Free speech and democratic equality go together. Censorship means that there is a select group of powerful people that get to decide what ideas are allowed.
They can go together, but they can also conflict. There's lots of argumentation on how hate speech and pornography can undermine democratic equality for minority groups and women respectively. See the SEP article on freedom of speech[0].
I get what the article is saying, but I feel like they are playing word games. Hate speech laws are not increasing freedom, they are trading off freedom for social cohesion, which all societies do to some extent, just not necessarily with censorship.
