Maybe everyone considers this to be good progress

I don’t see it as progress, but good in this scenario. Like you said, this isn’t a new development at all.

this is a pretty dystopion look when you take a step back

I think it already is. Has been for over a century, for many people. The bottom line is private companies can essentially shut people out of employment, if they want. It’s tough to live like that, that’s why anti-discrimination legislation has been so important. So yes, I do cheer when a company decides to, or is pressured into, removing confirmed neo-Nazis from employment, but I’m aware that we don’t want to revert to a society where people are unreasonably removed due to age, ethnicity, sex/gender, union status, etc… Not all politics is equal or equivalent, neo-Nazism is inherently and proudly harmful to most of society, there’s no “both sides” symmetry.

I’m definitely familiar with censorship and oppression powers being used against both reactionary and progressive groups. In fact, that’s an important part of how Lemmy was founded and grew. And it’s also why socialist groups campaigned against some of the protest laws introduced under the guise of being anti-Nazi legislation, which clearly didn’t achieve it’s purported goals. You’re right to be skeptical about institutions making political decisions with their power.

As for private companies, these political decisions are typically either guided by the personal beliefs of the owners/shareholders (see Elon Musk’s influence on twitter’s speech restrictions, or any mass media company) or by public pressure and reputational risk (see reddit only deleting some controversial communities once they make it into a newspaper, or the millions of companies making paper-thin political signalling efforts in line with whatever political positions are widely popular).

Because of this, I believe it’s important for us to build worker power as citizens to be able to pressure these companies into making pro-social political decisions, instead of anti-social political decisions in the interests of their rich shareholders. In a word, make private companies care about us, because most of them don’t.