You're being snarky, but this is essentially true (as I understand it).
In the US, outside of a few legally protected characteristics, a company is free to exercise its speech to choose not to provide service to customers it does not wish to.
The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights.
Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms. (Zuckerberg cares a lot about this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...), but ultimately all of that is above and beyond what the legal expectations are.
In FB's case it wasn't so much a policy change that lead to them shutting down Trump's account, but that USG's position as a rule of law nation was in question after 1/6 and it no longer met their own policy requirements that give elected politicians in rule of law democracies a special pass to violate their moderation rules.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
In the US, outside of a few legally protected characteristics, a company is free to exercise its speech to choose not to provide service to customers it does not wish to.
The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights.
Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms. (Zuckerberg cares a lot about this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...), but ultimately all of that is above and beyond what the legal expectations are.
In FB's case it wasn't so much a policy change that lead to them shutting down Trump's account, but that USG's position as a rule of law nation was in question after 1/6 and it no longer met their own policy requirements that give elected politicians in rule of law democracies a special pass to violate their moderation rules.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.