So no right.
Being a bigot (which is what white supremacists literally are, so this is not just some hyperbolic statement) is not a protected class. No one has to let the klan show up in uniform to their restaurant, or let people use their platform to promote hate speech.
To be clear the click bade headline here really is awful- no one got banned for going to the rally, they got banned for hosting parties in the AirBNB rentals themselves. They used AirBNB to set up their hate events, and AirBNB put a stop to it.
Equating White power groups with other groups is truly foolish. There is no debate about whether their views are beneficial or have any merit. They will not care about you if the situations were reversed.
And AirBNB has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, outside the protected classes of race, gender, etc.
Political views aren't a protected class in the U.S. They can ban people for any old reason, and if there isn't any general backlash against banning white supremacists, there'll be no specific negative consequence to this action.
The leap from "white supremacists not allowed" to "any non-extreme left belief not allowed" does not make sense.
This approach is burning bridges and giving up on any attempt to convince the other side. They'll still hold their views and they'll be forced into a bubble where their views are reinforced and are likely to become more extreme. Next election cycle could very well have people asking "how on earth did Trump get re-elected?" and the answer will be this style of attempted thought control.
Even worse, it's burning bridges with people in the middle and in many cases even the ones that are on your side.
Sometimes slippery slopes are slippery.
The Democratic party has not controlled the narrative for a long long time. I know people sometimes need a bogeyman to have something to rail against but this isn't it.
Again, First Amendment is to stop the US government from suppressing speech. If Voat had been shut down and the yellow bellies behind Breitbart arrested, you would have a case. But that hasn't happened. Instead the constant whining about 'fake news' by the current administration has been a far sinister and much more effective attempt at speech suppression by driving people into their various safe spaces.
If you want examples about these things happening, YouTube channels like this one have had their money taken away by Google due to being "offensive" when it is actually just not on the same side of the political fence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DshdVX_MlSo
I strongly disagree that there is some vast left-wing/liberal conspiracy to suppress right-wing speech. I can concede that both sides do their part to ensure that the opposing side's viewpoint is suppressed, marginalized, and ridiculed (e.g. Fox News, Info Wars.) It pits people against each other for no good reason, causes deterioration in social well-being, and makes us unable to work together as a society. Maybe we can just agree that people are what they are and leave it at that.
The rise of the right and the general rightward shift over the past several decades has been largely driven by the right policing and pressuring the mass media (the Democratic Party shifting it's center of power from center-left to center-right in the 1990s helped); to the extent there is even a remotely defensible appearance that the right is not favored by the mass media it's because in theblast couple years the Republican Party has shot rightward faster than the media and public discourse has, outpacing the movement of the Overton Window.
On the one hand I don't want a bunch of hateful thugs running about rallying actual hate normally. I just have to imagine if I were in a non western country and they had hate rallies against westerners, for example.
On the other hand, say in Venezuela or Cuba where politicians rally (or rallied) around hate for the US and US citizens, I mean, hateful as it is, should I want that suppressed forcefully?
Maybe more worrying is who gets classified, do they go by the Dept of Justice tally? Or do they make their own assessment?
It's because of the most liberal free speech clause in American constitution. Because it is not govt's responsibility to police speech, when speech gets too unbearable to most people, the companies have to step in or else they risk their platforms disappear.
While I don't agree with White power rallies (which should go without saying), they have as much right to service as any other political group.
StackOverflow already took an "open-borders, anti-Trump, or get out mentality", so its not a stretch to say that any right leaning belief, or more acurately any non-extreme left belief will be under fire from more and more companies.
That is troubling indeed.