Yes! It absolutely is censorship and bias. I agree with that. But private corporations are allowed to censor and be biased.

That's why a bar can kick you out for screaming racial slurs if they want to: it hurts their business by making their customers unhappy. That's also why corporations can donate to any political cause that they want. Some private corporations exist only to be biased! The ACLU is an example.

"Free speech" means, to me, the freedom to speak without fear. Twitter has not given Yiannopoulos a reason to fear speaking. He's just no longer free to use Twitter as a broadcast medium. It's like if Twitter lent him a huge megaphone that said "TWITTER" on it, listened to what he said, and then decided they didn't want him to have it anymore.

I’d like to posit this scenario to everyone, and hear your responses:

A privately-held telecom provider (i.e. utility) disagrees with my political views. As a result my internet service is terminated.

Let's agree the definition of a public utility is "Furnishes an everyday necessity to the public at large".

Has the provider restricted my First Amendment right?

At what point (if ever) would you consider Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter public utilities?

In your scenario: Yes.

Is Twitter or any other application layer non-government service on the internet a utility? No.

So is this what happened? No.

They didn't ban him for his political views, nor are they a utility.

They did ban him for his political views. But it's clever how you snuck in that one subjective statement into an otherwise objective line of reasoning.

> They did ban him for his political views.

No, they banned him for soliciting harassment, not for the views which motivated the solicitation of the harassment.

That policy is used to silence dissenting opinion. Don't spread this PR. It's equivalent to police claiming they detained you for a broken tail light. Dorsey and his Saudi owners are on a purge.

You have it backwards.

I believe you are referring to twitter being used to silence a dissenting opinion when you said "that policy", in reference to Nero. I actually think it's the other way, the bullying sent toward the SNL actresses' way, the sexist and homophobic comments, those were actually meant to silence a dissenting view, someone those people did not like.

Stopping bullying is a good thing. No good comes from bullying someone you don't like.

Nero's alt-right followers "actually meant" to ridicule her. Twitter actually silenced him.

That's why they banned Jones as well. Oh wait, they didn't. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA44q8W_Xt0

They did not ban him for his political views. They banned him for impersonating tweets of another user, and for leading a harassment campaign against other users. Nothing to do with his political views.

It doesn't make sense as an analogy to this situation. Public utilities are usually public (at least in the US) because they need to be monopolies. You can't have 10 companies running competing power lines throughout a city, so you have one. Because you only have one, it gets heavily regulated to ensure fairness. The same is true of broadcast frequencies.

Public utilities more commonly exist as oligopolies–not dissimilar to the social media market, in which the number of (major, national) firms can be counted on one hand.

The difference is that where you live you can't choose another utility provider, so they are in a way localized monopolies.

On the internet you can choose whatever service you like.

I would like to change your scenario to one that more closely mirrors the situation at hand: You are using their service to harass other users. Your targeted harassment of these other users causes them to cancel the service.

Or, lets go for something simpler: Spam. You're using the telcom provider to send out spam. They cut you off for it.

Is it really censorship if they're only "targeting" people who happen to be rude to other users? Or personalities who encourage their followers to do so enmass.

The only difference between Twitter and old school BBSes in this case is reach. You still need to break out the ban hammer sometimes or it turns into a cesspool.

> It certainly has nothing to do with the first amendment protections since twitter is a private company

I disagree. Because Twitter is a private company (and not a public utility), their being able to make this kind of decision is central to what the first amendment is about.

> it does have to do with censorship

Of course it has to do with censorship. Anytime a someone who owns an outlet chooses to allow or not allow their private channel to be used in a particular way, it has to do with censorship.