If your position is genuinely that you believe website operators should be mandated by law to host content they do not want to host except when that content has been specifically determined to be illegal, then we simply disagree on that point - I think that would make the world a worse place and I prefer the world where that rule is not in effect.
But if you believe in allowing the tiniest ounce of operator discretion, you believe in censorship, in principle.
Just think about the absolutist argument for a moment and it becomes incoherent: am I infringing on your free speech if I downvote you? What if I upvote you? If someone reads my comment, then decides not to read your comment, aren't I censoring you just as much as if I gave my friend a browser extension that blocks only your comments?
> "If your position is genuinely that you believe website operators should be mandated by law to host content they do not want to host except when that content has been specifically determined to be illegal, then we simply disagree on that point."
That's another meme I see repeated a lot. If we go back before 1950, the same argument you are making was used justify businesses refusing to provide service to women, minorities, LGBT people, etc. It's funny to see people supposedly on the left recycling discredited arguments from the bigoted right to justify their behavior today.
Society had to create protected classes, making something illegal that was already intrinsically immoral, to make clear that the argument you are trying to make is bogus. Perhaps it's time for liberals (and I mean actual liberals, not the left) to campaign to make political affiliation a protected class too.
Political affiliation being a protected class doesn't help your case. In fact, it already is a protected class in CA. But that doesn't matter, because parler doesn't and didn't claim to be republican, and wasn't removed for hosting republican points of view.
The protected class argument doesn't make sense until Mitch mcconnell and Mike pence are being deplatformed. And they aren't, because this has nothing to do with political affiliation and never did. That's just a mask the bad actors wear.
It is in fact interesting as that's one of key differences between the anti-discrimination laws of different countries.
USA in general considers gender, religion, color, national origin, race, and age as protected characteristics, but permits discrimination on political beliefs - but some jurisdictions in USA do have such a prohibition (e.g. DC - https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits). Some provinces of Canada prohibit such discrimination (in e.g. employment) but some don't. As another example, German constitution at the very beginning (Article 3, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...) asserts anti-discrimination for, among other things, political opinion.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 2 asserts that these rights shall apply " without distinction of [...] political or other opinion", and European Convention of Human Rights Article 14 explicitly prohibits discrimination based on "political or other opinions", which has also been applied by European Court of Human Rights in e.g. Redfearn v United Kindgom [2012] ECHR 1878.
That would forbid (for example) employers to fire people just because they were active members of Proud Boys or Antifa or the Communist party or KKK or whatever. However, IMHO this would not prohibit practical censorship of political opinions (free speech is not a core human right in either of these two declarations), it would still allow platforms to set rules for messages on their platform and kick out people who violate these rules - it would just disallow them to kick out people for having a political affiliation that they're expressing outside of that platform, but that's not what was happening here.
Just think about the absolutist argument for a moment and it becomes incoherent: am I infringing on your free speech if I downvote you? What if I upvote you? If someone reads my comment, then decides not to read your comment, aren't I censoring you just as much as if I gave my friend a browser extension that blocks only your comments?