But that doesn't mean that the problem is the freedom of speech rather than the excuses and bad behavior.

The problem to me seems at least as much with unfreedom as freedom. Algorithms for sharing content have, on purpose, a massive bias in what they distribute. In Facebook's case, for instance, the primary metric of success appears to be to maximize engagement, which apparently means turning everything into a tabloid-or-lower-quality echo chamber. What you put into your own chamber might or might not be free, but it's not really free if everything is stuck in echo chambers.

On Medium, someone can say something bad, I can push back in a comment, and then they can just block me! But not all the people who agree with them.

That's not exactly free speech--indeed, it's exactly the lack of freedom that causes that particular problem.

Simply turning off the ability to block isn't a great solution either, of course, because problems with spam and abuse (not disagreement, just flat-out unpleasantness) are real problems. Nor is turning off content selection entirely, because nobody really wants to read piles of random chaos.

So it's a tricky open issue, but "less free speech" doesn't look like an obvious answer to me.

Finally, I note that a lot of the bad actors who say they support free speech are especially eager to shut down speech they don't like (e.g. book bans). This suggests to me that, whether consciously or unwittingly, their "support" of free speech acts as a stratagem to provoke a backlash against "free speech", at which point they can far more freely do the banning that they are hoping for.

(And yes, I share a lot of Danah Boyd's concerns.)