We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.
We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).
In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.
I wasn't aware of SS13, and will look into what happened there. Content moderation at GitHub scale is hard and sometimes mistakes are made.
This is completely fair, but lack of transparency makes it significantly more frustrating.
Grumbly investors beget grumbly board members, who then vote to oust executives to correct the profitability problem.
How are you going to alienate/lose customers by not getting rid of customers? If anything, I'd argue the opposite; a platform that refuses to ban legal content is one that I find easier to trust (for a counterexample, see Google). It's not even like github-like companies are social networks where you can claim that one user's experience of the platform is made worse by another user's posts.
Most US companies these days have no morals, and are easily influenced by these tactics due to greed and fear of being targeted themselves. Silicon Valley and the majority of the big tech companies seem to be especially vulnerable to this, probably due to their own employee demographics.
What many of these companies don't understand, possibly because they live in a relative 'bubble' surrounded by those who think similarly, is that there are a lot of us out there who not only disagree with this type of behavior, but will actively NOT use the services of any company who supports these types of tactics.
The same kinds of "censorship" that you talk about coming from "the left" can be found in extreme parts of every ideology. Conservatives (probably of the rich and christian variety) have pushed many platforms to completely remove all even slightly adult content (the latest example being Tumblr), all sides of the political spectrum have been pressuring sites like YouTube to the point where no political discussion from any side can be monetized...
This is not an issue of political sides - it's an issue of politics (and society) in general.
As for the part about companies not knowing about the people who don't approve of this behaviour: they do. They know exactly how many of us there are: not enough. Losing even a single big investor will make a company lose more money than if everyone who disagreed with them completely stopped using their services.