How To Respond to the Great Deplatforming of 2021 – By Zach Weissmueller (Reason) / January 12 2021
We need an open digital commons, where individuals maintain ownership of their own identities and where speech is highly resistant to political pressure.
President Donald Trump’s response to last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol led Twitter to permanently ban him from its platform, and Facebook and YouTube closed his accounts on the grounds that he had used their platforms to incite violence.
Then Apple and Google banned Twitter competitor Parler from its app stores, on the grounds that the perpetrators of last week’s Capitol riot used it to coordinate the attack and because the service lacked adequate content moderation. Next, Amazon, which owns about a third of the global cloud storage market, evicted Parler from its cloud hosting service, causing the site to go down entirely.
These decisions drew a ferocious reaction, both for and against, from people of all political stripes.
“For better or worse,” as Edward Snowden said after Trump was kicked off Twitter, “this will be remembered as a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech.”
CONTINUE > https://reason.com/video/2021/01/12/how-to-respond-to-the-great-deplatforming-of-2021/
