Pamela Geller, who rose to fame in her successful effort to prevent an Islamic community center and mosque being built near the site of the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan, was yesterday banned from Twitter.
Gellar was banned not for anything she said about muslims, but for challenging the integrity of last year's elections.
In an age of constant anguish over social media policies and post-Trump purges of the worst accounts, Geller's departure has met with little fanfare; her star faded as competition for attention grew on the right after Trump's election.
But it's easy to forget that she was not a fringe figure. Her campaign against the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque' received broad political and media support, enjoyed wide public support as a result, and succeeded in its goal of preventing the development. It helped establish two bedrock media norms of the 2010s: first, that freedom of speech is best defined in conservative interests, and second, that no matter how extremist a position is, policy norms (such as journalism's voice from nowhere and the banhammer at Facebook) will call the shots from wherever the signal average moves to.
