Donald Trump (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform recently launched, and the left is none too happy about it. Indeed, some have already begun calling on Big Tech companies to target the social media app as they did with Parler last year. It does not appear those calling for the removal of Trump’s new site have been successful yet, but it doesn’t mean they will stop trying.
It appears that now, some on the left are attempting to exploit the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol building as a pretext for attacking the new social media platform. They are urging Big Tech companies like Apple to remove the app from their stores. Author Samuel O’Brient, who is no fan of free speech, wrote a piece on Medium, titled “Big Tech Could Save Us From ‘Truth Social.’”
“Trump clearly wants to use Truth Social to rally his troops again and fire them up for another run at the White House. There’s almost no way that such a mission won’t include inciting violence in some form,” he wrote. “If Truth Social becomes a venue for hate-spewing and further insurrection-plotting, these big tech giants can buy themselves a lot of goodwill by honoring their credos and standing up to protect American democracy.”
Other left-leaning activist media outlets have attempted to discredit Truth Social, claiming that it does not have a significant number of users. Former California Rep. Devin Nunes, who stepped down from his position to become CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), criticized progressives for attempting to suppress right-leaning views online. Nunes told The Federalist:
“The fact that there’s even a need and a demand for Truth Social – a social media platform that won’t censor content based on viewpoints – is unsettling in itself. Once you begin censoring, the suppressions develop a momentum of their own. This naturally leads to demands for preemptive censorship, which until recently was a concept you only found in dystopian science fiction novels.”
However, it might not be as easy for Big Tech to kill Truth Social. The Federalist explained:
“Despite the difficulties presented by a market largely controlled by Big Tech monopolies, Truth Social built most of its platform from the ground up. Parler previously tried a similar strategy but was eventually nuked by dozens of companies who wanted the platform gone for political reasons. Unlike in Parler’s case, Apple is really the only Big Tech company that has the power to remove Truth Social from its app store and the new social media platform is already working to keep the illegal activity that censors use to justify suppression off of the platform.”
For the left, therein lies the rub. When they used Jan. 6 as an excuse to wipe Parler from the digital map, they overplayed their hand. This alerted conservatives to the reality that they must come up with methods to make it impossible for the authoritarian left to tamp down on right-leaning thought on the internet. Conservative entrepreneurs began developing their own hosting services to make themselves impervious to efforts to de-platform them the way Amazon Web Services did with Parler, which has since rebounded.
“We’re building as much of our own infrastructure as possible from scratch,” Nunes explained. “We won’t be relying on Big Tech firms to keep our website on the internet, and we’re partnering with companies that are fundamentally committed to free speech, such as Rumble.”
This is a shrewd move on Truth Social’s part, and other conservative projects will use the same methods to subvert progressive efforts to censor them.
Devin Nunes (Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images)
“The Big Tech companies generally did not begin as leftwing propaganda projects. In fact, the founders of a lot of these companies were idealistic proponents of free speech. But over time, they got corrupted and transformed their platforms into appendages of the Democratic Party and the left,” Nunes pointed out. “Truth Social won’t do that, no matter the pressure from the media, the government, the left, or anywhere else. President Trump, myself, and others here have spent years fighting back against the left’s ridiculous attempts to silence us.”
As the left continues its efforts to maintain a level of supremacy over online political discourse, conservatives will persist in carving out their own spaces on the internet. While this will ensure the preservation of free speech, it is also worth noting that it will result in a more siloed environment. Social media seems to be one of many industries that are moving towards separating its consumer base by political affiliation. This means the problem with echo chambers could become even more pronounced.
Unfortunately, since the authoritarian left refuses to brook any form of dissent, it is making this new paradigm shift necessary. The right has only two options: Allow itself to be censored or build a separate infrastructure the left cannot destroy. It seems conservatives have opted for the lesser of two evils.
~ Read more from Jeff Charles.
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