Elane Photography paid thousands and thousands of dollars in fines for choosing not to work a lesbian wedding at a time when lesbian weddings were not legal in New Mexico. They never got their money back. It's not as cut and dried as you imply.

Thats actually not true. There are numerous businesses that are absolutely forced to distribute your content, even if they don't like it.

The obvious example is the phone network, and other common carriers. There are a whole set of laws that do indeed force these companies to distribute your content.

Are you going to take the next step and consider AWS, Twitter, and Facebook monopoly carriers or service providers? Under their current definitions they are not and can cut ties with you for what ever reason they want (barring protected class issues I assume).

If you step back a bit too, there's another issue I have, which is that it seems to me these companies are coming down hard against the idea of free speech. Let's look at it this way: some group believes the Big Social Media Companies are being politically biased in a way they disagree with, in part because of active moderation that reflects decisions by that company about what's "correct" or "incorrect". So they say "hey we're going to start a new social media platform that we don't moderate." This gets used by violent extremists.

Then some other Big Tech companies tell this new company, predicated on unmoderated speech, to moderate their speech too or they will cut resources.

As others have noted, plenty of violent behavior has been organized on Twitter or Facebook, and it hasn't received the same sort of punishment and ostracism. So why Parler? Because some groups on it are supportive of Trump? Because it's the US government? It's hard for me to take appeals to quashing violent behavior seriously when they're so arbitrary in their application at some level.

At some level, it doesn't matter to me, because there's another argument, which is that the platforms should be very removed from the content on them, like a phone company. They could be promoting that, and instead they're going hard in the other direction, which is to support heavy "moderation" by monopolies. I don't want big business "moderating" speech, or having that much power to do so.

My political inclinations are very different from Trump or anything in these insurrections but I don't like the way it's headed, and I don't see the gay wedding cakes as remotely the same.

If there were three wedding cake companies in the entire English-speaking world, and wedding cakes were a universal requirement for getting married, I might feel the same. In fact, in some ways I do feel the same, but I also would say maybe there should be a lot more wedding cake companies.

Twitter and Facebook made a concerted efforts around 1st-party paid employees that are responsible for macro-moderation across their platforms. Parler instead just replied "our volunteer moderators will handle it". Even reddit has 1st-party moderation, despite their large volunteer moderator community.