> but banning the former president

Trump was banned for inciting an insurrection which is illegal.

> Trump was banned for inciting an insurrection which is illegal.

So we should ban everyone who's suspected of doing something illegal then? They don't even have to be charged with any crimes, we just have to be convinced that they did something illegal in order to have grounds for banning them

A ban on a social media site is something done by a private party, not a function of the justice system.

So yes, bans can be done without any legal action. And really that's how it should be for the sake of proper function.

Otherwise I could just spam HN over and over, until HN actually managed to sue me and win the lawsuit. Can you imagine how long that would take?

Mind you, spam is very much free speech, so it'd be interesting to see which law that would be breaking.

It was pretty far past suspected. If I was a person of influence and I was sending mobs to break into govt buildings I would have been arrested, especially if it went on for months leading up to it and I said I love what you are doing, you are beautiful. We've tried to keep presidents out of actual criminal implications, we probably made a big mistake as a country when ford pardoned nixon. I do doubt trump's attempt to overturn the election, encourage sedition etc will lead to him facing actual criminal sanctions.

Multiple countries have passed laws forcing social media companies to remove content seen as inciting violence. They don't have a choice but to remove that sort of content.

They gave people multiple chances. When you encourage violence, spread medical advice where it's against actual medical advice, when it hurts people and you are no doctor either, when you send people out to attack others, encourage deadly violence, then after a few chances it seems reasonable to ban them. I wonder if musk will release what must have been a huge amount of worrying about much anger this would cause right wingers. This supposed scandalous impact of these selected disclosures won't have much impact because it's not that surprising that there was a limit. Also it's a private company, they can make any decisions about letting people use their system that they want to. Do you think Fox News has been tortured about how much of trumps shenanigans they should put on the front page of their website? They clearly reduce coverage of trump's foolishness, support for racists, etc. It's not a crime to do this, they are a free private company.

What does this have to do with my above comment?

This isn't about "right wingers" or any of these braindead arguments about "moderation being in the public interest", my point was that saying what Roth and others did was "normal company operation" is an outright lie and anyone who's actually paying attention knows this