Within days the most powerful man in the world had been permanently cut off from communicating directly to his more than 120 million fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter.
After years of providing oxygen to the political guerrilla tactics of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey finally decided that fanning the flames of violent insurrection through a firehose of incendiary falsehoods violated their terms of service (sort of).
From a purely legal point of view, Facebook and Twitter were on solid ground. The First Amendment might be the most protective free speech standard in the world, but this bulwark of liberty protects the social media platforms from government officials, not government officials from the platforms.
Read the full piece by Executive Director Jacob Mchangama in Arc Digital.