Democrats aren’t “banning conservatives for their political preference on social media.” The Democratic Party doesn’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. The people who run those companies for the benefit of their shareholders made the decisions.

In fact, no one is “banning conservatives for their political preference on social media’. The people being banned are being banned for violating the terms of service of the platforms, terms of service that are set up by the owners of said platform to discourage content that they believe will drive away users (and therefore damage the property of their shareholders).

(Aside: If you go to the websites of any of these conservatives who run their own, such as Alex Jones, you’ll find a fascinating thing. They have their own terms of service, which generally look very much like the ones they complain about at other sites. At InfoWars, for instance, you’ll find that they reserve the right to remove any content you post if they don’t like it, and to delete your account if you violate the terms. So if you’re really looking for “double standards,” there’s a good place to start.)

In general, if you’re a private business in the US, you have the right to choose who you do business with on pretty much any grounds you want. I say “pretty much,” because we’ve decided that there are some reasons, largely due to a history of discrimination, that can’t be used for this. Most of them — race, national origin, sexual preference — are immutable characteristics. The one exception we recognize is religion. And the law is fairly strict; to prove discrimination, you have to show that you were discriminated against because of one of the named characteristics. If you run a sports bar in Boston and have a rule that you don’t allow anyone wearing Yankees logos and a black guy wants to come in wearing a Yankees hat and you don’t let him, you’re not going to run afoul of the law.

Political affiliation or ideology is a chosen characteristic, and is not protected under the law. So even if social media platforms were kicking people off because of their ideology rather than their behavior (Narrator: They’re not) they wouldn’t be in any trouble with the law. Nor would it be a double standard, as the two things (ideology and sexual orientation) are clearly fundamentally different in that one is innate and one is chosen.

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