1. Companies are legally free to ban anyone they want. (in fact i side with right of the christian baker refusing to make cakes for gay weddings)
2. Companies shouldn’t ban people for their political opinions or restrict them from expressing them. It’s evil and immoral and horrifying behavior, but not illegal. if they do it, i will call it out as horrific. just like i think the baker shouldn’t discriminate against gay weddings even though they should legally be able to.
Let's say I (or my company) hosted an online message board, and a thread was brought to my attention with messages like "We need to hunt down every last Democrat senator and put a bullet in their head!", with replies like "Amen! I'll bring my rifles" and "What time should we meet?".
You'd better believe I'd "oppress" such speech and ban the users, and you'd be severely hard-pressed to convince me that such a response is a human rights violation. Those messages, or whatever fabricated claims were used to justify the threats therein, don't constitute "political opinions" just because political parties and politicians are named. Likewise, outright false/fabricated claims that "the Democrats" fraudulently/secretly changed the result of the 2020 election are, in no way, "political opinions" -- rather, they are statements of (false) fact, meant to incite viewers to violence for the fabricator's gain.
For me to un-publish such posts from my web site cannot be considered discrimination against a political group; it's refusal to allow my servers to help conspirators commit a violent crime. If you want to brand something as "horrific" here, it should be the posts I described and not the take-downs.
> imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
Private people and companies are under no obligation to offer their help and services to people who wish to use those services to organize killings or any other crimes. In fact, it's extremely common for businesses to have (and enforce) policies against such use of their products/services, since it's obviously not in their best interest to be viewed by the public as an accessory to crime.
The "stop the steal" and similar posts now being removed under the policy are intended for recruiting people to an upcoming armed escalation of last week's riot and invasion at the Capitol (using the false pretense of election fraud by Democrat officials). Their purpose is to capture or kill anyone standing in the way of their goal to overturn the election result, at some point before inauguration. This isn't conjecture; the posts and the commentary surrounding them have been out there for everyone to see. This was also noted by Twitter in their recent announcement on the suspension of the outgoing president's account.