Shares of Twitter are tumbling at the opening bell after it permanently kicked President Donald Trump off the social media platform.
There was a broad market selloff Monday to start the week, yet the 11% slide in shares of Twitter Inc. far outpaced those declines.
Twitter on Friday shut down @realDonaldTrump, citing concern that Trump would use it for further incitement of violence. Trump retorted that hed be building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!
There is a protest planned outside of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco by Trump supporters Monday, though employees are working from home due to the pandemic and there are few if any people there.
Facebook, which has suspended Trumps account through Jan. 20 and possibly indefinitely, also slipped 2% Monday.
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THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. APs earlier story follows below.
President Donald Trump has been kicked off of most mainstream social media platforms following his supporters siege on the U.S. Capitol. But it remains to be seen how fast or where if anywhere on the internet he will be able to reach his followers.
The far right-friendly Parler had been the leading candidate, at least until Google and Apple removed it from their app stores and Amazon booted it off its web hosting service just after midnight Pacific time early Monday.
Parlers CEO said that could knock it offline for a week, though that might prove optimistic. And even if it finds a friendlier web-hosting service, without a smartphone app, it’s hard to imagine Parler gaining mainstream success.
The 2-year-old magnet for the far right claims more than 12 million users, though mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower puts the number at 10 million worldwide, with 8 million in the U.S. That’s a fraction of the 89 million followers Trump had on Twitter.
Still, Parler might be attractive to Trump since it’s where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active. Parler hit headwinds, though, on Friday as Google yanked its smartphone app from its app store for allowing postings that seek to incite ongoing violence in the U.S. Apple followed suit on Saturday evening after giving Parler 24 hours to address complaints it was being used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities. Public safety issues will need to be resolved before it is restored, Apple said.
A message seeking comment from Parler was sent Sunday on whether the company plans to change its policies and enforcement around these issues.
Amazon struck another blow Saturday, informing Parler it would need to look for a new web-hosting service effective midnight Sunday. It reminded Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, that it had informed it in the past few weeks of 98 examples of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence and said the platform poses a very real risk to public safety.
When asked for comment, an Amazon spokesperson referred the Associated Press to the letter obtained by Buzzfeed.
Parler CEO John Matze decried the punishments as a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace. We were too successful too fast, he said in a Saturday night post, saying it was possible Parler would be unavailable for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch.
Every vendor, from text message services, to e-mail providers, to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day, Matze said Sunday on Fox New Channels Sunday Morning Futures. He said while the company is trying to get back online as quickly as possible, its having a lot of trouble, because every vendor we talk to says they wont work with us, because, if Apple doesnt approve and Google doesnt approve, they wont.
Losing access to the app stores of Google and Apple whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones severely limits Parlers reach, though it had continued to be accessible via web browser. Losing Amazon Web Services means Parler needs to scramble to find another web host, in addition to the re-engineering.
Trump may also launch his own platform. But that won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts anticipate growing pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary speech as Americans take stock of Wednesdays violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.
While initially arguing their need to be neutral on speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually yielded to public pressure drawing the line especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged early in the coronavirus pandemic urging people not to wear masks, noted civic media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Zuckerman expects the Trump de-platforming may spur important online shifts. First, there may be an accelerated splintering of the social media world along ideological lines.
“Trump will pull a lot of audience wherever he goes, he said. That could mean more platforms with smaller, more ideologically isolated audiences.
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Associated Press writer Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
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