Apple has threatened to ban Parler from the App Store

It's uncommon, but the Supreme Court also has original jurisdiction, "In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party." U.S. Const. Art. III. Here, Texas attempted to sue four other states over how they conducted their elections, so it fell under original jurisdiction.

I honestly think just splitting the US off might be a better thing than marching blindly into worsening civil divide. We're at a point wherein either side winning the presidency is just riling up the other side. Biden literally represents only his 55% of voters and Trump his 45% and when one side ones the other strictly loses, there's no feeling of compromise anymore. This is going to end in one side subjugating the other, and the right is arguing right now that's exactly what the left is doing to them through the means that you mentioned in your post. I think, eventually they'll respond to their perceived subjugation and the recent riot was just the peak of an iceberg.

They don't want to live a certain way but politics in general has been increasingly moving towards a national level, away from local politics. I can understand the right's belief that big city liberals are forcing left-wing values onto them because the left has expressed the same opinion about the right forcing values onto the left. The sentiment is mutual. And to some degree both sides are correct, there are definitely value systems that are forced from the top down (government), some may be good and some may be bad but that also depends on who you ask. And in the end neither side is happy.

Now obviously, tech companies are in their right to ban whoever they want for whatever they want. That's how the US operates even though I don't like it, and the right was happy to give businesses that power. But at a societal level it's clear we have an America with more than one identity and it's acting like a dysfunctional mental illness because we're forcing people together that don't want to be together. If the middle east is any indication that's a recipe for inevitable conflict.

When the subject is censorship in the United States, the First Amendment is going to come up! It's what underlies private parties' ability to control what they publish, rather than follow dictates from the government. Great-grandparent mentions laws.

As for other networks, I've used several that aren't big household names. They work fine. Some actually do "social" better, in my opinion. Some boast self-hosting and censorship-resistant features. None of them are popular. But many are cheap enough to run more or less indefinitely, given their small size.

I think "just build your own" is a perfectly valid response, since nobody's entitled to any of what a platform represents. If you send a newspaper an editorial and they refuse it, "start your own publication" or "print it up as a pamphlet" are just fine. So is just "no", without any free tips on next steps or alternatives. Nothing is owed. Nothing's delivered.

Back to the laws, there are others to keep in mind here. Not just as they sit on the books, but how they play out in practice. Nobody wants to be dealing with subpoenas, court orders, and lawsuits, even lawsuits they can probably get dismissed early on under 230, all the time. Nobody wants to be dealing with media scandals. That's what happens when crime starts happening on your servers. The costs are so high, and involvement so unpleasant, that most experienced operators tune their terms, policies, and algorithms to sweep very broadly, accepting a lot of false positives to avoid false negatives that eat up all their money and time.

From a certain point of view, I'm sure it seems Facebook and especially Twitter are seizing on illegality as a pretense for political ends. Taking that was a factor as a given, there's almost certainly some additional element of simple self-defense and cost-saving at work here. Even if you start a new platform that doesn't share their presumed political bias, the other factors will stay in play.

Unwillingness to face that explains many of the woes of specifically right-allied platforms in the last ten years. If you set yourself as "the alternative" for people the major platforms are happy to be rid of, you can end up with a user base with a really high percentage of people creating problems that are problems no matter what your politics happen to be.

> The other side keeps deplatforming them. Their legal cases are rejected. The mainstream media refuses to take them seriously. We're not even listening to them, because it's science and they're ists if they disagree. We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right.

Not really. More like, they voted in 2016 and won and "the other side" raised concerns about manipulation of voters and attempted to go through proper democratic channels to change things--which failed, so they accepted it and moved on until other debacles prompted similar action, and again, "they" accepted the results of those democratic processes, just like the game is supposed to work. The mainstream media has taken "them" seriously since 2016 and hasn't shut up about them since. Their legal cases are rejected because unlike what "the other side" did in 2016, they aren't following the process properly, have no legitimate evidence to present, they are totally incompetent, etc.

> We are slowly squeezing a significant segment of the population out of public debate, and they are powerless to stop it.

The POTUS was their megaphone for 4 years. You are supposed to elect the person you feel best represents you and your interests. If "they" didn't do that, "they" shouldn't be trying to establish him as a monarch. "They" are traitors attempting to rob everyone that voted last year of their voice. Their turn with the microphone is up, but they refuse to yield it. Yes, the figurehead will no longer echo their ridiculous, conspiratorial, world view, so we are "squeezing them out" in a sense, but hey, it's called American democracy and it has worked that way for years.

They've had 4 years to deliver on their promises and win a second term. Guess what. They didn't. You know why? Because instead of delivering they ignored a deadly pandemic and let 369K Americans *die* and the economy crumble. Now is not the time to sympathize and "let the other side be heard" we've been doing it for 4 years and there's nothing worth listening to unless your ears are comforted by the melodious sounds of the collapse of the United States.

