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In the aftermath of the violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol last week, Twitter and Facebook de-platformed President
Donald Trump.
They effectively ended his unprecedented run of attention-hacking, gaslighting, and outright lies about the results of the 2020 presidential election.
It wasn’t just the president and leader of the free world who got this treatment. All of a sudden, the dominant social media platforms, including YouTube, also decided they had had enough of the incendiary groups—QAnon, “Stop the Steal,” and related conspiracy groups—that had been allowed to use their services to organize a movement that ultimately resulted in a deadly attempted coup.