A tech company banning a user isn’t equivalent to a new law on the statute either.
If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote. We only get to choose from a pre-approved list of options that all have to conform to whatever Twitter and Facebook deem is acceptable. Twitter and Facebook et al are unelected and accountable to no one. That's not democracy. That's a corporate dictatorship with sham elections.
I really haven't. Trump is the only western leader to have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms. You can't claim this is the thin end of the wedge, this is a reaction [by those platforms] to the risks to western democracy in its entirety. They gave him four years of rope to hang himself with, it was only a direct attack on democracy itself that caused this action.
> If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote.
Trump has all the means of communication that any previous president has had. All he has to do is stand at a lectern and talk and it will be broadcast on national television.
Again, he wouldn't have lost the access that he had if he hadn't tried to directly attack the entire system of democracy itself. All the other lies he's told over the years were allowed to be seen.
> corporate dictatorship
That's a laughable leap, sorry. If he hadn't incited a violent insurrection, and if he wasn't a few days away from the end of his tenure then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Let me put this another way. Do you think everybody, no matter what harms they cause, deserve a voice on all platforms? Would you expect Twitter to host the voice of Hitler?
Ultimately, they are private companies, they have no obligation to balance, fairness, access. It seems the state forcing corporations to do their bidding would be far more of a slippery slope than the president, who has tried to actually destroy democratic process, being banned from a platform.
So it is spectacularly, flagrantly, and most of all utterly unconvincing to suggest that he - I don't know - misspoke? Didn't mean it? Was widely and unfortunately misinterpreted by an angry crowd he just happened find himself in front of with kindness and good will to all men in his heart?
None of that is even remotely plausible.
Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc are perfectly justified in shutting him up, for the safety of all Americans, and very possibly the rest of the world.
Once we've dealt with this threat, we can come back and have a debate about media control in all of its forms. And when we do that we can include the trad media too, because they have a lot to answer for.
But for now there are more pressing problems. Whether or not Twitter did the right thing isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-warns-s...