By the time Donald Trump on Wednesday became the first president in American history to be impeached twice, he had already become the first president to be canceled by Silicon Valley.After years of defending his presence on their platforms, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media networks decided that the assault on the Capitol had left them no choice but to suspend his accounts — in Twitter’s case, permanently.

“A successful impeachment would be an embarrassing end to Mr. Trump’s political career,” my colleague Kevin Roose writes. “But losing his huge online following — 88 million followers on Twitter, and 35 million on Facebook — would deprive him of cultural influence long into the future. It takes away the privilege he seems to covet most: the ability to commandeer the world’s attention with a push of a button.”

The decisions drew praise from online-extremism researchers, but they also stirred concern among free-speech advocates. Will deplatforming the president actually stave off further violence, and what does it reveal about the state of free digital expression in the United States? Here’s what people are saying.

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“Making matters worse,” Matt Stoller and Sarah Miller write for The Guardian, “in seeking ad money and quick profits, Facebook and Google, as well as private equity, have killed the pro-social institutions on which we rely, such as local newspapers, by redirecting advertising revenue to themselves.” In the past 16 years alone, about a quarter of the country’s newspapers have disappeared, according to a University of North Carolina report.