Silicon Valley Muzzles Trump

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA – First it was Facebook. Twitter followed shortly afterwards. Then the rest fell like dominos.

After years of taking a laissez-faire approach to President Trump’s use of their platforms to propagate disinformation and promote political violence, Silicon Valley’s social media giants have moved to muzzle the president in the aftermath of his inspiring rioters to storm the Capitol Building Jan. 6.

Five people were killed including a Capitol Police officer after a rally held in support of the president’s baseless claims of election fraud.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has taken heat in the past for allowing Trump to skirt the company’s policies, was the first Silicon Valley executive to take action, issuing an indefinite ban of the president Thursday morning for a period of at least two weeks.

Twitter banned Trump permanently on Friday, and Amazon Web Services, Google and Apple effectively pulled the plug on Parler, the social media site of choice of man on the far right that as of Monday morning was no more.

Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok and Snapchat, among other social media companies, have since followed suit.

Trump issued a statement Friday night implying retaliatory regulations could be forthcoming against the companies that in his view “coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left,” The Washington Post reports.

Trump warned that a “big announcement” is to come in the waning days of his presidency and said he’s looking “at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future!”

Trump is “itching to lash out at Big Tech” CNN reports.

Zuckerberg said in a statement Thursday announcing the indefinite ban that by inspiring the political violence on the Capitol Trump showed that he “intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden."

"Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies,” Zuckerberg said.

“We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech. But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government."

Twitter announced Trump’s permanent ban in a blog post “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

The statement said Trump violated the company’s policy restricting glorification of violence in two tweets on Friday that triggered the permanent suspension of the president’s account.

The president first tweeted: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

He later tweeted: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Twitter said it gives world leaders some latitude in the interest of promoting open dialogue but that they “are not above our rules entirely.”

Twitter’s statement said the president's tweets “could inspire others to replicate violent acts” that occurred on the Capitol last week.

“As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so,” Twitter’s statement said.

Parler went dark early Monday morning after AWS booted the social media company from its servers.

The company has field an antitrust lawsuit in federal court seeking an order to keep the social media site online, Yahoo finance reports.

The company said in a statement AWS is required to give 30 days’ notice before terminating its service.

Shutting it down “is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support,” Parler said. “It will kill Parler’s business -- at the very time it is set to skyrocket.”

Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor of journalism and media at the University of North Carolina, attributed cynical motives to Big Tech’s sudden crackdown, The Associated Press reports, suggesting that the companies aim to get in good graces with the incoming Biden administration.

Trump “only has two weeks left in power, and that certainly makes it easier to deplatform the president,” McGregor said.

The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the move to silence the president.

“[I]t should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier,” ACLU senior legislative counsel Kate Ruane said in a statement, Politico reports.