Pattern Matching
The Instagrammed Insurrection and the Great Deplatforming
Booting Trump won’t solve social media’s problems. But it’s not a bad place to start.
The president of the United States is no longer allowed to post on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, or Shopify. Twitter said Friday night that its ban was permanent — and it was swiftly followed by suspensions of the @POTUS and @TeamTrump accounts when Trump attempted to use those instead. When Trump tried tweeting from the account of Gary Coby, his digital campaign director, Twitter promptly suspended that, too. The nonprofit First Draft started a helpful Google Doc to keep track of all the platform responses to the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
Meanwhile, Google suspended the “free speech” social app Parler from the Google Play store, and Apple was threatening to do the same on its iOS App Store, imperiling a right-wing refuge that some expected to become Trump’s new platform. An evidently apoplectic Trump spent Friday evening “scrambling to figure out what his options are,” Politico reported. Before he was booted, he tweeted that he’s “negotiating with various other sites” and suggested he might even try to build his own social platform. (I have an idea for what to call it.)
