Do they? Plenty of ISIS accounts and other bad **** gets removed. The difference is you don't have a large ecosystem of media proclaiming bias. We all agree that ISIS related accounts should be deplatformed thus
when the social media companies do it gets only a minor mention. Never does it get mentioned in the conservative media alongside the Alex Jones ban because it doesn't fit the desired narrative. The narrative is that ONLY conservative sources are being silenced. Without a thorough analysis of all bans it's impossible to say that's fact or fiction. I'd bet my house that progressive leaning accounts have been banned. Pointing to a single account like Farrakhan is simply showing an inconsistency.
The issue is the application of the alleged standards. It is possible for a progressive to get banned on social media. It does happen, but the leash is much looser. After a pretty lenghty period of ISIS using social media to help them wage war, kidnap and murder people, and then post videos of them getting burned to death or having their heads severed, social media companies did block them. To my knowledge, Trump, Alex Jones, and hell, David Duke haven't done anything like that, but they're being treated like those who have. What they have done is spout a lot of stupid stuff, incorrect stuff, and say nice things about people who did bad things. Well, there's a lot of gray and a lot of subjective judgment calls in that, and it's impossible to come up with any kind of real standard for that sort of thing. Plenty of people do those things, and plenty of people with big followings do them and have no action taken against them at all. Jack Dorsey has addressed the nutty stuff the Ayatollah says (which would make Trump look like a choir boy), and he dismisses it as "sabre-rattling."
And again, they can do this. They can be arbitrary about the enforcement of their rules. These are private companies with no obligation to the government or to private entities other than what's in their agreements with them. However, I'm not going to give them unearned and undeserved respect or take them seriously when they claim any sort of moral authority or credibility. They don't have either. They are private businesses doing whatever the hell they want, and that's OK with me so long as they're honest about it.
I'd agree there. Clearly the size of the audience matters and I wish they'd be open about that. You can say crazy **** and avoid the ban until lots of people start sharing your crazy rambings.
I'm not really talking about the size of the audience factor (though that's clearly a real issue). I'm talking about the specificity of the allegation. If I sue somebody, I have to specify in legal documents exactly what they did or failed to do that was wrong and state how it's wrong under the laws. I haven't seen that done with the Trump ban. I haven't seen them specify the offending post and specify exactly how it violates their rules. The most I've heard is that he said generally nice things about the Capitol rioters. Well, people say nice things about Hamas who shoots rockets at civilians. People say nice things about rioters destroying property and beating innocent people all summer. People say nice things about the Chinese Communist Party that's doing its best Reinhard Heydrich impersonation on the Uyghurs. Have those people been banned or even sanctioned for doing so? Not that I'm aware of.
Ultimately, I think this is all stupid and arrogant. Social media companies are trying to take on a role they can't possibly take on. They're trying to install guardrails on public discourse that are much tighter than the legal limits on them, and they're trying to be the arbiters of what's true and what's false. I understand why they want to. There's respect and grandeur that comes with it, but they can't do it. It's not just that they're not perfect at it. They're bad at it, and it's massively destructive to public trust and discourse when they get it wrong.
Look at what happened with the banning of posts about Covid being made in a lab and leaked. Nobody really knew where Covid came from, but they banned posts suggesting that it came from a lab - treating it as if it was thorougly disproven when it never was or even close to being so. It was always a very plausible scenario, and there were always reputable people saying it. That sort of thing is frightening to me, because the people trying to be the ultimate arbiters of what's true and what's false demonstrated that not only do they not know what's true or false,
they don't even know what it means or what it looks like for something is proven true or false.
Rather than trying to play God about the truth, it's far better to adopt Justice Louis Brandeis's approach. Absent an immediate emergency, a free society, country, or culture should always choose more speech to combat a falsehood or alleged falsehood than enforced silence. More speech is always more likely to find the truth than suppression of the alleged falsehood, especially when the allegation of falsehood turns out to be (and actually was always) ********.