Your link with the by line "unmask antifa" has rather little credibility (Edit: your guy is editor of The Post Millenial - "Follow Us On Parler"). For good or ill, "antifa" is a just a label for a wide variety of groups that aim to fight "fascists" in the streets. These range from random leftists to the somewhat unhinged, who indeed get regularly banned for overt calls to violence. Which is to say there are no "top Antifa accounts". Twitter bans all sorts of people regularly for all sorts of things.

"antifa" is as vague as "anonymous"

This whole argument is wildly misunderstanding the problem. Andy Ngo frames this as a black & white issue - when by all reasonable measures, it is not.

It’s not all free speech or none. I don’t see Andy protesting that it is a crime to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there isn’t one. I also don’t see Andy protesting when that teenage girl was sent to prison for verbally abusing her boyfriend and verbally encouraging him to commit suicide - which he eventually did. Where are his protests? Where are the guardians of free speech here?

The thing is, there is speech for the purpose of communicating, speech for the purpose of convincing, and speech for the purpose of manipulating. The first two categories are always protected and should be under most conditions. The last has heavy restrictions. You are not allowed to use the platform someone else built to manipulate the audience they built if they do not want you to. Period.

Trumps endless lies aren’t speech. They are a blatant attempt at manipulation with a reckless disregard for the truth. That needs to be restricted urgently. We’ve seen too many minds manipulated by this category of non-speech.

That’s also the entire problem with the “conservatives” - especially under Trump. They abused platforms to manipulate people into following them because they didn’t actually have persuasive points. They abandoned their commitments to fidelity, fiscal responsibility, and morality. All they had were lies that they repeated until they became undistinguishable from the truth.

This isn’t about speech. It never was. It is about manipulation and one particular political segment trying to use our core values against us.

Stop trying to muddy the waters. This whole argument is a straw man.

Stop trying to pretend this was ever about speech.

I mean Twitter just removed Trump after the capitol riot and rest assured we're all asking why he got to stay up for the last 4 years too.

I don't think it's about being in the opposite political party. Facebook's users are more conservative than liberal. Twitter is constant screaming of all political affiliations. YouTube is famous for being the place where our relatives fall down the right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole. The thing that paints a target on your back is your platform being a landing pad for the people banned from other social networks and basically nothing else. I don't care how conservative you are Goat was a cesspool. And it wasn't because the people on it were conservative but because it was where people too vulgar for Reddit went. /r/popular might bleed dark blue but Reddit hosts plenty of active conservative communities that aren't /r/TD.

The argument "we have law enforcement are courts for that" is disingenuous as best unless you want the gov't to start employing hundreds of thousands of internet cops tied into the moderation tools of every platform. Without platform moderation there are literally zero practical consequences for online death threats, harassment, hate speech. It just doesn't happen. There is no one to call. Your local police won't take you seriously and have zero power to do anything even if they did. In spirit I actually agree with you but saying "throw it to the legal system" without any plan to make it work just feels like you don't actually want any moderation and know that this would accomplish that.

With 11-31K followers these aren't "top" antifa accounts. Ngo is just taking advantage of the demonization of anti-fascism to continue to create the image of an other that can be despised.

https://thebasebk.org/about/ https://www.revolutionaryabolition.org/about/ https://www.ramnyc.org/ https://jewishworker.org/about/

These are obviously left wing groups, but they seem to advocate a lot more than being just the anti- to fascism.

Twitter or most other social media platforms do not have a problem with conservatives (or "the opposite political party" as you put it). Was deplatforming anyone but blatant white supremacists even a conversation before 2017?

Most mainstream conservatives operate accounts on Twitter without an issue and a fair amount of libertarian and conservative-identifying individuals have used Twitter for years without being banned for their views. Framing this as a problem with political viewpoints doesn't do much besides serve a false narrative.

If you read Twitter's rationale for banning Donald Trump it didn't have much to do with his viewpoint. It had everything to do with implying and promoting violent acts. Putting deplatforming in terms of "censorship of political views" is a seductive argument but it falls apart when you recognize the content of those viewpoints have less to do with a matter of policy opinion and more to do with an unhinged ideology based around waging civil war against your opponents.