system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The Trump/Parlor bans are due to free market economics

The recent events of social media companies banning accounts, delisting apps, and pulling hosting is not purely for the sake of safety but is for liability and profitability concerns.

Just like a bar that has a policy to take away a drunk patrons keys these companies have determined the liabilities (drunk driver crashs) out way the possible benefits (sell a few more drinks).

The executives of Twitter, Google , Facebook, Amazon, and the rest don't give two shits about possible incendiary or violence inciting rhetoric that we've seen. Otherwise these actions would have happened long ago. If these companies did not take action this time they would probably face a significantly larger federal response then they will now. This could have other effects such as opening them up for lawsuits. 

The other issues was effect on internal operations. Long before Trump supporters stormed the US capitol, groups in these tech companies had submitted petitions or emails on taking action. The events at the US capitol gave a physical display of what these companies were partially responsible for. This makes it harder for employees to stay at that company and even harder to recruit out of college. Unlike 4 years ago, I think college students will pause before accepting an internship or a job from one of these tech giants. 

I would be interested to hear if people have a different take on this. Why would executives at these publically traded companies make this decision now if it didn't have to do with profitability of the company? If that was the case why wait until now?

Edit: some of the comments are extensively talking about Section 230-c1. The section in question is shown below. This post was not intended to be a conversation about section 230 but rather my view that tech companies don't really care about issues until it hits or has the possibility to hit their bottom line.

 "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
gpt
Under the law, Twitter is considered a "platform" and not a "publisher" which means they have less legal responsibility for what gets posted.   If someone violates copyright, defames someone, or incites violence, twitter isn't legally responsible the way a newspaper is.   By being a platform, it means they're just hosting other people's content and can avoid legal responsibility for it.

You don't get to have it both ways.  They don't get to both control what gets posted AND have no legal responsibility for what is on their site.  If they control the content then they're a publisher and need to be legally responsible for what is said.

Package delivery services have a similar exchange of rights.  If UPS delivers drugs to your address, your UPS driver isn't in legal trouble for delivering drugs.  These are called "common carrier laws".  And in exchange for those legal protections, package companies don't have the right to open your package.   They legally cannot open anything.  Which is what protects them.  If they can't legally open it, then they can't be held responsible for what is inside.