How Big Tech giants finally dealt crushing blow to Trump
Donald J. Trump spent the last days of his presidency sulking in the White House residence, isolating himself from nearly everyone and busying himself in making an enemies list, which included his own vice-president. One of the few people seen visiting him was a man who made a small fortune selling pillows on television and is a consumer of the most bizarre conspiracy theories possible.
Washington D.C. was a ghost town peopled only by National Guardsmen called up to defend the Capitol against the angry mobs unleashed by the President’s caustic vitriol. Even these men weren’t quite trustworthy; they were being vetted again to ensure they weren’t secret Trump supporters who would compromise the new President’s security.
Of all the humiliations Donald Trump has been subjected to, however, the worst hadn’t come from his political opponents. It came not on the day of the Capitol insurrection or even the impeachment that followed, but on the day that Twitter suspended his account. In an instant, the President who had goaded his supporters to fight hard, feeding them a steady diet of lies, conspiracy theories and deceit for years, had no means to get in touch with them.
Mr Trump himself was likely stunned when this finally happened. For years, his detractors were hounding social media giants Twitter and Facebook to boot him out from their platforms. None of their entreaties worked; Mr Trump kept lying, riling up supporters, destroying careers, firing high-level Cabinet members, threatening politicians, instigating his supporters to deliver death threats, and his accounts were untouched. Even as he was actively spreading lies before and after the election, lies about mailin voting, lies about who had won, and lies about rigging, Twitter and Facebook did nothing.
That changed after the Capitol Hill insurrection. Facebook and Twitter finally jettisoned Mr Trump. When an irate President tried to access the official POTUS account and started to tweet from there, that account was also suspended. In a belated purge, the two platforms began to delete pages and other accounts that were pushing for further attacks on the Capitol.
Extreme right-wing Trump supporters, members of militia groups like the Boogaloo Boys or neo-Nazi groups like The Proud Boys and many others immediately cried foul. Twitter and Facebook were engaging in censorship, they claimed, trying to quash speech on the right even as they let left-oriented groups operate without restrictions. The argument reflected just how far Trump supporters are from the one-time conservatives who used to make up the Republican Party. The latter group, with many who have long turned away from Donald Trump, would know, for instance, that freedom of speech and censorship rights do not apply to private companies but to governments. Free enterprise, a cherished conservative principle, stands for the freedom of Twitter and Facebook, both private companies, to kick out whomever they wish.
Annoyed at being booted out, Mr Trump’s MAGA supporters turned to a different quasi-Twitter service called Parler that was geared towards just those conservatives who were against Twitter’s rules of content and moderation. Parler doesn’t moderate any of its content, allowing anything and everything to be said and shared on the site. In the minds of Mr Trump’s staunchest supporters, this was the ideal freespeech zone, where the harm words can cause was simply no consideration at all. Mr Trump’s faithful, many of whom already had Parler accounts, trooped off. If the liberals in charge of Twitter and Facebook would kick them out, Parler was there to welcome them.
The tentacles of Big Tech, however, could reach longer and deeper than they imagined. Parler may have been a separate service that didn’t moderate its content, but it used Amazon Web Servers to host content, and the app was distributed via the Apple App Store and Google Play. These made it subject to the rules of service of Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. These other tech giants stepped in. If Parler wouldn’t moderate its content, they would refuse to host the site or allow the app to be sold. Ultimatums were handed down; they couldn’t be met, and so the week after the Capitol insurrection Parler went dark. The conservatives who funded it vowed the site would be back, but without web server hosting it appeared this would be a tall order.
Big Tech’s role in first pushing and then ultimately (belatedly) removing Mr Trump will be debated for decades to come. It’s hard not to wonder about how many people would still be alive if Twitter and Facebook had done what they did this January a year ago; they would have denied Mr Trump a platform to spread lies about Covid-19 and the election. A study completed by the Washington Post found that in the two weeks since Mr Trump was suspended from Twitter, misinformation on the election and the events that followed had been reduced by a whopping 72 per cent.
Donald Trump, who tweeted hundreds of times a day on some days and whose tweets are now a part of history, will never have access to a Twitter account again. His is a lifetime ban applied not to a particular account but to him as a person regardless of which account he uses. The story of Mr Trump’s end is in this sense as much a tale of how giant tech companies now have the power to make or break governments, even in the most powerful country in the world.
By arrangement with Dawn