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Suspension of a politician or president’s account is clearly election interference. It is not acceptable in our society on a values level but it should also be illegal because it’s effectively a donation to the other side. The more fundamental problem is that large social media platforms and infrastructure providers like AWS are utilities and should be highly regulated so they behave like a public utility and also broke up for anti competitive reasons to the extent possible. But we seem to be allergic to regulations that make sense - and ironically, Republicans in particular are blindly anti regulation.

dnemmers•4mo ago

FTA: Under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, social media platforms are allowed to moderate their services by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in “good faith.”

anigbrowl•4mo ago

How was it election interference? The election was in November, January 6 was 2 months after the election. Apparently when a buzzword is repeated often enough it causes short-circuits in basic reasoning, producing a zombie-like imitation of cognition.

Instead of waxing wroth about high principles based on blatant counterfactual premises, MAGA people should consider apologizing for trashing Congress, threatening to murder the vice-president, and trying overturn the results of an election they didn't like. It's unfortunate that the Biden administration set about prosecuting this with a resource-intensive bottom-up completist approach instead of going after hte organizers from the outset. The architects of Brazil's abortive coup are now sitting in prison where they belong, likewise those in South Korea.