What happened here is opportunistic, not principled. There were plenty of other cases i can think of where companies did take riskier stands after evaluating pros and cons (cloudflare springs to mind). Those you can call principled.

Basically, they are just full of shit and are willing to hop on whatever bandwagon makes them look the best.

Isn't his time up on Jan 20? It really looks like collusion to this Aussie (me), who has no stake in the game.

> while it makes good PR.

I'm sure there's quite a few million Trump voters who would disagree it's good PR.

As mercurial as he's been, he is still the sitting president of the country which lauds itself as the greatest (personally I disagree with the latter assessment).

So, what does it mean when the tech companies have put a gag on their own sitting leader?

From the outside it looks very humorous (probably more humorous than what Mr Trump has been in the past 4 years!)

Two weeks before the end of the term is just about as late as you can take such an action, short of taking it after the 21st (which twitter was rumored to be waiting for).

> what does it mean when the tech companies have put a gag on their own sitting leader?

I can ban my country's president from my own software platform if the mood strikes me. The reason twitter is different is because of the massive audience. What does it mean, indeed. I'm kinda looking forward to the republican reaction to this, maybe suddenly they'll care about the fact that media companies have insane amounts of power in the US.

Jumping on a bandwagon isn’t collusion. Twitter started by fact checking him back in November. Other sites followed. Over time, Twitter got more aggressive about it before banning him. Now everyone else isn’t the first to ban, so it’s not as “scary” to do so.

It took as long as it did because no one wanted to take that “first step”.

"This claim is disputed", yet the Flat Earth Societies page remained unchallenged. It's clearly political bias more than a search for the truth.