| I don't know about this specific service, but I've read up about the general context. What is happening here to US Conservatives is similar to what happened to Muslims around 2016. Until that time, most online services didn't want to touch anything religion-related with a ten foot pole because they felt that it would be religious censorship and/or feared the backlash. But then, with Daech stepping up its online recruitment effort and hiding much of it among benign Muslim/Muslim-adjacent conversations, services decided to do something. So a loosely coordinated effort started around 2016 to marginalize Daech. This meant investing time and effort in moderating Muslim and arab-speaking communities. This meant banning extremist users and closing extremist groups – even as they migrated from service to service. This also meant banning communities that refused to moderate extremist speech. And, to the best of my understanding, it worked. Daech lost most of its capability to recruit online for terrorism, civil war and funding, while, after an initial scare, regular users (including Muslims and arab speakers) continue using the services without any real disruption. Until 2020, nobody dared to touch US Conservatives for the same kind of reason. US Conservatives are powerful, well funded, well organized, they own a large fraction of US media and they are very much in a position where they can boycott and destroy plenty of services (possibly not Big Tech, but many services are much smaller). This was a problem because the number of terrorist attacks planned by groups hiding in plain sight among regular Conservatives users had reached scary levels, not to mention the amount of dangerous propaganda hiding among regular Conservative discussion. I assume that there were plans to try and do something about that, but they were rejected by business fiat because of the fear of backlash. Then came the assault on the Capitol and the plans were not rejected anymore. We have entered a stage in which services attempt to get rid of/marginalize extremists from within the ranks of US Conservatives, in the hope that this will help decrease far right terrorism. It is scary for US Conservatives, just as the 2016 operations were scary for Muslims and arab-speaking users. As far as I can see, right wing communities very much continue to exist – they just can't operate in a "we're not going to moderate extremist speech". Is it specifically targeting US Conservatives? Yes, it is, because US Conservatives communities are being used by extremists to hide in plain sight. Is this a good strategy? Is it successful? Too early to tell, I guess. But there is a historical precedent that suggests that it should be, in time. |