By Sarah E. Needleman and Georgia Wells
Silicon Valley's moves to eject President Trump from social
media represent a display of power the companies have avoided
making for nearly four years. Now Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and
others must reckon with what comes next.
In a span of a couple of days, Twitter and Facebook -- Mr.
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. and Reddit Inc.
Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google also took
steps to boot Parler, a social-media app and website that has grown
in popularity among conservatives -- and which some rioters had
used to promote Wednesday's attack at the U.S. Capitol, according
to screenshots viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The actions against Mr. Trump and 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 who said 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.
"Right or wrong, they made a political decision," said Jonathon
Hauenschild, director of the communications and technology task
force for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative
nonprofit group, regarding the companies' moves. Attention on the
tech giants "was there to begin with. Now the spotlight is fully
on," he said.
The tech companies acted in response to Wednesday's attack by
Trump supporters in Washington, in which five people died. That mob
was mobilized largely on social media, and Mr. Trump's posts before
and during the episode were criticized by Democrats and Republicans
for inflaming and supporting the crowd. Many people outraged by the
event -- including employees working for those companies --
demanded that Twitter, Facebook and others take more aggressive
action than they had in previous controversies involving Mr. Trump.
The companies said removing Mr. Trump and Parler from their
platforms was necessary to prevent online posts that could lead to
further violence.
"It's a seismic change," said Chris Nolan, chief executive of
San Francisco-based ad-buying firm Spot-On, of companies' actions
to ban the president. "It's a step on the part of the platforms to
recognize that what happens on their platforms has consequences in
real life."
The decisions added fuel to an already raging debate over
whether the platforms do too much to police content on their
platforms or not enough.
Many conservatives, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and
others, said the impact of the platforms' decisions suggests the
tech industry's sway over public conversation is too great.
"We are now living in a country where four or five companies,
unelected, unaccountable, have the monopoly power to decide, we're
gonna wipe people out, we're going to erase them, from any digital
platform, whether it's selling things and the like," he told Fox
News on Sunday.
Some allies of Mr. Trump have said they would shift their
activity on Twitter to other platforms -- including Parler and Gab
-- deemed more tolerant of speech. Twitter on Friday also suspended
some other accounts related to Mr. Trump and his backers, including
those of his campaign and one of its senior officials, as well as
several associated with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon that
Twitter said violated its policy on coordinated harmful
activity.
For Twitter, in particular, it is unclear how the decision will
affect the company's business. The president's personal Twitter
account had more than 88 million followers, which equated to nearly
half of Twitter's total number of average daily users. And while
Mr. Trump wasn't Twitter's most widely followed member, his tweets
stirred conversation and engagement for Twitter users across the
political spectrum. Having the president embrace Twitter as his
platform of choice reinforced the company's pitch to the broader
public that it serves as the go-to place to know what is
happening.
At the same time, Mr. Trump's frequently contentious tweets also
created headaches for the company, as it tried to enforce its rules
and ensure the platform is hospitable for big-name advertisers.
"From a business standpoint, I don't see this as a problem for
the social-media companies," said Eric Ross, chief strategist at
Cascend Securities, who covers publicly traded technology
companies. "It seems like they were already moving in the direction
of limiting people's political commentary and discourse, and
advertisers seemed to be following them."
A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment.
Facebook and other companies might feel less impact to their
businesses from moderating the accounts of Mr. Trump and his
followers. Yet their actions showed how companies have evolved
during the Trump era.
Before Mr. Trump took office, most major platform operators
preferred to moderate as little content as possible, employing
fairly small teams of content moderators. Some Twitter executives
called their company "the free-speech wing of the free-speech
party."
Now, companies such as Facebook employ thousands of moderators
and use artificial intelligence and other technology to keep tabs
on what their users post. At Twitter, acrimony on the platform
began to pose a liability to business, a former executive said.
"It got to a point where there became an expectation that
Twitter needed to police it more, or people wouldn't use the
platform for fear of being subjected to abuse," the former
executive said.
Companies' actions will likely come under even more scrutiny as
regulators pursue antitrust cases against several tech giants, and
as Congress and the incoming Biden administration look to revamp
25-year-old legislation known as Section 230 that has long provided
a liability shield for the platforms' decisions over content
regulation.
In recent months, Parler had become a refuge for some
conservatives upset about what they saw as overreach and bias by
the mainstream platforms. On Friday, Parler had been downloaded
182,000 times across Apple and Google's app stores, a 14-fold
increase in its number of downloads from the previous Friday,
according to app-analytics firm Sensor Tower Inc.
Yet Parler has also faced criticism for its hands-off approach
to moderation, including speech from neo-Nazis and other groups
that call for violence.
Parler's future is unclear. Amazon halted its cloud-computing
services, which left the service inoperative as of Sunday. Google
and Apple removed it from their app stores, meaning even if it can
restart, its app would be unavailable to many smartphone users.
Apple and Google require apps in their stores to moderate
content. Google pointed to examples of content it found on Parler
that threatened elected officials and called for plans to organize
a militia march. One user posted: "How we take back our country?
It's simple...we hunt them down!" Google also flagged images of
fliers shared on Parler that called on armed militias to march on
Washington, D.C., the day of the inauguration.
Parler executives told the Journal the company has doubled its
team of volunteer moderators and instructed them to search "hot"
hashtags to gauge whether users are inciting violence. Parler Chief
Executive John Matze said the company has been removing users who
violate its terms.
Mr. Matze said keeping his business running will be difficult
because companies it has relied on to operate have suddenly stopped
working with it. "Our vendors dropped us all at once," he told the
Journal. With Amazon planning to cut off Parler's data storage and
processing contract at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Sunday, he expects
Parler to become temporarily unavailable. "In the best-case
scenario, it'll be 12 hours. In the worst, worse-case scenario,
weeks," he said.
Though Parler and other smaller platforms might grow, longtime
observers of social media say the significant scale of Twitter and
Facebook make those platforms unlikely to lose their influence.
Smaller venues full of like-minded users don't give users the
chance to reach new audiences, leaving participants competing with
each other for attention, said Joan Donovan, director of research
at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and
Public Policy. "Once someone's been removed from the mainstream
networks," she said, "they tend to become very marginal."
--Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz contributed to this article.
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com and
Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 10, 2021 19:38 ET (00:38 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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