The outgoing president, Donald Trump, continues to have at his command the power of his office and all the communication tools of the White House, but his suspension from social networks after inciting the assault on the Capitol has angered the president and some of his followers.
After his Twitter account was permanently suspended for inciting violence, as this social network explained on Friday, other companies have now taken steps to block
Parler, the application that had become the alternative megaphone of many Trump supporters.
Parler had even been dubbed the "Twitter for conservatives."
Amazon's web and cloud services suspended Parler's account, leaving the app without servers on Monday morning and stopped working.
Over the weekend, Google and Apple removed the application from their stores, thus preventing it from being downloaded by new users.
"The statements of Amazon, Google and Apple about giving us access has caused other of our providers to stop giving us service," said John Matze, founder of Parler, in a statement about why the application was not working.
The technological giants claim that they took these actions because
Parler was allowing the dissemination of violent messages
and harmful falsehoods about the electoral result, as well as allowing users to "plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities."
Parler was used by violent people who discussed plans to sneak guns into Washington DC and break into Congress, according to researchers from the Digital Forensic Research Lab, with the intention of invalidating the result of the popular vote and the electoral vote that gave him victory. Democrat Joe Biden.
Users of the Parler application could not access their accounts as of January 11 and the app was withdrawn from the Android and iOs.EFE stores
In the last days after the assault on the Capitol, in addition,
videos continued to circulate in Parler that instigated action on January 20
, the day on which the new president must be constitutionally inaugurated.
[The day the internet turned its back on Trump: how various platforms began to implement their user policies]
Parler was established two years ago by Matze and, in that time, had attracted approximately 12 million users, according to the social network.
Of them, eight million were in the United States.
In contrast, Trump had nearly 90 million followers on Twitter.
As Trump supporters consider whether to move to other platforms, such as Telegram or the 4chan forums,
Silicon Valley tech companies are not the only ones beginning to take action
to prevent false information from spreading or causing further violence.
The radio company Cumulus Media, which has hosted the programs of conservatives and right-wing Trump supporters like Ben Shapiro, also told clients that the company "will not tolerate suggestions [on the air] that the election It is not over, because the election has already been resolved, "according to The Washington Post.
Between a debate on censorship
Supporters of the outgoing president have tried to argue in recent days that the actions against Parler and Trump's accounts on platforms such as Twitter or Facebook
are supposedly an act of censorship,
However, Trump still has multiple tools at his disposal to give notice to the American public before his term ends on January 20 at 11:59 a.m.
Not for nothing is there a cabinet position called the White House Communications Directorate.
At
the international level, the right to free expression has had limitations: it
is considered that if the ideas or opinions expressed incite violence against a specific group or person, a crime is committed because the global rights to non-discrimination are being violated.
There are rules and laws in this regard, such as legislation in Rwanda to avoid expressions that deny the genocide that that country experienced.
[Another impeachment, 25th Amendment, voluntary resignation? What could happen to Trump after the assault on the Capitol]
What the US Constitutional First Amendment states
is that Congress and other branches of government must not and cannot attempt to restrict the right to express themselves, but it says nothing about how private companies and platforms can proceed.
The Supreme Court of the United States established in a 1969 ruling that constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression do allow action to restrict speech "aimed at inciting or producing an immediate illegal action and which has a probability of inciting or producing such action."
For Kara Swisher, a journalist specializing in the technology industry and the internet, it makes no sense to argue that the business decisions of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon or Apple consist of censorship.
Swisher told MSNBC this morning that
"businesses need not be forced to serve
those who do not [meet] standards."
He added that those tech giants, like private companies, have conditions and terms of service that everyone, even a world leader, must abide by if they want to use their platforms.
"I founded Parler to be a place for open dialogue and discussion where we could work to leave behind the anger and hostility that seems to be consuming our civil society," Matze said in a statement this weekend.
Instead, according to many experts, it became the mechanism for organizing acts of anger and hostility.
With information from MSNBC and The Washington Post
