I'm personally not sure where to stand on this. On one hand, you're right: you can probably come up with an excuse for every platform as to why "making a statement" shouldn't be permitted.

On the other hand, do we really want everyone able to make political statements in unrelated arenas? Literally everyone feels strongly about something. Letting all causes be elevated via unrelated venues would be untenable, which means you must draw a line somewhere.

I suppose it's not totally unreasonable to draw that line by saying, "all content must be related to the topic at hand" when it comes to, for example, a gaming competition.

> Letting all causes be elevated via unrelated venues would be untenable

I'm not sure it would be untenable. People generally intuit the social cost/risk that comes with making a statement in an unrelated venue. That is a natural force acting against people randomly bringing up strongly held opinions on unrelated platforms. Explicitly drawing and enforcing a line just doesn't seem necessary.

> I suppose it's not totally unreasonable to draw that line by saying, "all content must be related to the topic at hand"

I think this would have the effect of either completely sterilizing platform discussion or being impossible to enforce reasonably. For instance, what would happen if a competitor just mentioned something totally innocuous that would incense nobody but was off-topic? Should that be punished?

that's what the off topic subforum is for, every site should have one in some form as every true community wants to talk about unrelated (to the main site topic) stuff especially as people get to know one another

I do believe making a website is still cheap and easy. Not to mention some platforms like twitter do allow for political discourse on them (even if spotty).

The idea is that if the platform owners don't want it, a platform user should respect that choice.

Respect is a bit too far for me. Accept, is more more style.

When you play in someone else's sandbox, you're going to have to deal with their rules. No one is guaranteed an audience.

Conversely, if someone makes their sandbox publicly available, they accept some risk that someone else in it may behave in a way that they don't like.

You can argue that Blizzard was well within their rights in punishing Blitzchung, but then Blizzard's audience is well within their rights to be upset with said punishment.

> Conversely, if someone makes their sandbox publicly available, they accept some risk that someone else in it may behave in a way that they don't like.

Actually, you don’t have to accept that. That’s what moderation is for.

Moderation is a method to manage the risk, if anything the existence of moderation indicates that platforms accept it to some extent.

>I do believe making a website is still cheap and easy

Is it now? Parler shows that if you rock the boat, your hosting will be pulled and your phone app removed. Google censors a certain page that was the successor to r/The_Donald on Reddit, along with another certain chan style site. Similarly Gab got payment processors and hosting pulled out.

Now I have never bothered to explore these sites, but if their public image is telling of the truth, then I deplore the political narrative within them. Yet they still paint a real clear example that companies can and will screw you over if they want to, with not a whole lot you can do about it.