I don’t get it. Is youtube supposed to be a public space now? Last time I checked, Youtube was a private property.
Getting your stuff demonetized (not even removed) from a private hosting site is NOT what coherent people refer to when they talk about censorship in the context of free speech.
Similarly, in Ye Olde paper journals, getting a letter to the editor rejected explicitly for undue and unjust reasons would not be a violation of free speech. Neither would it be today.
A violation of free speech would be if the state, city or other level of government banned a specific journal, a specific journalist, or a general message for undue and unjust reasons, thereby making it impossible for the intended message to reach any audience.
In earlier times, there were lots of different journals (not to be confused with newspapers) covering a variety of topics, and people would write articles and letters to be published in these journals. Most of them were essays and opinion pieces, but they were an important part of the democratic process before the information age came around. Suppressing dissent could have been as easy as shutting down someone’s printing press. But there were tons of different journals and pamphlets going around and being read by tons of different people, making it somewhat harder to censor, as you had to know which journals or pamphlets would publish and spread the unwanted content. Most of the time, when one journal closed, others popped up in its stead. And people who did not find an outlet for their message could, if they could afford the printing press and materials, start their own journal and print their own pamphlets.
Free speech is a concept that applies to the public space. The whole point of private spaces is that their ownership is not universal, so that not everyone can make use of that space as they see fit. Public spaces are owned universally by everyone involved. Hence why censorship is problematic in public spaces, it is robbing a person of their property.
In public spaces, people have a right to express themselves. But people don’t have a right to be listened to, and even less so in the context of someone else’s private space.