.