Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey drew criticism from free-speech advocates when he announced last week that President Trump would be permanently banned from his social media platform. Reports indicate the tech billionaire is considering additional steps to censor more accounts.
“We are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go on beyond the inauguration,” Dorsey said in a video leaked to the guerilla news site Project Veritas.
The video, which was reportedly leaked by a Twitter insider, said the next steps will be to shut down accounts tied to the QAnon conspiracy.
The Associated Press reported that those who follow the conspiracy believe there is a high-ranking government official known as “Q” who has been dropping cryptic clues on online message boards. One of their theories, according to the AP, is that Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex-trafficking ring. About 70,000 accounts accused of peddling the conspiracy have already been banned from the site.
“The moves we’re making today around QAnon, for instance, is one such example of a broader approach that we should be looking at and going deeper on,” Dorsey said.
Many conservatives, who claim that big tech companies “shadow ban” content, believe the next steps will be a crackdown on all conservative content.
Twitter’s defenders point out that the company is allowed to post and delete any content it wants, and if you have a problem with that, then go somewhere else. But the only problem is there is no place for them to turn. Parler, which was seen as a long-shot challenger to Twitter’s dominant position, went dark last Sunday after Amazon Web Services announced it would no longer host the free-speech platform.
Business Insider reported that Amazon said Parler was unable and unwilling to “remove content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens.”
TREND FORECAST: We have reported extensively on censorship in this and other issues of the Trends Journal over the past several years.
While it is difficult and costly to create free speech mediums, it does provide one of the most lucrative OnTrendpreneur® opportunities of the 21st century.
