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Bans on Parler and Trump show big tech's power over web conversation With an internet ecosystem dominated by a few big players, the app has little chance of survival without access to these mainstream channels
As Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. banished users and groups supporting the violent mobs at the U.S. Capitol last week -including President Donald Trump himself -- downloads surged for a less restrictive social media app called Parler. But in an effort to prevent further riot organizing, Google Inc. and Apple Inc. booted Parler from their app stores, and Amazon.com Inc. shut off its web services.
“We will not cave to pressure from anti-competitive actors!” John Matze, Parler Inc.’s chief executive officer, said on his site Friday. “We WON’T cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech!” In reality, Matze doesn’t have much choice. His free-speech-centric network, where some extremists turned to rally insurgents and organize future uprisings, was deemed an “ongoing and urgent public safety threat” by Google. Amazon employees asked that the web giant “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration,” which Amazon did. Apple quickly rejected as insufficient a Parler plan to moderate its content. With an internet ecosystem dominated by a few big players, the app has little chance of survival without access to these mainstream channels. The Parler restrictions underscore how technology companies have increasingly been held accountable for the potential consequences of what happens on their services, where they have greater visibility than governments do -- and the ability to take quicker action. For years, large tech companies avoided such debates by claiming to be content-neutral. Meddling and misinformation campaigns in the 2016 presidential election made it clear that these companies, and their software algorithms and content moderation, had real-world impact...