Trump’s personal Twitter account had 88 million followers. It has been silenced, and social-media platforms’ influence on online discourse is clear. wsj.com/articles/twitt… via @WSJ
In a span of a couple of days, Twitter and Facebook, President Trump’s main social-media megaphones—took action to silence the president’s personal accounts or online communities devoted to him, citing rules prohibiting content that incites violence.
They were joined by companies such as Snap Inc. SNAP 0.55% and Reddit Inc.
Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG 1.12% Google also took steps to boot Parler, a social-media app and website that has grown in popularity among conservatives
The actions against President Trump & Parler illustrate more starkly than ever the companies’ influence over conversation online, and the political nature of their decisions. While lauded by many, ejecting the president and some of his supporters also infuriated others.
It amounts to censorship, and the moves risked driving off some users in a way that, especially for Twitter, could reshape their businesses.
It also illustrates the political nature of how they determine what content to remove, what content to allow and what to amplify."
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Scrambling to deal with a sudden competitive threat to its messaging platform WhatsApp, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has released a statement clarifying the upcoming changes to its terms of service.
The privacy concerns have already triggered users to turn to rivals in droves, according to data from Sensor Tower.
Signal was downloaded 8.8M times worldwide in the week after the changes were first announced on Jan. 4 vs. 246K times the week prior. Better service no tracking
Telegram, 2nd best, reached 11.9M downloads (vs. 6.5M), while WhatsApp recorded 9.7M downloads following the announcement, a decrease of 14% from the week before.
We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
In District of Columbia, it’s a crime to “intentionally or recklessly act in such a manner to cause
another person to be in reasonable fear”
and to “incite or provoke violence where there is a likelihood that such violence will ensue.”
This language is based on Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), in which the Supreme Court set the standard for speech that
Trump spoke to reporters again on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and said he didn’t incite the riot. “They’ve analyzed my speech and my words and my final paragraph, my final sentence. And everybody to the tee thought it was totally appropriate,” Trump said.
Trump also lashed out also at Big Tech companies that have censored him following the riot and purged many accounts of alleged conspiracy theorists. Trump was permanently banned by Twitter and banned from using Facebook or Instagram until at least after Biden’s inauguration.
"24/12/2020, China’s market regulator began an antitrust probe into Alibaba & sent investigators to its headquarters
of Hangzhou.
Announcement came after the party’s politburo targeted monopoly businesses to prevent “disorderly expansion of capital”.
The move on Alibaba also came two months after financial regulators dramatically cancelled Ant’s planned $37bn initial public offering, which would have been the world’s largest.
The measures amount to unprecedented squeeze on a business whose ubiquitous services are central to
Opinion FT Alphaville Guest post 6 HOURS AGO
"A strong recovery could be bad for asset prices"
Global liquidity will continue to pour into the world economy. But how will that impact asset prices and the recovery? ft.com/content/4429c2… via @FinancialTimes
Michael J. Howell founded CrossBorder Capital, a London-based advisory investment management company in 1996. He published a book "Capital Wars" on the turbulent rise of global liquidity. In this post, he argues that despite the pool
of cash and credit available to investors breaking fresh records in 2021, global liquidity may prove to be more positive for economies than for asset markets.
When liquidity concentrates in asset markets, measures of so-called monetary velocity — calculated using the ratio of
Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution, write @VivekGRamaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld wsj.com/articles/save-… via @WSJ
Facebook and Twitter banned President Trump and numerous supporters after last week’s disgraceful Capitol riot, and Google, Apple and Amazon blocked Twitter alternative Parler—all based on claims of “incitement to violence” and “hate speech.”
Silicon Valley titans cite their ever-changing “terms of service,” but their selective enforcement suggests political motives.
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the