[Frost1x]

I tend to agree with this sentiment.

Unfortunately, I think even outside the oligopolies of tech, we have another underlying issue where even in a competitive market, market consensus can arrive that runs counter to democratic ideals.

I'd be surprised if all the tech providers actively coordinated on this. I'd be more willing to believe they all saw Trump as a threat to business and an overhanging risk for their business they tackled at an opportune time. One or two set the stage for the market (Twitter and Facebook) and then the rest followed through based on observed market feedback from Twitter/Facebook's actions, arriving at a concensus to censor Trump.

To be very clear, I don’t like Trump whatsoever and think he has clearly manipulated masses of people for years. At the same time, I don't think Trump directly violated policies. He's largely acted in the questionable grey areas of culture and society to push his will and has been quite effective at it.

This really brings into question underlying foundational principles surrounding free speech limitations and free speech protections, privatized communications' role in modern political discussions (essential to democracy), how we protect against oligopies or natural market consensus that may be harmful to underlying foundations to democracy, and so forth.

In this case I think we saw the oligopies and market concensus actually help democracy by protecting against a ridiculous yet growing insurrection attempt. What happens if that control or market consensus shifts to help businesses over consumers or general citizens of the US? There's clearly a lot of unchecked power here that needs to be corralled.

[dmwallin]

The government of the United States itself is based on a separation of powers, with limited and specific ways for one branch to affect the other. You can see this in multiple ways, legislative, executive and judicial divisions, but also state vs federal. I would argue that government vs business vs the populace is another unstated but extremely important one. Given that the right of free speech is one of the primary tools both business and the populace use to regulate government I would argue that it's not worth loosening its protections. We already have plenty of tools to deal with excess business power already if we can get both government and the populace on board.