Silicon Valley Bans Show Where Power Truly Lies

On Jan. 8, Twitter announced that effective immediately, President Trump’s Twitter handle, @realDonaldTrump, would be permanently banned from the platform for inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Other platforms later jumped onto the bandwagon. Later that day, Google and Apple announced bans over the Parler app, a popular platform for conservatives, and Amazon stopped hosting the website beginning today. The removal of Trump’s megaphone and a conservative hotbed by Big Tech in Silicon Valley shows where power truly lies.

With President Trump inciting an armed insurrection against the U.S. Capitol last week, putting the lives of many lawmakers in danger, Big Tech has taken the first step in banning the president. Twitter took the lead, permanently suspending the president’s Twitter handle. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitch, Shopify, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, Pinterest, and Stripe are just some of the other companies that have joined to pull the plug on the president and his supporters.

The social media app Parler, which markets itself as a “free speech social network,” has taken hold within conservative strongholds recently. The platform has been criticized for being the breeding ground for the insurrection and has also been a hotbed for many of the president’s conspiracy theories about election fraud, which have been debunked thoroughly. There have also been countless calls for violence and aggression on the platform which went unmoderated and spread like wildfire. The platform, which became a top download on the Apple App Store, is now offline, though, after Google banned it from Google Play and Apple banned it from the App Store on Jan. 8, and Amazon put the final nail in the coffin by refusing to host the platform on Amazon Web Services beginning today, Jan. 11. All three companies cited infractions of their terms of services about glorifying and inciting violence (among other rules), banning them.

Now, it is perfectly legal for private companies to moderate and regulate speech. The First Amendment, which protects free speech among other things, only applies to the government. That is to say, unless the speech was done in public or directed at the government, you could still be punished for what you say since the freedom of speech is not absolute. In fact, the Supreme Court actually ruled in Miller v. California (1973) that there are certain categories of obscene speech not protected by the First Amendment.

Since by using a company’s platform you have agreed to their terms of service, it is well within a company’s realm to ban people from using the platform they may have decided to have violated their terms of service. (In fact, corporations are allowed, technically, to censor anyone or anything they want.)

Also, these companies have been under pressure for years to hold the president and his allies accountable for what they say and do on these platforms. It took an insurrection against the government for Big Tech to act.

Obviously, pro-Trump conservatives fumed at the companies’ decisions to ban Trump and users. Many claimed that the companies were taking away people’s freedom of speech (which, as established above, is not the case). James Dickey, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party, said that this was “a level of censorship that would make China proud.”

However, Silicon Valley has finally proven where power in America lies. It isn’t with the president, and it isn’t with Congress. It’s with a number of unelected individuals heeding the world’s largest tech companies, and Big Tech’s influence is only getting bigger.

This power is often in subtle ways. For example, before Twitter permanently banned Trump from the platform, the threat of a ban was able to convince Trump to put out a video in a now-unaccessible tweet conceding his defeat and partially condemning the violence at the Capitol.

For years, Trump has used his Twitter handle with 88 million followers as somewhat of a megaphone to keep his loyalists and the GOP in check. Republicans who denounced him would get an angry tweet directed at them, with the president often calling them to be primaried. Yes, he could simply call for a press meeting and the nation’s news would all be showing him, but his Twitter handle is undoubtedly his platform of choice for informal speech and calling out enemies within his party. In fact, after he leaves office on Jan. 20, he will have virtually no way to demand the attention of the world’s news organizations without Twitter, since he will no longer be able to just call press conferences at will. He even used a different Twitter handle to say that “We will not be SILENCED!” But, to put it plainly, he has been.

We could see the issue of regulating Big Tech, an issue that had already been on Democrats’ agenda for the past few years, become more bipartisan than ever. But we could also see the GOP tie on to the issue of Big Tech dominance to win over voters. Facebook is already facing a lawsuit for being a monopoly.

It is evident that we cannot expect social media platforms, private, listed, for-profit companies to allow anyone to use them, the same way stores and restaurants can deny service to anyone they wish. However, questions about the power tech companies have over our lives, which are held accountable to hardly anyone, need to be answered.