Trump seeks social media outlet
BOSTON — One Twitter wag joked about lights flickering on and off at the White House being Donald Trump signaling to his followers in Morse code after Twitter and Facebook squelched the presidentfor inciting rebellion.
Though deprived of his big online megaphones, Mr. Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach, led by the far-right-friendly Parler — even if Google and Apple both removed it from their app stores.
Mr. Trump may launch his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts anticipate growing pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary speech as Americans learn from Wednesday’s violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.
Twitter ended Mr. Trump’s nearly 12-year run Friday. In shuttering his account, it cited a tweet to his 89 million followers that he planned to skip Presidentelect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, which it said gave rioters license to convergeon Washington again.
Facebook and Instagram have suspended Mr. Trump at least until Inauguration Day. Twitch and Snapchat also have disabled Mr. Trump’s accounts, while Shopify took down online stores affiliated with the president and Reddit removed a
Trump subgroup. Twitter alsobanned some Trump loyalists, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in a sweeping purge of accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol insurrection. Some had hundreds of thousandsof followers.
In a statement Friday, Mr. Trump said: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”
The “immense power that the social media platforms have as gatekeepers of public discourse” had been flexed as never before— a power that should be troubling even for supporters of the Trump ban,
tweeted Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
Experts were betting Mr. Trump would pop up on Parler, a 2-year-old magnet for the far-right that claims more than 12 million users and where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active. Parler hit headwinds, though, on Friday as Google yanked its app from its store for allowing postings that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.” Apple did the same Saturday.
Apple told Parler executives in an email Friday it got complaints the app was being used to “plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”
Parler CEO John Matze complained on his site of being scapegoated: “Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple themselves, apply to Parler.” He said he “won’t cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians whohate free speech.”
Losing access to the app stores of Google and Apple severely limits Parler’s reach, though it will continue to be accessible via web browser.