And yet we campaign for these private companies to censor things on our behalf, such as russian fake news. If a government is meant to represent a people, would a governments pressure on a private company be the same?

That's not really what the article is about if you read the entire thing.

I almost didn't read the article either but it had surprising depth to it.

It is a well thought out and well put together article. In todays day and age and current climate, classical enlightenment era spawned liberal thinking is a nice change of pace.

> Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook?

In this case, the two are linked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong

"The restaurant is the center of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which has been discredited by a wide variety of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. One Pizzagate activist fired a gun in the restaurant in 2016, and another started a fire in it in 2019."

Pizzagate dropped in 2016. The shooting happened in Dec 2016.

Q's first post wasn't until Oct 2017. Two things are being conflated here.

It would be more like a restaurant banning people for talking about things they did not like.

Restaurants probably ban people for wearing Nazi paraphernalia, using the nword loudly, etc.. All the time.

>Every restaurant has the right to get rid of someone destroying their place, why can't Facebook?

I don't know.

It's weird how this was a non-issue until around 2016, when all of a sudden it became an existential threat to free speech and civilization itself.

It's almost as if there's a tacit agenda behind the presentation of concern for free speech in the general case, with the goal of normalizing extremist right-wing speech in parallel with its increasing adoption and normalization within a specific mainstream American political party.