After yesterday’s protests at the US Capitol, Big Tech unleashed an unprecedented wave of censorship against President Trump with Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitch suspending him indefinitely and Twitter locking him out for 12 hours.
But in a Twitter statement, former First Lady Michelle Obama has demanded that the Silicon Valley giants go “even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms.”
She also framed yesterday’s protests as “insurrection” and insisted that the tech giants should introduce “policies to prevent their technology from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection.”
Obama backed her calls to deplatform the President by claiming that yesterday’s protests were organized by a “gang” which “laid siege to the United States Capitol” and that “the day was a fulfillment of the wishes of an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures.”
She contrasted her view of yesterday’s events with her view of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that occurred over the summer. According to Obama, these BLM protests were “an overwhelmingly peaceful movement.”
Obama’s call to purge President Trump from Big Tech echoes the talking points of numerous mainstream media outlets. Like Obama, these outlets have framed yesterday’s events as an “insurrection,” contrasted them with so-called “peaceful” BLM protests, blamed Trump, and insisted that he needs to be deplatformed by Big Tech.
If these Silicon Valley platforms bow to this pressure, they would take their already unprecedented levels of censorship of President Trump to new heights and set in motion a series of irreversible precedents for online speech.
By deplatforming Trump, it would confirm that the ability of any future President to speak and connect with the millions of users on these platforms can be dictated by pressure campaigns from the mainstream media and public figures.
The ripple effect would apply to any politician or world leader because those behind the pressure campaigns would know that once they apply enough pressure, they can get anyone deplatformed.
Yet these wider considerations seem to have been lost in the current mainstream media news cycle which is focused on pressuring these tech giants into booting the President and setting this irreversible precedent.
