The social media giants move to ban President Donald J. Trump shows they are acting as publishing platforms and raises questions about regulation, Matt Hancock has said.
Last week President Donald J. Trump was removed from Facebook, Instagram and had his Twitter account suspended among other major blows to the Trump campaign in what appeared to be an orchestrated attempted by the now mainstream tech giants to silence the President and stop him communicating with his millions of supporters and followers around the world.
My analysis of the tech giants motives behind this silencing of the 45th President is they see themselves widely responsible for ‘allowing’ President Trump to be elected back in 2016 when many in the industry said ‘this could never be allowed to happen again’ they truly meant it.
So far, they have been willing to back their words up with actions in the form of removing an account, silencing anyone who descent from their narrative and is articulate enough to garner any form of major support before they too become a ‘problem’ to them like they saw President Donald J. Trump.
I do not think I am being melodramatic when I say that the last week and coming months will decide how the western world’s system of freedom of speech will play out in the cyber world for potentially decades to come, regardless of what your political opinions are or what you think of President Trump ask yourself if you think that a handful of companies who hold the keys to the masses on the internet should have the ability to remove a democratically elected leader from their platform?
I have included some charts in this artcile to give you an idea of the major influence of social media on the western and wider world with billions now using these platforms for everything to getting the latest news, keeping up with family too selling a car – for many social media has become part of the daily routine.
Many will answer yes, citing these are private companies who can pick and choose who they want to access their platform – but let me argue the case that these tech giants have morphed into major companies with populations bigger than most nations that access their platforms on a daily basis, they hold the keys to the flow of information on the mainstream web and any potential competition is bought up by them before it has a chance to fully develop into a real competition or worse squeezed out the market by being blocked from app stores – many still don’t know that Google owns YouTube or Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
The mainstream app stores like Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store pick and choose what Apps they want to host on their platforms and operate in a broadly self or unregulated space, free speech platforms like Gab have not been allowed on both app stores with companies citing the lack of content regulation.
These tech giants have gotten far too big for their boots and if action is not taken against them, I truly fear for what little freedom of speech we have left on these platforms today, I understand some content needs to be regulated such as the old saying you do not shout fire in a crowded theatre unless there really is one!
The same goes for the cyberspaces that many of the public use every day, broadly speaking the Nation-States already hive laws against much of the horrific side of the internet, for example, selling illegal goods or indecent images of children, those engaging in such criminal activity will and should be brought to justice in a court of law and removed from online networking.
The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has suggested the platforms’ move to “taking editorial decisions” raised “a very important question” about their regulation by the Government.
“They’re choosing who should and shouldn’t have a voice on their platform,” he said.
Mr Hancock is not wrong, just late to the party as they have been doing this long before the censoring of President Donald J. Trump, what’s different this time is the social media giants have widely been able to silence the democratically elected leader of the ‘free world’ and half of it has not batted an eyelid.
Its long past the point of return but we can minimise damage by taking regulatory action against social media giants, Government need to apply pressure to make sure that the social made companies follow the laws of the nations that they operate in.
The British right to freedom of speech, what little we have left of it should be upheld on these social media platforms, the time has passed for these monopolies of internet speech to have all the privileges of acting like publishers without following the legal standards of one.
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Editor-in-Chief | Carl D. Pearson has been involved in British politics and media from an early age, with the key knowledge of what it takes to run a news organisation for the 21st century. Mr Pearson, as Editor-in-chief, is responsible for supervising the daily tasks of publishing media and content to UNN’s website and various platforms.
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