Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy

When a person manages to be wrong so efficiently, why on Earth should they feel entitled to partial credit for supporting arguments to a factually incorrect main idea?

The problem is that when the government is derelict in it's duty (or, if critical mass of people believe so), this is the expected outcome. If people lose faith in the government to protect them, they're not going to roll over and die, they'll take whatever measures they deem fit to defend themselves and their property.

Law Enforcement exists for a reason. Maintenance of a degree of order keeps the populace happy while professionalism and codification of enforcement moderates the response (at least in the general case). Ideally, it's the "win-win" scenario where the perpetrators get to be treated well enough, while the populace is confident that violations of their safety and rights will be addressed.

- Facebook is generally considered in colloquial terms, a "platform".

- Expectations by the users are thus that Facebook (the entity) does not dictate opinion, but instead provides an avenue for hosting and discovery of individual opinion.

- Thus, to the userbase, Facebook is not a Single source, but is instead a aggregation of multiple sources of "information" (or opinion; Scare quotes were intentional)

- One-sided enforcement of opinions on topics breaks the above assumption, converting it from "platform", to "publisher".

- This represents far more centralization of information control than the previous "platform" state. I think "centralization" captures my intention here more than the previous "top down" descriptor.

One of the assumptions of a free democracy is that people, as individuals, are permitted to discover their own opinion from available information. It's imperfect, but it's pretty important. If we severely restrict the pool of available information to just the slice amenable to whoever is in power, that's in effect the same as forcing their opinion. After all, you can't form the opposing opinion on something if everything you can find supports it.

Addendum:

On the gotcha of "Facebook's right to free speech". I'm of the opinion that this must be taken in light of scale and the subsequent threats to the individual right to free speech. Here, I declare (unilaterally, agreement may vary) that the individual right to free speech should be held above that of the corporate right, especially when scale is considered. I very much consider the largest digital spaces the closest analogue to the modern public square (some would disagree here) due to their scale and ubiquity.

If the alternative to vigilantism is mob rule I'll choose vigilantism. The real issue here is that this should not be an issue for those living in a western-style representational republic or democracy to deal with, this being the task of the police.

If the monopoly on violence - i.e. the police - is not used to keep the violent at bay others will have to take up that task or the violent will rule - there are plenty of examples in the world where this has been and /or still is the case. That those "others" can end up resembling those they were formed to keep in check is an unfortunate aspect of that type of society and one of the reasons why the monopoly on violence was created. The solution to this conundrum is therefore to refrain from unilateral pacification when confronted with violent opponents. It also means that those politicians who acted upon and/or instigated the "de-fund the police" sloganeering have a lot to answer for, this being as stupid as de-funding the fire brigade when the city just caught fire (which it, incidentally, did in a number of cases).