I'd argue the whole freedom of speech idea is basically just propaganda designed to portray the liberal democracy as being more enlightened than other types of societies, which is then used to justify western hostility to other human civilizations.

Every society, without exception, puts some limits on freedom of expression. There is zero reason to believe that the west got the balance right while everybody else has got it wrong. And seeing how western society is now losing all social cohesion by becoming atomized into competing thought bubbles, I'd argue there's plenty of reason to think the west got it wrong.

A society needs to have to have a common world view to be functional. That world view can evolve over time, but at least some core principles need to be generally accepted. For example, people have to have a common agreement of how politics and economics function in their society. Without that, any sort of progress becomes difficult because everybody pulls in a different direction. We see this happen in western parliamentary democracies all the time. You get one party in power and it tries to pass one set of policies, then another party comes in and starts reverting those policies. So, any projects have a very short horizon of just a few years that a particular party can stay in power. However, even here the parties cannot deviate too far from the agreed upon model. A party has to subscribe to liberalism and capitalism to even get into power. Parties with different ideologies are inherently shut out from the whole process.

A second aspect of this is that the type of free speech championed in the west is superficial because it generally does not translate into any material action. People have the right to scream into the void. As soon as criticism starts to translate into any sort of organized movement then the state takes action to suppress it. And this is often done with brutal violence. The murder of Fred Hampton being a perfect example.

Finally, we are now seeing the whole narrative collapsing even in the west as countries rush to limit expression online, pass age verification laws, ban foreign media, and so on. All this illustrates that a high degree freedom of expression was only really possible because the material conditions facilitated general consensus that the system was working in the interest of the public. When most people have their needs met, and the standard of living is higher than in other regions of the world, then you don't need to actively suppress dissent. Now that the material conditions are changing, we're seeing attacks on freedom of expression.