Friends, family and advisers to US President Donald Trump have been bitterly complaining that Twitter’s ban of him 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 have aired their grievances first of all on ... Twitter — a choice underscoring the platform’s huge readership and the relative paucity of alternatives.
“Free speech is dead & controlled by leftist overlords,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr, the president’s older son.
Photo: Reuters
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer asked: “Who will be silenced next?”
Mike Pompeo, posting not as the US secretary of state, but on his personal account, wrote: “Sadly, this isn’t a new tactic of the Left. They’ve worked to silence opposing voices for years.”
For US Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, the decisions by Twitter and some other social media were “absurd & profoundly dangerous.”
“Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?” he asked.
Every one of the above messages was posted on Twitter, the social network that for years has been Trump’s preferred means of communicating with the public — and sometimes even with other world leaders.
However, on Friday, 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 Web site that is normally fairly permissive, on Friday closed a forum popular with Trump fans, saying that it was inciting hate.
The question now is where Trump and his supporters will turn next.
Donald Trump Jr, himself fearing exclusion from Twitter, has asked his followers to send him their e-mail contacts — hardly the most reactive form of communication — so that he can keep them abreast of news.
In a quickly deleted tweet, the president himself on Friday spoke of creating his own platform “in the near future,” without providing any details.
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, and had to add computer servers to handle it, founder and chief executive officer Andrew Torba said.
He reported 12 million visits in 12 hours, adding: “Exploding growth right now.”
Launched in 2016, Gab positions itself as a platform promoting “freedom of expression,” but has become known above all for its far-right — even neo-Nazi — user base.
In 2018, when an assault on a Pittsburgh synagogue claimed 11 lives, investigators discovered earlier anti-Semitic posts by the shooter on Gab.
Several companies have banned Gab, including PayPal, Visa and the Apple and Google app stores.
Parler faced more severe consequences: After it, too, was banned first by Google and Apple in their app stores, Amazon confirmed it was suspending the social network from its cloud computing services, effectively pushing it offline.
A Parler regular, influential political commentator Mark Levin, said on Friday that he had “suspended” his own Twitter account “in protest against Twitter’s fascism.”
Levin also mentioned his account on Rumble, a site which, like YouTube, broadcasts videos, but promises its users they will “never be censored for political or scientific content.”
Yet, all these alternative platforms are so closely identified with the right — even the extreme right — that, especially as tech companies move against them, they seem unlikely ever to draw followings like Trump’s 88 million Twitter followers.
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