All dictatorships exert control by criminalising free speech.
Diasi makes a good point above.
But I would go further. It is no longer about stopping free speech, it is much more about controlling every aspect of the way people live, believe and think.
Has anyone been following the Bhruhaha from Birminghan Saltley about the teaching of sex education to 4 to 8 year olds. Here are two quite different takes on the subject.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/06/those-birmingham-parents-are-right/https://unherd.com/2019/03/bigotry-dressed-as-victimhood/The second article really gets under my skin, because it assumes state institutions, and the LGBT lobby, know better than parents what is good for them. It follows, the article suggests, if parents don't agree with what is being taught in their children's schools they are implicitly bigots. It in no longer possible for parents to decide the moral codes they want their own children to live by, the state should decide at whatever age the state decides the kind and depth of the sex education they should receive.
The goal of the author, and the state, is to educate children such that they don't take moral guidance from their parents or from any priest the parents trust to instill moral guidance in their children.
The Parents and their preferred Priests are bigots, bigots because they don't want certain messages being absorbed by their children.
I might be quite relaxed about what Parkfield school want to dish out to children in the form of Sex Education, but I'd want know the form of the Sex Education and I'd want the option of saying NO, I don't want my children hearing that.