Actually "wrong speech" could always end careers, there are several examples of public figures in the fifties who had to step down for being insufficiently anti

Actually "wrong speech" could always end careers, there are several examples of public figures in the fifties who had to step down for being insufficiently anti-communist. What is new, is that social media can propel a message from a basically private space to a public one. Twenty years ago the context a message was fairly well known to the sender. Either the sender writes a press release, and can not use irony, or he is talking in private, and irony is acceptable. Since the situation was clear, he could craft the message accordingly. By contrast, today a message can be retweeted and basically dragged from a private into a public space and it looses a lot of context in the process. ( Note that this happens after the sender crafted and send the message. ) The reactions we see today are not really a free speech issue, speech was never free from criticism or consequences, but senders can no longer control the context of their message. The situation is somewhat analogous to joking too loud in a bar, everybody at your table laughs, but the guys at the other table demand a apology. So we do not need free speech protections, we need a way of buying the other guys a beer.