The Atlantic
Trump Is Banned. Who Is Next?
Tech giants must not treat their crackdown on the president’s social accounts as an edge case. The social web should be different now.
January 9, 2021
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Updated at 10:59 a.m. ET on January 11, 2021.
It happened slowly, and then all at once. After years of sparring, the internet’s most powerful moderators deplatformed their most famous troll: the president of the United States. Facebook has blocked Donald Trump’s account indefinitely. So have Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify; even one of the Trump campaign’s email providers has cut it off. At the time of writing, Trump still has his YouTube channel, but the company says it is accelerating its enforcement action. It was a Friday Night Massacre of platform bans.