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“Twitter banned President Donald Trump’s account Friday, citing ‘the risk of further incitement of violence.’” AP News
“Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc have suspended Parler from their respective App Store and web hosting service, saying the social networking service popular with many right-leaning social media users has not taken adequate measures to prevent the spread of posts inciting violence.” Reuters
Read our previous coverage of the DOJ lawsuit against Facebook and Big Tech’s testimony to Congress. The Flip Side
The right is critical of Twitter’s ban of Trump and Parler’s suspension, arguing that they violate free speech principles.
“As private companies, Facebook and Twitter have the right to restrict President Trump from their platforms. Still, from the perspective of national interests, it is a mistake for them to do so…
“U.S. legal tradition [protects] speech that is hateful, hurtful, and designed to be so. Born of the Constitution and subsequent case law, this tradition rests on the understanding of a murky borderline between offensive speech and contemplative thought. That, where lawmakers attempt to draw the border against offensive speech, they risk undermining democratic participation and creative thinking…
“As Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his 2010 Snyder v. Phelps opinion, ‘Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.’”
Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner
“Sociologists have documented how America’s political tribes increasingly shop at different stores, live in different places and have different tastes. That cultural gap contributed to Donald Trump’s rise, and political segregation of the internet will widen it…
“Dissenting opinion won’t vanish because tech CEOs ban it. The views will go underground, perhaps become radicalized in frustration, and eventually burst into the open in the streets. Perceived political abuses by tech firms are becoming a major engine of populism in the 21st century, and the companies’ moves on Parler will supply an infusion of fuel…
“Joe Biden said Friday that America needs a ‘principled and strong’ opposition party. Whatever the GOP’s future, and despite widespread revulsion at the President’s actions last week, tens of millions of his supporters will be the basis for that opposition party. New and aggressive uses of corporate, politically endorsed power to silence larger swathes of the right will be destructive in a way that all Americans may live to regret.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
Twitter “[cites] one tweet saying he won’t attend Biden’s inauguration as ‘being received by a number of his supporters’ as a rejection of the election results or a signal that it would be ‘safe’ to attack the inauguration because he won’t be there to potentially be taken out as collateral damage. They then go on to claim that referring to his supporters as ‘American Patriots’ somehow signals approval of or incitement to violence. Am I the only one rolling my eyes to the point of needing new glasses right now?…
“Find the people who have been openly encouraging violence and destruction or bragging about doing it online and kick them off of social media. Actually, go find them and arrest them to boot. But by twisting the words of the President (or anyone else) in this fashion to justify the decision to kick him off the platform, we’re not seeing the exercise of power. This is an abuse of power.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
“Following the death of George Floyd, Colin Kaepernick told his legion of followers that ‘revolting is the only option’ and that they ‘have the right to fight back.’ Then-congressional candidate Cori Bush asked activists to show up to protests to ‘disrupt peace’ because if they’re ‘peaceful… it’s NOT a protest.’ We know what happened next. Those tweets remain online, by the way, along with those from dictators, terrorists, anti-Semites and Antifa members organizing online. Somehow they don’t violate Twitter’s terms of service. Team Trump’s? Or the legions of conservative accounts using Parler to connect with their community? Purged and taken down…
“In the short term, Big Tech fed into the worst instincts of the activist base… It won’t take long before the base turns on its own party. Democrats will never be left-wing enough to satisfy activists because they set both their enemies and allies up to fail. Progressives say not only are mere words violence, but silence is violence, too. Even Democrats are destined to fail in the progressive reality unless you kowtow to their worldview by saying the words they want you to say, when they want you to say it…
“When Democrats face the political consequences of this unwise decision, they may very well find themselves on the receiving end of the very same mistreatment.”
Jason Rantz, Fox News
“Parler has policed at least some posts calling for violence, as Mediaite reports the company removed posts by extremist ‘election fraud’ lawyer Lin Wood that called for the execution of Vice President Mike Pence for his refusal to reject Electoral College votes for Joe Biden. As we’ve noted before, endless bile roams free on Twitter — hate speech and worse that the company polices in no consistent way. Yet now other tech companies are punishing Parler for failing in the same way. They’re not applying a neutral rule, they’re catering to the biases of their angry left-leaning employees…
“When people complain about the overwhelming share of their markets controlled by Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google, the companies’ defenders insist that they compete in important ways, checking each other’s power. This is looking more like a cabal supporting each other — at the least, uniting to enforce a common political orthodoxy. A similar argument goes: If you don’t like how Facebook or Twitter enforces its rules, go build your own alternative. Yet Parler did just that, with growing success — and boom, the tech world moves to kill it.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
The left supports Twitter’s ban of Trump and urges tech companies to ensure their rules for acceptable speech are clear and transparent.
