it's arguably the inverse of this. They're doing it because they don't feel threatened by a Republican administration any more. With or without specific regulation threats the workforces and often also leaders of these companies would have done it years ago.

Democratic members of congress have repeatedly called for the breakup and/or regulation of "big tech", just for different reasons.

As a liberal in big tech, I can assure you the primary motivation is that we are

1. horrified by trump, always have been 2. aren't concerned that trump will unilaterally end our business if we oppose him anymore 3. are extremely concerned about american democracy and our lives, given the way trump has convinced almost half the country that the election was rigged, which has encouraged them to almost kill an entire branch of our government

AND BEAT ONE POLICE OFFICER TO DEATH WITH AN AMERICAN FLAG WHILE CHANTING THE MUTATIONAL ANTHEM

we in big tech are not robots, sir.

Do you remember Russiagate? How half the country literally believed that Trump was a puppet of Russia, and that Russia had hacked the election. Hilary Clinton wrote a book about it. I will say that Trump should act with more tact and decorum, but just months ago CHAZ was a literal autonomous zone acting outside of the laws and authority of the city of Seattle. Nobody should have had their ability to communicate freely online taken away because of it, but fascists apply mental gymnastics to affirm one moral stance against another depending on the person commiting the crime.

When you say literally, I think you can't say "hacked the election"

You instead have to say what people literally think/thought: that Russians hacked the democrats to release more emails and the like.

Nobody thought the russians hacked the actual election to change votes and the like, just that they influenced it illegally at the behest of the trump campaign

Yeah Chaz was ridiculous and a gift to tucker Carlson. I am glad all that stuff is over it was embarrassing.

Yeah, 3 years of fake Russian collusion and peepee tapes and a waste of a special counsel, followed by months of BLM riots where over 30 people died. And a literally insurrection in the CHAZ/CHOP where they actually tried to declare separate sovereignty from the united states and annexing land...I don't really take liberals opinions that seriously.

I'm less interested in whether that's true and more interested in the fact that a broader demographic of people now actually care about the soft power inherent in a private social media company that is the sole medium through which millions of people communicate their politics and receive the information and influence that helps form their beliefs.

I was just out of high school during the Snowden leaks and have watched Americans who were at that time indifferent or considered him a traitor continue to spend time on these platforms over the years. The outrage then seems to have existed almost exclusively amongst the paranoid and those who have considered the effects of individual privacy in a democracy. This was always bound to happen, and it seems internally inconsistent to me in a capitalist free market for any individual to only now (post 2016) hold these companies accountable for perceived infringements if that same individual has up until now continued to use these platforms despite the public knowledge.

Put another way, if America's culture of public discourse had been of a higher quality back then, and our political apathy lower, this would not be such a surprise to as many people. It probably would be a non-issue, because we would have utilized any number of other readily available technologies for organization and communication to replace the products built by companies that exist strictly to create revenue for their stakeholders.

Or maybe they are doing this because an unprecedented (in the US anyways) social media coordinated mob was perhaps less than a few minutes away from capturing and doing god knows what to the entire line of succession of our government.

The big tech oligarchs couldn't give less of a shit about that.

If I were them I would be scared of reprisals and would be in active dialog with the government pleading for help in managing the storm partially created by the social media platforms.

You have no clue what they care about.

This started about 2014-2015 ish, but it really got going just after Trump's election in 2016. There is a leaked video from Google with mass crying post election, and the organization then vowed to prevent it from happening again. I suspect other tech companies were similar.

Throughout Trump's presidency they have been constantly fighting Trump since, rather than trying to stay in his good graces. So I don't buy that it's about power.