BOSTON (AP) – A Twitter wag joked about the lights flickering in the White House as Donald Trump signaled to his Morse code followers after Twitter and Facebook crushed the president to incite rebellion.
While deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump has much less far-reaching alternative options. Parler, a right-wing extremist, may be the main candidate, although Google and Apple have withdrawn it from their app stores and Amazon decided to launch it from their web hosting service. That could leave him offline for a week, Parler’s CEO said.
Trump can launch his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts predict growing pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary speeches as Americans take stock of Wednesday’s violent takeover. U.S. Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.
Twitter ended Trump’s nearly 12-year career Friday. By closing your account He quoted a tweet to his 89 million followers that he planned to skip the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20, which he said gave license to riot police to converge once again in Washington.
Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump at least until the day of the inauguration. Twitch and Snapchat have also disabled Trump accounts, while Shopify removed president-affiliated online stores and Reddit removed a subgroup of Trump. Twitter also banned Trump loyalists, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in an extensive purge of accounts that promoted QAnon’s conspiracy theory and the Capitol insurrection. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers.
In a statement Friday, Trump said, “We’ve been negotiating with other sites and we’ll have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building our own platform in the near future.”
Experts had predicted that Trump could appear in Parler, a 2-year magnet for the far right that claims more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr. they are already active. Parler, however, was blown away on Friday when Google removed its smartphone app from its app store because it allowed posts that were intended to “incite continued violence in the United States.” to “plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities.” Public safety issues need to be resolved before it can be restored, Apple said.
Amazon gave up again on Saturday, informing Parler that it should look for a new effective web hosting service on Sunday at midnight. He reminded Parler in a letter, first published by Buzzfeed, that he had informed him in recent weeks of 98 examples of publications “that clearly encourage and incite violence” and said the platform “poses a real risk for public safety ”.
Parler CEO John Matze denounced the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market. We were too successful too fast,” he said in a Saturday night post, saying it was Parler may not be available for up to a week “while we rebuild from scratch.”
Earlier, Matze complained of being expiatory. “The rules that don’t apply to Twitter, Facebook, or even Apple itself, apply to Parler.” He said he “will not fall into politically motivated companies or those authoritarians who hate free speech.”
Loss of access to Google and Apple app stores, whose operating systems allow hundreds of millions of smartphones, severely limits Parler’s reach, although it will continue to be accessible from the web browser. The loss of Amazon Web Services would mean that Parler will have to struggle to find another web host, in addition to reengineering.
Gab is another potential landing point for Trump. But it has also had issues with internet hosting. Google and Apple ripped it off from their app stores in 2017 and the following year became homeless on the Internet due to anti-Semitic publications attributed to the man accused of killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Microsoft also terminated a web hosting agreement.
Online speech experts expect Google’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube-led social media companies to police more strongly on hatred and incitement after the Capitol rebellion, as Western democracies already do led by Nazi-besieged Germany.
David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine and a former United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, believes that the world’s speakers will also face pressure from citizens and law enforcement. ‘order, as well as the little-known places where it now looks like there will be more pre-opening disturbances being organized. They include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released Saturday by The Alethea Group, which tracks misinformation.
Kaye rejects arguments by U.S. Conservatives, including former UN Ambassador to the President Nikki Haley, that Trump’s ban goes wild with the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting free speech. “Silencing people, not to mention the president of the United States, is what is happening in China, not in our country,” Haley tweeted.
“It’s not that the rules of the platforms are draconian. People are not caught in rape unless they do something clearly against the rules, ”said Kaye. And not only citizens have the right to freedom of expression. “Companies also have their freedom of speech.”
While initially arguing their need to be neutral in speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually succumbed to the public pressure that marked the line, especially when the so-called Plandemic video arose early in the COVID-19 pandemic urging people not to wear masks, noted civic media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Zuckerman hopes Trump’s disfigurement can spur major changes online. First, there may be an accelerated split of social media world following ideological lines.
“Trump will attract a lot of audience wherever he goes,” he said. This could mean more platforms with smaller and more ideologically isolated audiences.
A split could push people to extremes or make extremism less contagious – he said: Maybe people looking for a welding video on YouTube will no longer be offered an unrelated QAnon video. Less top-down and more self-governing alternative media systems could also emerge.
Zuckerman also expects a major debate on the regulation of online speech, including in Congress.
“I suspect you will see the efforts of the right arguing that there should be no regulations on acceptable speech,” he said. “I think you’ll see arguments from the democratic side that speech is a public health issue.”
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Associated Press writers Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, and Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.