I think you may have missed the point. This isn’t just about one incident with James Massey. It is about Medium’s/Medium Staff’s long-standing and systematic editorial bias which privileges and promotes some political viewpoints, viz., regressive left identity politics, over others, viz., traditional progressive liberal and all manner of conservative. I’ve demonstrated that at length here. Editorial guidelines that are vague and give the publishing platform lots of discretion are particularly problematic when we have good reason to believe that the platform is politically biased. This is a big part of why those guidelines are a problem.

No, no one is forcing me or anyone else to write or read work on Medium, just like no one is forcing anyone in particular to read the New York Times or the Washington Post or watch CNN or NBC or MSNBC or any of the major left-leaning mainstream media sources … and yet don’t you think it’s a problem when we can’t trust sources that are supposed to be mainstream and neutral to deliver more or less unbiased content? When we lose trust, then what happens is the emergence of these filter bubbles, where conservatives flee into the world of talk radio and Fox News and only liberals are left behind consuming what passes for “mainstream” news, and the result is two different sets of realities and total polarization. This is why it would be nice if Medium, which is supposed to be an unbiased blogging platform open to all could be trusted to be politically neutral and promote quality rather than particular viewpoints. I understand the desire to crack down on total hate speech and promote civility (if you want to do that, why not ban profanity, which is all over Medium and tends to dumb down and derail conversations that happen here?), but these editorial guidelines go way beyond that.