How To Respond to the Great Deplatforming of 2021

We need an open digital commons, where individuals maintain ownership of their own identities and where speech is highly resistant to political pressure. 

Full text and links: https://reason.com/video/2021/01/12/how-to-respond-to-the-great-deplatforming-of-2021/

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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."

"It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism," wrote journalist Glenn Greenwald.

So how should those who value a free and open society feel about the deplatforming of the commander in chief, the ongoing purge of many of his supporters, and repression of discussion of 2020 election voter fraud claims?

Twitter is a private company and CEO Jack Dorsey's capacity to evict even the president of the United States is something to be grateful for. But what if the network power of a handful of Silicon Valley giants is so great that there's nowhere for the evicted to turn? And are Facebook, Twitter, and Google acting independently, or are they bending to the will of Congress at a time when tech has become so deeply politicized?

The takeaway from the great deplatforming of 2021 is that we need an open digital commons more than ever, a place where individuals maintain ownership of their own identities and where speech is highly resistant to political pressure.

Decentralized networks are vital to protecting open discourse not only from Twitter, Facebook, and Google, but from Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), President-elect Joe Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who have the real power to stomp on the free speech rights of American citizens.

It's easy to forget that Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg embraced the concept of a neutral "public square" not long ago. Zuckerberg told Congress in July 2020, "We do not want to become the arbiters of truth."

Sigmund Freud theorized that when thoughts or experiences are repressed, they inevitably resurface in more deranged and damaging forms. When our dominant communication platforms seek to repress widely held beliefs and opinions, those beliefs and opinions aren't likely to simply disappear but rather reemerge elsewhere in less visible forums where they'll face less scrutiny.

The next few years may be ugly, but silencing dissenters will ultimately fail. As Stewart Brand famously quipped, "Information wants to be free."




Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena. Riot footage by Ford Fischer.

Music credits: ANBR licensed through Artlist.