Yes, these are private companies. Yes, they don't have to spend time, money or infrastructure on anyone they don't want on the platform, I understand all of this.
What I merely want to comment on is the ubiquity of these websites. Facebook, Google, Twitter and even TikTok are increasingly becoming primary means that people around the world communicate. If I'm a racist prat that spams that we should "kill all those muslamics, innit", sure I should be warned or removed from these platforms, however that significantly diminish my means of contacting other people.
I have friends that I can only really contact through Facebook. I'm trying to add them on multiple services so that I stay away from a single-point-of-failure, however some of my relatives are old and/or technologically inept, and they never check their email or SMS. While I could call them, if I were to get banned from Facebook that could reduce my ability to communicate with these people down quickly and easily to near zero.
I understand that there are actions for your consequences, I just fear that with these services becoming so commonplace (see WeChat in China, for example), being locked out of these walled gardens could have severe, real world impacts to those that the platform doesn't like.
I don't know, just food for thought.
From the perspective of Amazon, Google, Apple, and many others, the overthrowing of the US Government negatively impacts their long-term goals in many areas, such as profit and employee retention. If the US Government were overthrown and Trump became dictator, Amazon would have to move a ton of customer data to other countries because America would be the new China.
It's crazy that it took a coup attempt to open their eyes to this risk. The fact that they didn't take action sooner suggests that a lot of C-level folks throughout the tech world have been pretty complacent in regards to government stability.
In this case, you had people trying to overthrow a democratic vote. So they are literally the enemies of a free society. But the same laws and infrastructure to prevent this can be misused.
That's the hard stop. You can't have a governmental system that is fault tolerant to malicious misrule. You need to apply laws or laws lose power, and you need to trust those carrying out governing to obey some norms.
I am just saying that there are limits to trust. And when someone you 99.9% trust tries to convince you to give them 100% trust, you should pause.
Don’t think this is even vaguely true. We know that one of the primary tools of activists (or insurrectionists / terrorists depending on your point of view) in other countries are WhatsApp groups, and other encrypted chat platforms.
If one is organising a serious insurrection, then I believe one does not normally broadcast their plans to the enemy. That’s kinda strikes me as op-sec 101.
Only in a free and open society could you possibly hope to organise an insurrection in public, on broadcast platforms, without direct and immediate consequences brought down by the state. We must be so pampered to believe that the right to organise in public is a requirement insurrection.
Insurrections were organized well before AWS and the like existed, and they will still be organized well after AWS and the like are gone.
Limiting platforms that make it easier to radicalize large numbers of people is still a good thing.
My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary.
It's like fitting everyone with a shock collar and saying it will only be used against insurrectionists. The government will be a lot less worried about resistance, and the definition of "insurrectionist" is likely to move over time.
It just doesn't seem like a good direction to me.