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Deprived of his main online megaphones, Donald Trump seeks alternative ways to broadcast his messages in his final days in the White House.
After Twitter, Facebook and Instagram shut down the president for inciting rebellion in the wake of the unrest in Washington, Trump’s main options appear to be far less far-reaching.
Chief among them is the far-right Parler, even if Google removed him from its app store on Friday and Apple threatened the same.
Trump can launch his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts anticipate mounting pressure on all social media platforms to curb inflammatory speeches as Americans evaluate the violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday for a mob incited by Trump.
Twitter ended Trump’s nearly 12-year career on Friday. In closing his account, he cited a tweet to his 89 million followers that he planned to skip the January 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden that he said gave rioters license to converge on Washington once more.
Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump until at least inauguration day. Twitch and Snapchat have also disabled Trump 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 deep purge of accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol uprising. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers.
In a statement Friday, Trump said: “We have been negotiating with several other sites and will have a big announcement soon, while also looking into the possibilities of building our own platform in the near future.”
The “immense power that social media platforms have as guardians of public discourse” had been flexed like never before, a power that should be concerning even to supporters of Trump’s ban, tweeted Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight Institute of the First Amendment in Columbia. College.
Experts are betting that Trump will appear on Parler, a two-year magnet for the far right that has more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr are already active. However, Parler had headwinds on Friday when Google pulled its smartphone app from its app store for allowing posts that seek to “incite continued violence in the United States,” and Apple threatened to do the same, giving Parler a 24 hour ultimatum.
Apple told Parler executives in an email on Friday that it had received complaints that the app was being used to “plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities.”
Parler CEO John Matze complained on his site about being a scapegoat.
“The standards that don’t apply to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple, apply to Parler,” he said, adding that he would not “give in to politically motivated companies and authoritarians who hate free speech.”
Losing access to the Google and Apple app stores, whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones, severely limits Parler’s reach, although it will remain accessible via the web browser.
Another possible landing spot for Trump is Gab, although both Google and Apple removed it from their app stores in 2017.
Online speech experts hope that social media companies led by Google’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will more vigorously control hate speech and incitement in the wake of the Capitol rebellion, as the Western democracies led by the Capitol already do. Germany ravaged by Nazism.
David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine and a former UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, believes that the world’s Parlers will also face pressure from the public and law enforcement, as will little sites. known where there are more interruptions prior to the inauguration. now it’s apparently getting organized. These include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released Saturday by The Althea Group, which tracks disinformation.
Kaye rejects arguments by American conservatives, including the president’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, that Trump’s ban savagely attacked the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting free speech.
“Silencing people, not to mention the president of the United States, is what happens in China, not our country,” Ms. Haley tweeted.
But Kate replied, “It’s not that the platform rules are draconian. People don’t get caught up in violations unless they do something clearly against the rules. “
Although they initially argued their need to be neutral in speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually gave in to public pressure, drawing a line especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged early in the Covid-19 pandemic urging people not to wear masks, he noted. the civic media professor. Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Zuckerman hopes that the removal of Trump’s platforms could spur major changes online. First, there may be an accelerating fragmentation of the social media world along ideological lines.
“Trump will attract a large crowd wherever he goes,” he said. That could mean more platforms with smaller and more ideologically isolated audiences.
A splinter could push people to extremes, or make extremism less contagious, he said. Perhaps people searching for a welding video on YouTube will no longer come across an unrelated QAnon video. Less top-down and more autonomous alternative media systems could also emerge.
Zuckerman also expects a great debate on the regulation of online speech, including in Congress.
“I suspect that you will see efforts by the right arguing that there should be no regulations on acceptable speech,” he said. “I think you will see arguments from the democratic side that speech is a public health problem.”
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