BOSTON (AP) – A Twitter joke joked about lights flickering on and off in the White House, Donald Trump signaling to followers in Morse code after Twitter and Facebook suppressed the president for inciting rebellion.
While he doesn’t have his big online megaphones, Trump has alternative options with a much smaller reach. The far-right Parler is arguably the lead candidate, although Google and Apple have both removed it from their app stores and Amazon has decided to launch it from its web hosting service. That could knock it offline for a week, said Parler’s CEO.
Trump may be launching his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and freedom of speech experts are anticipating mounting pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary language as Americans take stock of the violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol. Wednesday by a mob incited by Trump.
Twitter ended Trump’s nearly 12-year run on Friday. By closing his account quoted a tweet to his 89 million followers that he planned to skip the January 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who he said licensed rioters to reunite in Washington.
In any case, Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump until inauguration day. Twitch and Snapchat also disabled Trump’s accounts, while Shopify removed online stores affiliated with the president and Reddit removed a Trump subgroup. Twitter also banned Trump loyalists, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, in a sweeping purge of accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol uprising. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers.
In a statement, Trump said Friday, “We have been negotiating with several other sites and will be making a major announcement soon, while also looking at opportunities to build our own platform in the near future.”
Experts had predicted Trump could turn up on Parler, a 2-year-old magnet for the far right that claims more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active. However, Parler faced headwinds on Friday when Google yanked its smartphone app from its app store to allow messages that “ incite continued violence in the U.S. ” Apple followed suit Saturday evening after Parler gave 24 hours to handle complaints that it was used to plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities. According to Apple, public safety issues must be resolved before it is fixed.
Amazon struck another blow on Saturday, letting Parler know it should start looking for a new web hosting service at midnight on Sunday. It reminded Parler in a letter first reported by Buzzfeed that it had briefed it in recent weeks on 98 examples of messages “clearly encouraging and inciting violence” and said the platform “poses a very real risk to public safety. “
Parler CEO John Matze condemned the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace. We were successful too soon, “he said in a Saturday night post, saying that Parler might not be available for a week” because we’re rebuilding from scratch. “
Earlier Matze complained that he had been made a scapegoat. Standards that don’t apply to Twitter, Facebook, or even Apple itself apply to Parler. He said he “does not give in to politically motivated corporations and authoritarians who hate freedom of speech.”
The loss of access to Google’s and Apple’s app stores – whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones – severely limits Parler’s reach, although it remains accessible through a web browser. The loss of Amazon Web Services means that Parler has to look for another web host in addition to the re-engineering.
Gab is another potential landing spot for Trump. But it has also had problems with internet hosting. Google and Apple both launched it from their app stores in 2017, and the following year it was left internet-homeless for a while due to anti-Semitic reports attributed to the man accused of murdering 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Microsoft has also terminated a web hosting contract.
Online speech experts expect social media companies led by Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube to follow more vigorous hate speech and incentives in the police force in the aftermath of the Capitol uprising, like Western democracies led by Nazi-tormented Germany already do.
David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine and former UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech, believes the world’s Parlers will also come under pressure from the public and law enforcement, as will little-known sites where further disruption before the inauguration is now apparent. be organized. They include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released Saturday by The Alethea Group that tracks disinformation.
Kaye rejects arguments from US conservatives, including former UN ambassador to the president, Nikki Haley, that the Trump ban destroyed the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting free speech. “Silencing people, not to mention the president of the US, is what is happening in China, not our country,” Haley tweeted.
“It’s not that the rules of the platforms are draconian. People don’t get caught in violation until they do something clearly against the rules, ”said Kaye. And not only individual citizens are entitled to freedom of expression. “The companies also have their freedom of expression.”
While Twitter and Facebook initially advocated their need to be neutral about speech, they are gradually yielding to public pressure, especially when the so-called Plandemic video Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, urging people not to wear masks, noted Ethan Zuckerman, a professor of civil media at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Zuckerman expects Trump’s de-platforming could cause significant online shifts. First, there may be an accelerated fragmentation of social media world along ideological lines.
“Trump will draw a lot of audiences wherever he goes,” he said. That could mean more platforms with a smaller, more ideologically isolated audience.
A splintering could push people to extremes – or make extremism less contagious, he said: Perhaps people looking for a welding video on YouTube will no longer be offered an unrelated QAnon video. Alternative media systems that are less top-down and more self-governing can also emerge.
Zuckerman also expects a major debate about online speech regulation, including in Congress.
“I suspect you will see efforts on the right to claim that there should be no prescriptions for acceptable speaking,” he said. “I think you’ll see arguments from the Democratic side that speech is a public health problem.”
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Associated Press writers Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California and Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.