After social media giants Twitter & Facebook banned President Trump permanently, the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed their reservation about big tech’s “unchecked power”.
On Friday, Twitter announced that they were permanently suspending President Trump’s account.
"After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Facebook also permanently blocked Trump on Thursday night.
ACLU senior legislative counsel Kate Ruane put out a statement saying:
“For months, President Trump has been using social media platforms to seed doubt about the results of the election and to undermine the will of voters. We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.
President Trump can turn to his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others — like the many Black, Brown, and LGBTQ activists who have been censored by social media companies — will not have that luxury. It is our hope that these companies will apply their rules transparently to everyone.”
On big tech’s growing power & clout, Glenn Greenwald warns that:
"the centralized power over US democracy (and other democracies) concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of unaccountable Silicon Valley oligarchs is stunning, unprecedented and unsustainable.
Before the election, Facebook and Twitter united to censor reporting by a major newspaper about Joe and Hunter Biden. They just banned it from spreading. Now they united to ban the President himself from their monopolistic platforms. Ponder the unaccountable power they wield.”