There's an innate link between free speech and pedophilia, I think, in that kids are pretty much the only group that every major group on earth feels deserves protection in some way. You might not be a racial minority, a woman, gay, or trans, but you were definitely a kid at some point.
So if you're a free speech absolutist, you end up having to face child porn, which is the one thing that basically everyone agrees should be censored. You can say that the government can lock you up for years for trying to communicate this and most people will go "yep, sounds good".
The result is that it becomes kind of a weird litmus test.
For asshole technocrats, they just like talking about free speech because it lets them be abusive dicks, and they have no real desire to defend it when they don't stand to gain for it. Reddit's an example, where they started off giving a plaque to the guy who founded the Jailbait subreddit because their sexualization of underage girls drew in a ton of traffic to their website, but then when there started to be the smell of potential legal risk they buckle and start closing subreddits. So it turns out they're only absolutists while it's convenient for them to be.
On the other hand, you've got the likes of 8chan, who claim free speech absolutism because they're just a bunch of pedophiles, and they don't ever clamp down that hard even when they've got the spotlight on them because pedophilia is the only reason they're there.
I dunno how closely this is related to the thread at hand, but this talk just reminds me.