The distinction between government and private groups is not a clean as you might think. At a large enough scale, private groups can start to take on

The distinction between government and private groups is not a clean as you might think. At a large enough scale, private groups can start to take on a role in society that resembles that of a government, should we not then expect them to be held to a standard that resembles that we expect of governments? Absolutely agree that companies, particularly companies with large market share, can effectively wield state-level powers and that it is something we need to figure out as a country. In this case we're talking about Google's all-hands discussion about weeding out bad-faith actors. They weren't trying to silence people who simply thought Trump was the better candidate, they were talking about something very close to spam filtering. "Silence Republicans" is something that (even as a liberal) is something I'd be absolutely opposed to; filtering out outright fraudulent news sources (from any part of the political spectrum) is something we should all support. We've been doing something similar as a country for many years. Notice how tabloids like the National Enquirer aren't typically lumped in with "real" news sources at the newsstand.