I would prefer a world where anti-vax posts did not exist, but I also think it’s naïve and pointless to pretend that the suspension of a few high-profile accounts will lead to a change in anything other than the reputations of the social media giants. These bans serve more as P.R., both for places like Twitter, which have come under great scrutiny, and the banned themselves, who immediately get to paint themselves as martyrs.

The shutting down of accounts is only one of the many ways a tech company can suppress content. This past May, The Washington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review both reported that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter had blocked or restricted millions of posts about the conflict over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The affected accounts were overwhelmingly from pro-Palestinian sources. The companies all attributed the restrictions to technical or algorithm errors, an explanation that was rejected by many activists who had encountered similar disruptions before.

To be clear, I am not saying that this is what happened in that instance. My point is more that we have little way of verifying the truth.

Censorship thrives under vague conditions, whether through a loosely worded and selectively enforced ToS or the unknowable machinery of algorithms and glitches. When these are combined, they present a true threat to free expression.