The deplatforming of Trump et al from Twitter, Facebook, and even Parler from the major cloud hosting services is not a civil liberties issue, it's an issue of the deceleration of discourse, not unlike what Michael Lewis wrote about in Flash Boys, which told the story of Brad Katsuyama and IEX, which had as its stated purpose slowing down the high-frequency trading that was making stock markets challenging places for individual investors to get good trading execution, thereby stacking the deck against us.
Everyone is still free to speak. People engaging in speech advocating violence just can't use some specific microphones and megaphones. It is, in short, a collar not on production but on distribution. It is in essence a scaling up of the same situation the KKK used to be in here in Chapel Hill. Time was, the KKK would march in Chapel Hill and we would respect their first amendment rights and ignore them. Respectable platforms wouldn't touch them. We need to get back to that modus operandi.
Honestly, it's not just the Right that needs its discourse slowed down, it's all of us. Pursued to the extreme and implemented broadly, we should just heed Jaron Lanier's well-considered exhortation to delete our social media accounts. I have been abiding by that in spirit of late, though I haven't gone the whole way. I am treating social media much like we treat red meat here in our household. I haven't foresworn it entirely, but I've really cut back, and it's working out just fine.
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