Quite. This is not a political debate. This is about enforcing TOS which explicitly ban use for criminal acts.
The fact that the criminal is the President of the United States and his enablers is incidental to the principle.
No one wants to ban any reasonable political views. But when a political party organises public mass violence, subversion, insurrection, murder, intimidation of public officers, the attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, among other crimes, that party - and especially its leaders - loses all claims on the patience of the public and on the tolerance of private sector service providers.
Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith. The reality is that criminal acts took place on a scale that was truly shocking.
Anyone who provides goods and services of any kind to the individuals and organisations responsible has a moral and legal duty to stop doing so - immediately.
> Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith
But it is political. This summer saw widespread political violence, including attacks on government institutions, not to mention billions in property damage, but the mainstream reaction to that was "Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful"[1] with massive support for the riots from Silicon Valley companies. Kaepernick praised the violence and Dorsey gave him $3m.[2] The double standard is just sickening.
It is funny that you quoted that the arguments are not being made in good faith and then proceeded to make a bad faith argument.
Lets go through some quick fire bullet points, 93% of the summer protests where peaceful, most of the damage was on insured property with no loss of life, the cause of the riots was the unashamed and unlawful treatment of minorities in America. It was a grassroots movement.
Now lets compare that to, a mob that straight away turned to violence, caused loss of life (and bashed the head of a police man with a fire extinguisher), mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president, pipe bombs, molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene, and it all started from a conspiracy theory that 51 different judges have considered meritless, our congress has considered meritless and the vice president of his own administration considered debunked.
I wonder who is the one with a double standard here?
I'm not sure how to confirm/disprove that statement. I'd posit that most protestors at the capitol were peaceful, but I'm not sure how to confirm/deny that either.
>mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president
Where I live "ACAB" is a trendy chant used to devil-ify police
> molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene,
I have seen molotovs used at BLM protest
All this to say - it's not black and white; I also feel there clearly is some double standard going on here. I disagree with (what i think is) the premise of the capitol protests, but it does not strike me as that much worse than what people were supporting a few months ago.
None of these companies severing ties with Parler or other far-right presences are making political decisions. These are all business decisions, because they are businesses. I've explained this elsewhere, but what if a boycott were to start because the company refused to cut ties with Parler? They should just eat the loss? No, in any market, people vote with their dollars, and the vast majority of tech customers just happen to also be politically liberal. This is what we signed up for when we decided to operate in a free market system.
> No one wants to ban any reasonable political views.
No one (including the US Supreme Court) has a definition for "reasonable."
That's what has some of us alarmed.
For Trump and his cronies? Sure, there are more than enough actual laws they've broken. But let's justify action against them on actual laws, as opposed to because-SV-doesn't-like-them and has public support at the moment. Or even use the moment to pass new laws, covering the type of behavior we want to make illegal.
Instead, this feels a lot like 9/12, in that people are post-hoc justifying popular actions on a moral basis, to the detriment of legal foundations.
And as we found then, as soon as you decide "terrorists can't be reasoned with and don't deserve rights," then being able to label someone a terrorist becomes a powerful tool...
The fact that the criminal is the President of the United States and his enablers is incidental to the principle.
No one wants to ban any reasonable political views. But when a political party organises public mass violence, subversion, insurrection, murder, intimidation of public officers, the attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, among other crimes, that party - and especially its leaders - loses all claims on the patience of the public and on the tolerance of private sector service providers.
Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith. The reality is that criminal acts took place on a scale that was truly shocking.
Anyone who provides goods and services of any kind to the individuals and organisations responsible has a moral and legal duty to stop doing so - immediately.