I read a quote somewhere saying “A monopoly corporation is just a branch of your government that you don’t have representation in.” I think this applies to a lot of the actions taken by GOOG, FB, AAPL on their App Store, etc. yes, they have their reasons and maybe they’re even justified, but it’s not a good thing that they should have that power when there aren’t alternatives.
I haven’t followed all of these, so some I know more about than others.
Twitter - someone claiming bans were 95% pro Trump as of 2016. More stats etc here.
I began my analysis by compiling a list of every prominent individual or political party known to have been banned from Twitter since its founding.
Reddit - the main pro-Trump group, The_Donald, had been harassed by Reddit for years, subject to various suppression measures against their popularity, and after that “quarantines” and finally being banned entirely. Each time, Reddit made up new rules and restrictions, eventually banning them for failure to moderate harassment because anyone can feel offended these days, especially people who show up to politically opposed group looking to be offended. They sure didn’t ban /politics or /worldnews for being just as far left as the Donald was far right, but Reddit is run by avid leftists and have taken tons of Chinese money so they’ve got a political agenda.
MailChimp - a popular email list manager turned censor decided that anyone sending out anything “misleading” in their sole opinion was subject to ban and no, they weren’t providing you the list of your email subscribers if you hadn’t already maintained that locally. Conservative blog lists were primarily targeted, as well as those trying to organize peaceful rallies or protests. This was a departure one month ahead of the election (coincidence?) from their previous long standing policy of not caring about anyone less crazy than Alex Jones (the sole exception going back several years).
Facebook I avoid so I’m less familiar. They have been a lot more even handed and profit motivated than politically generally compared to the other big tech companies. They did partially suppress the NYP Hunter Biden exposé but have been more active since the election now that they know which way the political winds are blowing.
A number of smaller forums with free speech were shut down or DDOS’ed under unclear circumstances in the last two weeks. Others were suddenly forced to change hosting providers or the like, again around or shortly after the election and another batch around the recent “coup”.
I think it’s also telling on the news front that you can pretty easily predict the political leaning of a news site by whether they allow comments or not. I haven’t seen too many of the MSM news sites aside from NYT allowing comments at all, while most the right leaning ones do. It strikes me as the difference between telling you what to think and allowing you to discuss things and think for yourself.