Sometime around 2014-2016, it seems like the progressive left collectively realized that they were losing certain battles in the information war on the Internet, and opted to pursue censorship, deplatforming, and outright violence (e.g., "punch nazis") instead.
That's not to say that they were losing every battle, but the fact that they were losing some battles--that some portions of their narrative were just too easy to falsify in an era where any 4channer could grab some data from the DoJ website and make a memeable infographic--that was enough to cause the turn against free speech:
> Yet key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. That may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
I should also point out that the NYTimes ironically has its own well-documented history of disinformation: famously downplaying both the Holocaust and Stalin's purges as they occurred.