BOSTON (AP) – A Twitter joked about the blinking lights in the White House being Donald Trump signaling to his followers in Morse code after Twitter and Facebook crushed the president for inciting the rebellion.
Although deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump has alternative options of much less scope. Far-right Parler may be the main candidate, although Google and Apple have removed him from their app stores and Amazon has decided to remove him from their web hosting service. This could take you offline for a week, said Parler’s CEO.
Trump can launch his own platform. But it won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts predict growing pressure on all social media platforms to contain incendiary speech as Americans take stock of the violent takeover of the United States Capitol by a crowd set on fire by Trump.
Twitter ended Trump’s nearly 12-year run on Friday. When you close your account, quoted a tweet to his 89 million followers who plans to skip the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20, who said he gave rioters a license to converge on Washington once again.
Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump at least until the inauguration day. Twitch and Snapchat also disabled Trump’s accounts, while Shopify took down online stores affiliated with the President and Reddit removed a subgroup of Trump. Twitter also banned Trump loyalists, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn in a purge of accounts that promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol insurrection. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers.
In a statement on Friday, Trump said: “We have been negotiating with several other sites and will have a big announcement soon, while also looking at the possibilities of building our own platform in the near future.”
Experts predicted that Trump could appear on Parler, a 2-year-old magnet on the far right who claims to have more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active. Parler suffered headwinds, however, on Friday, when Google removed its smartphone app from its app store to allow posts that seek to “incite continuing violence in the U.S.” to “plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities”. Public security issues will need to be resolved before it can be restored, Apple said.
Amazon struck another blow on Saturday, informing Parler that it would need to look for a new web hosting service starting at midnight on Sunday. He recalled Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, which in the past few weeks had reported 98 examples of posts “that clearly encourage and incite violence” and said the platform “represents a very real risk to public security”.
Parler CEO John Matze condemned the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the technology giants to eliminate competition in the market. We were too successful too quickly, ”he said in a post on Saturday night, saying that it was possible that Parler would be unavailable for up to a week,“ while we rebuild from scratch ”.
Earlier, Matze complained about being the scapegoat. “Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple itself apply to Parler.” He said he “will not give in to politically motivated companies and those authoritarian people who hate freedom of speech”.
Losing access to Google and Apple’s app stores – whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones – severely limits Parler’s reach, while still accessible via a web browser. Losing Amazon Web Services means that Parler must strive to find another host – in addition to reengineering.
Gab is another potential landing point for Trump. But he also had problems with hosting on the Internet. Google and Apple started him from their app stores in 2017 and he was homeless on the Internet for a while the following year due to anti-Semitic posts attributed to the man accused of killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Microsoft has also terminated a web hosting agreement.
Online speech experts expect social media companies led by Google’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to more vigorously police hate speech and incitement after the Capitol rebellion, as Western democracies led by Nazi-haunted Germany already do.
David Kaye, a professor of law 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 well as little-known places where more disturbances pre-inauguration are now apparently being organized. They include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released on Saturday by The Alethea Group, which tracks misinformation.
Kaye rejects the arguments of U.S. conservatives, including the president’s former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, that Trump’s ban violently attacked the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting freedom of expression. “Silencing people, not to mention the president of the United States, is what happens in China, not in our country,” said Haley.
“It’s not that the platform rules are draconian. People are not caught in violations unless they clearly do something against the rules, ”said Kaye. And not only do individual citizens have the right to freedom of expression. “Companies also have freedom of expression.”
While initially advocating the need to be neutral in speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually gave in to public pressure that set the limit, especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic urging people not to wear masks, noted University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor of civic media Ethan Zuckerman.
Zuckerman hopes that Trump’s platform will spur major online changes. First, there may be an accelerated fragmentation of social media world along ideological lines.
“Trump will attract a lot of audiences wherever he goes,” he said. This may mean more platforms with smaller and more ideologically isolated audiences.
Fragmentation can take people to extremes – or make extremism less contagious, he said: Perhaps people looking for a welding video on YouTube will no longer find themselves offered an unrelated QAnon video. Alternative, less managed top-down and more autonomous media systems could also emerge.
Zuckerman also expects a big debate about online speech regulation, including in Congress.
“I suspect that you will see efforts from the right arguing that there should be no regulations on acceptable speech,” he said. “I think you will see arguments on the democratic side that the 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.