There probably exists not a single country in the entire world that is totally free in the sense that its population is allowed to freely express their views, unpopular or not, inconvenient or not, whenever and wherever that they so desire, without any sort of penalty whatsoever for expressing such; though countries such as the United States appear to ostensibly offer exactly that freedom in its Constitutional statue but in effect, history has demonstrated, again and again, that the freedom to express oneself in the most momentous and trying times of America's existence, that the press and the freedom of speech of organizations and individuals is almost always stymied, compromised, or eliminated.
For instance, the socialist Eugene Debs was arrested and convicted for essentially protesting against America's involvement in World War I, of which the National Government successfully argued that Debs was committing treason by his opposition to the drafting of American citizens into their mandated military service. Again and again, through court decisions, laws, arrests, incarceration, intimidation, and violence, the United States government and its equivalencies on local and State levels, has trampled upon the rights of American citizens to voice their Constitutional right to freedom of speech, of which, there is always given a somewhat convincing prevailing reason, that typically rests upon national or local interests and national or local security, that mandates that such freedom needs to bow to our governmental overseers.
In point of fact, the most important time that the right of freedom of speech rests upon, is those times of war or rumors of war, or civil rights abuses, or religious bigotry, or any of the myriad gross injustices that affects a community and a country, of which, if the people are not permitted to voice their viewpoint at those critical junctures, than that community and therefore that people don't have any real freedom of voice, but have only a pale shadow of what that freedom so represents.
Real freedom is uncomfortable for any government, because most governments though they talk about representing the people, and being of the people and for the people, aren't typically any of those things, whatsoever. Instead, far too many governments are really about taking care of themselves and their favored industries and peoples that those governments work hand in glove with, to the exclusion of all those that are not part and parcel of that system in action; therefore they have little interest in real protest, or in anything that will unnecessarily upset the status quo, because they are quite satisfied with the way that things already are.
The process of change, necessitates freedom of movement and assembly, the freedom to protest, the freedom of the press and the freedom to voice whatever that it is that means something to those so voicing it. When those freedoms are suppressed or compromised or neutralized, than what has occurred is that the state apparatus, in conjunction with the policing arm and justice departments, are strong arming the people from freely expressing themselves, when such an expression, is actually their Constitutional right, and should not be subjected to permissions from a government that is built upon their just powers coming from the free consent of those so governed.