Elaine Ou, Columnist

You Can’t Keep Rage Off the Internet

Big Tech has pushed Trump off major platforms. But it’s getting easier to build new ones.

January 12, 2021 at 7:38 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

It can work for awhile.
Photo illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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President Donald Trump has been removed from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, Twitch and Reddit. Stripe suspended payment processing for Trump’s campaign, Shopify removed stores affiliated with Trump merchandise, and even Trump’s email providers suspended his service. Parler, a social networking app promising refuge for Trump supporters, was removed by both Apple and Google from their app stores before Amazon Web Services pulled it offline altogether. Facebook banned the Trumpist rallying cry, “Stop the Steal.”

In a world where most communication takes place on platforms like these, that’s a lot of censorship, justified or not! Whether it’s effective is another matter.