In the days after Donald Trump whipped up a mob to overrun the U.S. Capitol in a desperate attempt to stop the certication of his defeat, many conservatives have voiced their outrage over the true victims of the failed putsch. “I’ve lost 50k-plus followers this week,” an indignant Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote on Twitter on Saturday, after the platform banned Trump and purged accounts that promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Complaining of “radical left” censorship, Sanders, Trump’s former press
secretary, wrote, “This is not China, this is United States of America, and we
are a free country.” In fact, Twitter and Facebook’s ejection of Trump is
pretty much the opposite of what happens in China; it would be inconceivable
for the Chinese social media giant Weibo to block President Xi Jinping. Trump’s
social media exile represents, in some ways, a libertarian dream of a wholly
privatized public sphere, in which corporations, not government, get to dene
the bounds of permissible speech. As a non-libertarian, however, I nd myself
both agreeing with how technology giants have used their power in this case,
and disturbed by just how awesome their power is. Trump deserved to be
deplatformed. Parler, a social network favored by Trumpists that teemed with
threats against the president’s enemies, deserved to be kicked o Amazon’s
web-hosting service. But it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech
titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not
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