You're right, they're not scientists. And to regex away the things they actually believe (ists) instead of science shows that you don't really give the reality of what it actually means to be something like a, for example, racist the full weight it deserves. Being a racist means your beliefs actively lead to the disenfranchisement, or worse, direct violence on others, which also in turn eventually hurts you longer term (fyi).

I think part of the problem with politics in this country is this very tendency toward abstractions, false equivalences, forgetfulness, and tepidness in language. Stop pussyfooting around. Call a spade a spade. If we all stayed grounded and spoke extremely concretely about things, it'd be a lot easier to prevent fringe voices intermixing with moderate voices under the banner of of a single ideology whose elements can differ wildly in their extremities. The fact of the matter is, most people only care about the one or two issues they feel affect them the most in a given moment and rather than compromise and side with the platform that maybe doesn't give them what they want on that one issue but is generally better overall they refuse to do so and will sleep with the devil just to have their one need met, damn everything else. The planet could literally become a flaming ball of molten lava and eliminate all life on earth and certain constituents in the US would not give a damn as long as it meant abortion was illegal.

Here's roughly my theory of how American politics functioned over the past four years for several people in the "center right":

Guy A believes something relatively reasonable, e.g. "I don't want to get taxed too much."

Party L says, we want to help a bunch of people in the States out with free services. (Guy A thinks, hey that doesn't sound too bad), L continues, but to do it we need to tax you just a bit more than we do now. Guy A responds, well that sounded ok, but there's no way I'm letting you tax me more. Sorry.

Guy B comes along and believes something heinous. Let's say he's a classical anti-semite and thinks all Jewish people are criminal and the root of all evil, he hasn't gotten to the point of wanting genocide yet, but he's on the path.

Party R comes along. Party R says, we really care about guns. We want to make sure everybody can buy a gun, and here's why guns are great. Guy B likes this because he thinks he might need a gun in case he runs into a Jewish person. Guy A isn't a gun nut by any means but he wonders about taxes. Party R says they won't raise taxes at all, hell, maybe we'll lower them! Guy A is on board because even though Party L's initial proposition was more enticing, at least Party R won't increase his taxes.

Next thing you know the anti-semite and guy that just wants low taxes are both called "republican" or "on the right". Both their interests become intermingled and caught up in a narrative that stands to represent the entire "party". A candidate comes along that appeals to the intersection of these interests, maybe he says some things that make Guy A a little uncomfortable, but hey at least his taxes are low right? Soon enough the fringe beliefs of Guy B become a more dominant element in the "party line" since the candidate wanted to appeal to all the interests of his party.

And there you have it, Guy A becomes part of the anti-semitic party all because of his own stubbornness and refusal to compromise on a single point and then starts to feel attacked when "the other guys in Party L" start saying he and his guys in Party R are anti-semtic, because he isn't anti-semetic! But the attacks make him dig in more to Party R and gradually become more comfortable with supporting things that maybe would have bothered him before, like hating Jewish people, all because it's "his party" now and at least they still don't raise his taxes.

So yeah, Guy A might wind up feeling "unheard" in all of this and like he's being conflated with neo-nazis when he's not really a neo-nazi himself, but he made his decision. Taxes were so important to him that he turned a blind eye to moral issues and decided to double-down when those issues escalated and "be loyal". Don't feel sorry for these people. That's how representation works. It doesn't matter if you went with the neo-nazis because you want low taxes, you chose them to represent you, so you don't get to say "well I'm not really a neo-nazi because I just wanted low taxes", especially when you doubled down and are only bailing out in the final hour since you finally realize it's repudiate or go down with the ship and your flight mode kicks in. You may not be personally murdering people, but you are an enabler at that point. You made a stupid, amoral decision and you are culpable for that. You need to take responsibility for such a choice.

Now is not the time for sympathy toward "them". I did try to be sympathetic to the plight of this "unheard majority" in 2016. In 2021? Seriously? In order to even field such an argument after 4 years and a legitimate attempt to supplant the American flag for a flag with a single man's name on it seems to me completely delusional. Part of the reason things have gone this far is precisely because bad behavior has had zero consequences for this administration until maybe finally now. This president's incompetences has the death of 369k people and counting attached to it. Not to mention the jailed children, calls to foreign powers to help manipulate the 2020 elections, and deliberate lies to the citizenry about matters pertaining to their health (covid was supposed to "disappear" by Easter, remember?)

>Imagine: a leader calls for a certain racial, ethnic, or religious group to be barred entry to their country.

A religious group is not a race. When China persecuted the Falun Gong, nobody called them racist. You could say it's islamaphobic, but that connotates an irrational fear. It's not completely irrational when the values of many adherents to that religion differ so significantly from secular American values: pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/01/18/stoning-adulterers/.

Fundamentally the difference between a religion and a race is that race is not controllable; it's clearly wrong to discriminate against somebody for something entirely outside of their control. But people do have control over their ideology, so much as some people would advocate discriminating against racists for their racist beliefs, people can advocate for discriminating against people who believe the legal system should sentence to death adulterers, apostates (people who leave their religion) and homosexuals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_homosex...).