Social media platforms muzzle US president

New York – Friends, family and advisors to Donald Trump have been bitterly complaining that Twitter’s ban of the president after his supporters stormed the US Capitol amounts to an assault on free speech by radical leftists.

Ironically, given the enormous influence of the platform, they aired their grievances on Twitter – underscoring the platform’s huge readership and the relative paucity of alternatives.

“Free speech is dead & controlled by leftist overlords,” tweeted Donald Trump Jnr, the president’s older son.

Asked Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer: “Who will be silenced next?”

And Mike Pompeo, posting not as secretary of state but on his personal account, tweeted: “Sadly, this isn’t a new tactic of the Left. They’ve worked to silence opposing voices for years.”

For influential Republican senator Ted Cruz, the decisions by Twitter and some other social media were “absurd & profoundly dangerous”.

“Why,” he went on, “should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?”

These messages were posted on the social network that for years has been Trump’s preferred means of communicating.

But on Friday last week, amid widespread fury after he encouraged the supporters who forced their way into the US Capitol in a bloody and chaotic melee, Twitter banned him permanently.

It was taking the rare measure, it said, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch joined in suspending the president’s accounts.

Reddit, a news and discussion website that is normally fairly permissive, last Friday closed a forum popular with Trump fans, saying it was inciting hate.

The question now is where Trump and his supporters will turn next.

Trump Jnr, fearing his own exclusion from Twitter, has asked his followers to send him their e-mail contacts – hardly the most reactive form of communication.

In a quickly deleted tweet, the president spoke of creating his own platform “in the near future”.

Conservative platforms popular among Trump’s fiercest supporters, like Parler and Gab, have drawn growing numbers of users.

Gab saw “record traffic” on Friday night and Saturday, according to its creator Andrew Torba.

He reported 12 million visits in 12 hours.

Launched in 2016, Gab positions itself as a platform promoting “freedom of expression” but has become known for its farright – even neo-Nazi – user base.

Companies who have banned it include PayPal, Visa and the Apple and Google app stores.

Parler faced more severe consequences: after it was banned by Google and Apple, Amazon confirmed it was suspending it from its cloud computing services, effectively pushing it offl ine.

A Parler regular, influential political commentator Mark Levin, said on Friday he had “suspended” his own Twitter account “in protest against Twitter’s fascism”. –