Twitter has banned Jesse Kelly — are they policing hate, or suppressing political ideas?

With no warning and no explanation, Twitter banned conservative radio host, writer, and retired U.S. Marine Jesse Kelly. Not suspended, but outright banned.

Unlike Twitter's ban of alt-right figures like Laura Loomer and Baked Alaska, there's no plausible or previous factor to explain why Twitter would ban Kelly. He's never engaged in the targeted harassment or hate speech that Twitter's terms of service specifically forbids. Kelly told the Washington Examiner that he's never been so much as temporarily blocked from posting, let alone suspended.

As always, it's important to reiterate that Twitter is a private company. There is no intrinsic right to use it to express oneself. However, Twitter's ban of Jesse Kelly epitomizes two major problems the company is creating not only for its users, but for itself.

First is the obvious quandary. The First Amendment, as a general guiding principle, works. Twitter is right to ban users who engage in incitement and threats, and other forms of targeted harassment. But why would Twitter attempt to rewrite the rules of acceptable speech, to the point that it would ban a mainstream figure as innocuous as Kelly? In doing this, Twitter is digging itself into the hole of effectively endorsing the voices that they do not ban.

And somewhere in there, as they begin to curate their content and ban people with perspectives they don't like, they take on the risk of being viewed by the courts as publishers, and of becoming legally liable for what they allow to be published.