Yesterday, Facebook banned a number of prominent loons from its Blue App site and from Instagram, thereby making it .00001 percent more tolerable to be online. These incendiary figures include Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and entryway bondage enthusiast Laura Loomer. After the bans, a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed, “We've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology.” But of course, that’s a good ol’-fashioned Facebook lie, the kind of lie that Mark Zuckerberg would be comfortable parroting to Congress. After all, Donald Trump Jr. is still on Facebook, isn’t he?

Moreover, banning Alex Jones from Facebook is easy, so easy that somehow Twitter thought of banning him before even Facebook did. This is because while Jones has a high profile—far too high—he is still part of an online fringe that is more or less acceptable to evict from the online discourse. Ah, but what happens when his kind of fringe thinking seeps into the brains of establishment leaders and, in the process, consumes them?

I’ll tell you what happens: nothing. I know this because Vice published an exposé about Twitter last week that laid bare something you almost certainly already knew: that it is NOT acceptable to them to digitally evict those who hold actual power:

On a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, (a Twitter executive) argued.

I would accuse that executive of saying the quiet part loud, but EVERYONE says the quiet part loud now. Donald Trump is president explicitly because he says the quiet part loud. Crazy loud. And Facebook and Twitter have thrived in part because, despite the fact that they subcontract thousands of poor bastards to sift through the garbage to weed out content they deem objectionable, they let their users say the quiet part out loud all the time. That goes for Republican leaders as well, such as eternal disgrace Steve King:

That tweet is still up, and King is in absolutely no danger of having his Twitter account taken away from him, despite the fact that he’s one of many white supremacist tumors riddling our legislative body. Like a pro sports team, social-media outlets may ban the occasional unruly bro throwing beers on the field, but they’re not touching the luxury-box patrons. They’re not fucking with the big money. But these platforms should. They should ban the shit out of King and Matt Gaetz and the president himself. All of them deserve the same fate as Yiannopoulos, who shriveled into nothing after his Twitter ban and now has to rent himself out to birthday parties to scrape together a dollar.

If Americans don’t find banning politicians violating the stated rules acceptable, then that's a massive indictment of the electorate: an endemic societal problem that requires fixing. Banning certain politicians is a NECESSARY trade-off, one Americans ought to live with, if platforms want to make an honest effort to get rid of all white supremacist propaganda. The fish rots from the head. Michelle Obama once said of her husband, “I've seen firsthand that being president doesn't change who you are. It reveals who you are.” You can go right ahead and apply that quote directly to Donald Trump’s presidency, which reveals a great deal about this country, about Republican leadership, and about a tech industry that profits off of Americans' poor efforts to police their own online behavior and also profits off of hatred (and perhaps revels in it) while attempting in vain to pretend they keep it at an arm’s distance.