I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but they can be interesting or amusing to ponder. I’ve dreamed one up (and I’ve not doubt I’m not the first) that could explain a current situation.
We’ve all seen that there has been a spate of “deplatforming” by most of the major social media companies. It has, I’m sure, surprised nobody that the bulk of these have been aimed at those on the right side of the political spectrum. One of the more high profile of these was Alex Jones, who I’m not sure is so much “right wing” as “straight up whackaloon” with some views that are right-ish. Why might the likes of YouTube and Vimeo and Facebook and Twitter being doing this? In some cases, there is a clear violation of terms of service; in other cases it’s not so clear, and there are some distinct inequities (Candace Owens, conservative, gets suspended for retweeting the racist tweets of Sarah Jeong, a leftist who has *not* been suspended; Alex Jones gets booted off everything because he’s “fake news,” yet “Ancient Aliens,” The History Channel and Giorgio Tsoukalos are allowed to remain). So the obvious conclusion is that these companies are doing this either to placate the screeching left, or because they themselves are on the left. But there is a *possibility* that there is another explanation.
Every time these companies boot someone for blatantly political reasons, they hasten their own demise. They are ticking off the right half of the country directly, and no doubt also disturbing a noticeable fraction of the non-looney portion of the left. These actions spur the creation of alternative social media that caters to the political right and reduce their own customer base. This is of course a bad business decision. But the calculus may be that if they *didn’t* do this they’d irritate their leftist customers. And the left is far more intolerant of opposing viewpoints than the right is these days; not too many conservatives were cheesed off that Twitter allowed Obamas campaign on there, for instance. So the choice is between letting the conservatives stay and risking their leftwing customer base (along with risking firebombs from their leftwing customers), or booting their conservative customers, who almost certainly *won’t* firebomb their offices. Both choices are bad.
Here’s where the conspiracy theory comes in.
As I have pointed out several times, these are private companies and they are free to reject the business of whoever they want. But every time they do that, they incentivize right wingers to demand that these companies be disallowed, by law, from booting people for political reasons. It might be that this is what these companies actually want. If they are barred from booting someone for political reasons, the whackjobs won’t be angry at, say, Twitter for letting Trump tweet. And the companies will keep paying customers on both the left *and* the right. It would be no particular issue for Facebook to permit Alex Jones *and* The History Channel to stay on; they each drive considerable traffic and thus ad revenue. “Gee whiz,” they might say to the rabid Antifa horde, “We’d *looooove* to boot everyone with a MAGA hat avatar, but, gosh, we’d be in violation of Trumps latest executive order. Sorry guys…”
It is, almost certainly, too much to hope for that what these companies secretly want and are working towards is actual freedom of speech and a minimum of censorship. But it’s interesting to ponder.