It's not just targeted bans of specific people, Shopify banned Trump for completely benign merch and Apple/Google banned Parler (non-partisan Twitter clone which only removes illegal content).
When half the country are feeling discriminated for just expressing their views you've gone too far. Twitter could just have enacted manual approval of Trump tweets instead of banning him for absurd reasons [1], and there would be far less hate all around.
I'm not interested in debating that topic here, and I've edited my original comment to try and avoid sounding like I'm inviting a debate. My point is that you're drawing a line between two very different things with different sets of supporters.
They're not really different things, it's about suddenly banning/criminalizing behavior due to slightly unrelated behavior.
Inciting a riot or storming the Capitol has always been disallowed/illegal, but now it's used as an argument to enact laws/policies to punish unrelated actions/tweets. We're in a situation where stating that you're not attending Biden's inauguration is branded as "inciting violence", and way too few reasonable people are speaking out about it.
The right screams bloody murder about it of course, but we don't listen to them any more. They don't listen to us lefties when we have reasonable things to say. We're quickly decending into a non-functioning society, and both sides are to blame.
> On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump tweeted:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> Shortly thereafter, the President tweeted:
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
> We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy
> As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021
The argumentation is completely absurd though. They argue that his statement of "75 million American patriots" may refer to the hundreds of Capitol rioters and that his statement of him not attending the inauguration, which Biden supports btw, is a signal that it's a safe target to attack.
It's almost impressive how they manage to read things from his two tweets that the tweets didn't include.
I think just as taking him out of context is bad taking the context out of his statements is bad.
He has been using rhetoric of the kind they have accuse him of for a long time now but is always careful to never directly call for violence.
Doublespeak is part of his grifting strategy after all. You would need to see how the extreme groups reacted to those tweets. If they used similar verbiage to what Twitter says I think at this point holding Trump to that as proof of bad enough speaking is fine.
Honestly the reality is his tweet history earned him the ban but pointing to one set of tweets is easier PR.
But private organizations banning people and government legislatures criminalizing activity are very different things, enough so that this concept of "banning/criminalizing" strikes me as meaningless. I just don't see the connection you're proposing.
I don't know what to say here other than, the concept is what's important. There's a huge conceptual gulf between us and I don't know how to bridge it.
When half the country are feeling discriminated for just expressing their views you've gone too far. Twitter could just have enacted manual approval of Trump tweets instead of banning him for absurd reasons [1], and there would be far less hate all around.
[1] The reasons stated for banned him was his two latest benign tweets that 1. his voters would have a voice and 2. that he would not attend Biden's inauguration. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...