In a nutshell, free speech means you have the right to say something without the government taking action against you for saying it (its a little more complicated than that, but lets leave the discussion of the meaning of this phrase for now, because I think you're interested in discussing a related, but different topic).
The topic you're discussing is one of "public forums". The idea of a public forum is a place that is created as an easy way for people to share ideas with the public (public here means an unspecified group of people, where anyone can decide to be part of that group if they want by going to the forum).
In their most original forum of an outdoor physical space, public forums needed very little maintenance, and hence were subject to little control by any private party (in fact, most public forums typically originated as a service provided by government).
Nowadays, the public forums with the ability to reach very large numbers of people are all online. These public forums are more costly to maintain than an open space of ground, so they are generally run by either for-profit or not-for-profit organizations.
Some public forums are operated to share particular forms of information, others are "general" in nature. For topic forums, off-topic information is often censored (on Hive, this censorship is done via communities). The idea is that people who "read/attend" a particular community forum have chosen to go to that particular forum because they want to hear that type of information and not others.
Next, let's define censorship: the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive" is the generally accepted definition I found, but I actually view censorship as having a broader definition. To me, censorship is not just suppression of ideas that are offensive: I think preventing someone from sharing any idea is censorship. This means that I also consider various IP rules like copyright to also be a form of censorship.
For the most part, I am strongly opposed to censorship as it is a dangerous limit on free thought and the evolution of civilization itself. But information is power, and under certain circumstances I would support censorship. The most obvious case I can think of immediately would be censorship of sensitive military information that if shared with an enemy would result in military losses.
For direct benefit, for support of internal beliefs, and because of government pressure, organizations will almost always exert some level of censorship over the forum they control. Generally speaking, I think too much censorship is applied by most such organizations.
Additionally, governments do often exert a lot of indirect control over the organizations that run these public forums, most notably in China, where there are ongoing active censorship attempts by the government of any public forum that operates in China. But almost all countries define some content as illegal content that should be censored and organizations that run public forums are often under pressure to censor such content.
With that as background, let's look at Hive: I'll finish this later, I have to go to lunch now...
Bon appetit and thanks for taking the time.