Crushed by Twitter, Trump seeks new megaphone online

A Twitter joker joked about flashing lights at the White House and Donald Trump signaling his followers in Morse code after Twitter and Facebook cracked down on the president for inciting rebellion.

Though deprived of his large online megaphones, Trump has much smaller alternative options. The far-right Parler may be the main candidate, although Google and Apple have removed him from their app stores and Amazon decided to remove him from their web host. That could take you offline for a week, the Parler CEO said.

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 quoted a tweet to his 89 million followers saying he planned to skip the January 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden that he said gave rioters license to converge on Washington a one more time.

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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.”

Experts had predicted that Trump could appear on Parler, a 2-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 US.” Apple followed suit Saturday night after giving Parler 24 hours to address complaints that it was being used. to “plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities.” Public safety issues will need to be resolved before it is restored, Apple said.

Amazon took another hit on Saturday, informing Parler that it would need to search for a new web host starting at midnight Sunday. He reminded Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, that he had informed him in recent weeks of 98 examples of posts “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 end competition in the marketplace. We were too successful and too fast, “he said in a post Saturday night, saying Parler might not be available for up to a week” while we rebuild from scratch. “

Previously, Matze complained of being a scapegoat. “Standards that don’t apply to Twitter, Facebook, or even Apple, apply to Parler.” He said he “will 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. The loss of Amazon Web Services will mean that Parler will have to struggle to find another web server in addition to reengineering.

Gab is another possible landing site for Trump. But he has also had problems with internet hosting. Google and Apple ripped him out of their app stores in 2017 and he was left homeless on the internet for a time the following year due to anti-Semitic posts attributed to the man accused of killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Microsoft also terminated a web hosting contract.

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 the little-known places where there are apparently more outages leading up to the opening. being organized. These include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released Saturday by The Alethea Group, which tracks disinformation.

Kaye rejects the arguments of American conservatives, including the president’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, that Trump’s ban savagely attacked the United States First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting freedom of speech. “Silencing the people, not to mention the president of the United States, is what happens in China, not our country,” Haley tweeted.

“It’s not that the platform rules are draconian. People don’t get caught up in infractions unless they do something clearly against the rules, ”Kaye said. And not only individual citizens have the right to freedom of expression. “Companies also have their freedom of expression.”

Although they initially argued their need to be neutral in speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually gave in to public pressure drawing the line, especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged early in the Covid-19 pandemic urging people not to wear masks, he noted. civic media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Zuckerman hopes that the removal of Trump’s platforms could drive major changes online. First, there may be an accelerating fragmentation of the social media world along ideological lines.

“Trump will attract a large audience 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 video about welding on YouTube will no longer be offered 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.”