One of the frustrating things for those who don't get worked up about the supposed

crisis of big tech censorship, and I am one of them, is that discussing content moderation

can quickly devolve into a game of whack-a-mole.

The people who trade in loose references to Orwell and Kafka are always finding new cases

to twist and new studies to misconstrue.

Even the blocking of the GOP's spammy fundraising emails is now a cause for martyrdom. That said, I think the big tech censorship

crowd tends to rally around two main cases. One is the slowed spread on Twitter and Facebook

of a New York post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. But I'd describe that case like this.

Two edge providers, wary of Russian election interference,

took a cautious approach to a piece of news fed to a news outlet

directly by the Trump administration.

Further, that news story got wide circulation anyway.

Did Twitter and Facebook handle that case? Well, not really, but 1984 it was not.

The other case is the decision by Apple, Google, and Amazon in the wake of the January 6th riot at the Capitol

to shut the social media platform parlor

out of the I store, Google Play, and Amazon Web Services. For reasons we'll probably get into,

I don't think this is a compelling case of big tech censorship either. But of the two cases,

I think it is certainly the more interesting one. You have a cloud

service, a provider further down the stack, booting an entire platform. What's more, you could argue

that while Parlor was a hot product at the time, it has struggled ever since to regain its

footing in the social media market.

We don't know the counterfactual, and obviously new competitors such as Getter and

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