The left supports Twitter’s ban of Trump and urges tech companies to ensure their rules for acceptable speech are clear and transparent.
“Some critics, especially those on the right, object to the giant social networks enforcing their terms of service simply because they are giant. Their scale, these observers argue, has transformed them into the 21st century equivalent of the public commons. Maybe so! But that doesn’t change the fact that they are not government actors, so they’re not bound by the 1st Amendment. And even promoting a free speech culture does not mean amplifying all speech…
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he doesn’t feel comfortable playing the role of speech police. But he’s created one of the world’s most powerful amplifiers, and he’s rightly set standards — low standards, sadly — for what people can do with it. World leaders should be held to the same rules as everyone else…
“Twitter similarly has said there’s a public interest in seeing what’s on the minds of important figures. But those figures have their own platforms and their own microphones. No private company is obligated to hand over its platform to a president in the supposed interest of newsworthiness and history. That just feels like a pretext for maintaining the huge audiences that controversial figures such as Trump bring.”
Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times
“Trump’s accounts have survived posting that ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ during the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. He has repeatedly amplified accounts supporting QAnon, a conspiracy theory that the FBI has labeled a domestic-terror threat. He’s compared the size of his nuclear button with that of North Korea’s, and still @realDonaldTrump [had] continued to grace our screens…
“The attempts [of tech companies] to dress up [last week’s] actions as part of a coherent and deliberate decision-making structure were trying to mask an uncomfortable truth about our most important speech forums: Platforms can and will do what they like… A tiny group of people in Silicon Valley are defining modern discourse, ostensibly establishing a Twilight Zone where the rules are something between democratic governance and journalism, but they’re doing it on the fly in ways that suit them…
“This will not be the last time a leader uses these platforms to incite violence; our tech overlords should prove, then, that it wasn’t just political expediency and tech-bro one-upmanship that made them act [last] week. In doing so, they can develop the coherent and consistent decision-making structure that they insist already exists and tie themselves to more principled masts.”
Evelyn Douek, The Atlantic
“The Election Integrity Partnership found that about half of all retweets related to dozens of widely spread false claims of election interference could be traced back to just 35 Twitter accounts, including those of Mr. Trump, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the actor James Woods…
“YouTube has a ‘three strikes’ policy that aims to punish people who repeatedly break its rules. The policy is riddled with inconsistencies, but it might be worth copying. I can imagine something like it for all the social media sites, with teams laser focused on accounts with large followings — say, more than a million followers, or maybe just for accounts found to be habitual spreaders of misinformation or division…
“Some might call this internet censorship. It is. But the internet companies already have extensive guidelines prohibiting bullying, financial scams and deliberately misleading information about important issues like elections. To do this, the internet companies will have to be willing to make powerful people angry. The recalibration of how internet sites handle influential people would put a lot of pressure on users with large followings to be more careful about what they say and share. That’s not such a bad idea, is it?”
Shira Ovide, New York Times
Some urge lawmakers to “eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996… The right seems to believe that repealing Section 230 is some kind of deserved punishment for Twitter and Facebook for censoring conservative views…
“[But] in fact, once the social media companies have to assume legal liability — not just for libel, but for inciting violence and so on — they will quickly change their algorithms to block anything remotely problematic. People would still be able to discuss politics, but they wouldn’t be able to hurl anti-Semitic slurs. Presidents and other officials could announce policies, but they wouldn’t be able to spin wild conspiracies…
“Would this harm Facebook and Twitter’s business models? Sure it would. But so what? They have done the country a lot of harm, and it is clear they have no idea how to get their houses in order — and no real desire to, either. If they make less money but cause less damage to the country, it will be well worth it.”
Joe Nocera, Bloomberg
Regarding Parler, “Not only was violence planned and incited on the site before extremists stormed the Capitol Wednesday and killed a Capitol Police officer, but further planning was ongoing ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20…
“‘Many of Us will return on January 19, 2021, carrying Our weapons, in support of Our nation’s resolve, towhich [sic] the world will never forget!!!’ one user wrote on Parler this week following the Wednesday attack… ‘We will come in numbers that no standing army or police agency can match.’ Another user, before the attack, used Parler to solicit feedback on who the insurgents should kill first.”
Cameron Peters, Vox
