I just don't think it's practical to treat a social media site like a public agency. I sympathize greatly with the author reading this story, but anyone who's moderated a public website can tell you it would be completely impossible if your most combative users could escalate to the government and demand you prove why you should be allowed to ban them.
It's fine to think this will never happen to you because you're not important enough, or not controversial enough, or have the most mainstream ideas that would guarantee that you won't be a target…
Until it does happen…
The situation here is also a bit different from moderating "a public website".
Noone's saying that everyone should have the right to have their presence and reach amplified.
But these bans on LinkedIn and GitHub apply to the entire account and the entire identity of the user, meaning, you could now be precluded from doing the most basic things compared to all of your peers.
LinkedIn ban precludes you from connecting to employers at in-person events unlike every other attendee. GitHub precludes you from working at any startup that uses GitHub in their workflow.
Plus, as the example shows, causing any sort of disruption isn't even a prerequisite to getting banned by these services.
(Opinions my own, obviously.)
I don't think that's necessarily true.
I think large providers would like to say that, but at the scales of cash involved, I think the burden of saying "no we can't be held accountable for what we do, get lost" should be much higher.
If a significant fraction of people are relying on their personal networks to find jobs, even if they're not working in a job where presenting a public face is a key component, then being cut out of large-scale social networking is no longer divorced from your professional life, it's a necessary service.
It probably isn't practical but you could do things like limit how much of the company is owned by one person and make sure that there are not special voting shares.
It's not the issue of share ownership, it's the issue of size and lack of process ownership, about everyone passing the buck and noone being personally responsible for these failures.
It's about the employees having an inverse incentive, to take actions just for the sake of it.
It's actually exactly about this attitude that somehow noone has the right to be on the platform, which, in turn, makes it easy to justify these forms of deplatforming and censorship, and the resulting self-censorship, too.