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NEW YORK – Donald Trump’s friends, family and advisers have bitterly complained that the president’s ban on Twitter after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol amounts to an assault on free speech by radical leftists.
Ironically, given the enormous influence of the platform, they have voiced their complaints first on… Twitter.
The choice underscores the platform’s large readership and the relative scarcity of alternatives.
“Freedom of speech is dead and controlled by lords of the left,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, asked, “Who will be the next to be silenced?”
And Mike Pompeo, posting not as secretary of state but on his personal account, tweeted: “Unfortunately, this is not a new tactic on the left. They have worked to silence opposing voices for years. “
‘Incitement’ For the influential Republican senator Ted Cruz, the decisions of Twitter and some other social networks were “absurd and deeply dangerous.”
“Why,” he continued, “should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?”
Each of the above messages was posted on Twitter, the social network that for years has been Trump’s preferred means of communicating with the public and sometimes even other world leaders.
But on Friday, amid widespread fury after he encouraged supporters who made their way to the United States Capitol in bloody and chaotic melee, Twitter permanently banned him.
He was taking an unusual step, he said, “due to the risk of further incitement to violence.”
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch have teamed up to suspend the president’s accounts.
Reddit, a normally quite permissive news and discussion website, shut down a popular forum among Trump fans on Friday, saying it was inciting hatred.
A new platform?
The question now is where Trump and his supporters will go next.
Donald Trump Jr., himself fearful of being excluded from Twitter, has asked his followers to send him their contacts by email, which is not the most reactive form of communication, in order to keep them abreast of the news.
In a quickly deleted tweet, the president himself spoke on Friday of creating his own platform “in the near future,” without providing any details.
Conservative platforms popular with Trump’s fiercest supporters, such as Parler and Gab, have attracted a growing number of users.
Gab saw “record traffic” on Friday night and Saturday, according to its creator Andrew Torba, and had to add computer servers to handle it.
It reported 12 million views in 12 hours, adding: “Explosive growth right now.”
Launched in 2016, Gab is positioned as a platform that promotes “freedom of speech”, but has become known primarily for its far-right user base, including neo-Nazis.
In 2018, when an assault on a Pittsburgh synagogue claimed 11 lives, investigators uncovered previous anti-Semitic posts from the shooter in Gab.
Several companies have banned Gab, including PayPal, Visa, and the Apple and Google app stores.
“ Twitter’s fascism ” Parler faced more dire consequences: After Google and Apple first banned it from their app stores as well, Amazon confirmed it was suspending the social network from its cloud computing services, effectively shutting it down. line.
The three tech giants said Parler, which briefly became the main free app in the Apple store on Saturday before it was removed, had not addressed violent content on its platform.
Given the riot on Capitol Hill this week, there was a “grave risk that this type of content will incite further violence,” Amazon said in a letter to Parler first reported by Buzzfeed.
Once the far-right fringe’s preferred platform, Parler, launched in 2018, now attracts more traditional conservative voices, such as those of Fox News star and close Trump ally Sean Hannity, as well as Republican Gov. Dakota. from the South, Kristi Noem.
Another regular and influential political commentator on Parler, Mark Levin, said on Friday that he had “suspended” his own Twitter account “in protest against Twitter fascism.”
Levin also mentioned his account on Rumble, a site that, like YouTube, streams videos but promises its users that “they will never be censored for political or scientific content.”
Yet all of these alternative platforms are so closely identified with the right, even the far right, that, especially when tech companies move against them, it seems unlikely they will ever attract a following like Trump’s 88 million Twitter followers. .
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