Tech regulating speech: Careful there

What happens when an elected official who’s still in office tries to overturn an election result? This happens everywhere, and it doesn’t raise eyebrows—unless it happens in America. After the storming of the Capitol, conglomerates like Boeing, Chevron, American Express, and Verizon all came out in defense of American democracy. The problem is that none of them can have the same impact as tech companies in this space. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Discord, Stripe, Pinterest, and TikTok (bet they enjoyed that!) either banned or restricted the actions of Donald Trump. Even Shopify pulled down stores selling his campaign merchandise. They did what US law had been unable to do: Silence an elected official who’s still serving out his term of office. But is the responsibility theirs? Incongruent values. It’s futile at this point to try to see this in terms of binary right or wrong actions. We don’t have the requisite principles, and often we conflate speech with digital participation. You might argue that these companies are private spaces, private platforms, private communities, and therefore they have the right (and responsibility) to decide how to manage those. But society often finds it hard to reconcile these two ideas:…
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