Ravelry, an online knitting community that has more than 8 million members, last month announced that it would ban forum posts, projects, patterns and even profiles from users who supported President Trump or his administration.
"We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy," the administrators of Ravelry posted on the site on June 23.
"Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy," the post added.
The administrators have maintained that they aren't endorsing Democrats or banning Republicans. Users who do support the administration have been told they can still participate -- they just can't voice their support on Ravelry.
Ravelry's move was met with both an outpouring of support from those who opposed the administration's policies and condemnation from those who support the president.
Ravelry is not the first online community to issue such an ultimatum to users. The roleplaying game portal RPGnet last fall issued a decree that support for President Trump would be banned on its forums.
"Support for elected hate groups aren't welcome here," the administrators posted. "We can't save the world, but we can protect and care for the small patch that is this board."

Is It Censorship?

The banning of conservative groups hasn't been limited to Ravelry or RPGnet. Facebook last fall announced that it had purged more than 800 U.S. accounts that it identified as flooding users with politically oriented spam.
However, some conservatives -- including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas -- have argued that Facebook has unfairly targeted those expressing conservative opinions. Cruz this spring raised his concerns with representatives from Facebook and Twitter during the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution's hearing, "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse."
The threat of political censorship could be problematic due to the lack of transparency Cruz noted during the April hearing.
"If Big Tech wants to be partisan political speakers it has that right," he said, "but it has no entitlement to a special immunity from liability under Section 230 that The New York Times doesn't enjoy, that The Washington Post doesn't enjoy -- that nobody else enjoys other than Big Tech."

Understanding Section 230

Much of the debate revolves around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the common name for Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As part of a landmark piece of Internet legislation in the United States, it provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" that publishes information provided by third-party users.
The law basically says that those who host or republish speech are not legally responsible for what others say and do. That includes not only Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Comcast or Verizon, but also any services that publish third-party content, which would include the likes of Facebook and Ravelry.
One of Section 230's authors, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has countered that the law was intended to make sure that companies could moderate their respective websites without fear of lawsuits.

Striking a Balance

The divide online is of course just a mirror of the deep political divide in the U.S., and it is unlikely that legal wording will do much to heal it. Battle lines have been drawn, and both sides continue to dig in. The question is whether banning those with differing opinions actually helps or hurts matters.
There is an argument that this is simply defusing controversy and silencing the most extreme voices.
"It was once shared with me that intolerance of intolerance is intolerance," said Nathaniel Ivers, associate professor and chairman of the department of counseling at Wake Forest University.
"We often think of intolerance as an inherently negative thing; however, there are instances in which communities, groups and organizations are justified in establishing zero tolerance clauses for certain behaviors and ideologies," he told TechNewsWorld.
"The challenge, however, is that these clauses are innately rigid and may at times exclude ideas, attitudes and behaviors that are benign," Ivers added.
Then there is the concern of whether this is an issue of censorship. However, those who understand media law know that in the legal sense, censorship applies to the government and media. Private companies actually are within their rights to determine what is appropriate for their audiences.