Tech giants clamp down on President Trump
Google, Apple remove Parler from app stores
As more and more social media platforms remove accounts tied to his administration, President Trump said he was “negotiating” to find new outlet to communicate with supporters and may end up building his own.
“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,” Trump said Friday.
Google and Apple both removed Parler, where Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. are active, from their webstores over the weekend. Amazon web services announced as of Sunday it would no longer provide Parler with web hosting services.
Parler CEO John Matze decried the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace. We were too successful too fast,” he said, adding it was possible Parler would be unavailable for up to a week “as we rebuild from scratch.”
Amazon told Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, that it had informed it in the past few weeks of 98 examples of posts “that clearly encourage and incite violence” and said the platform “poses a very real risk to public safety.”
Matze complained 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 who hate free speech.”
Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump at least until Inauguration Day. Twitch and Snapchat also have disabled Trump’s accounts. Reddit removed a Trump subgroup.
Twitter also banned Trump loyalists including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in a sweeping purge of accounts promoting the QA non conspiracy theory and the Capitol insurrection.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said the Trump ban savaged the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting free expression.
“Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country,” Haley tweeted.
But David Kaye, a University of California-Irvine law professor and former U.N. special rapporteur on free speech said, “It’s not like the platforms’ rules are draconian. People don’t get caught in violations unless they do something clearly against the rules.”
“The companies have their freedom of speech, too,” he said.