Amazon, Twitter and other tech companies confronted fresh blowback on Monday for barring President Trump and taking action against a wide array of websites that had glorified the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol last week.
Twitter’s decision to remove Trump’s account, citing the potential that his corrosive rhetoric might incite additional violence, precipitated a sharp drop in the company’s shares, which fell by more than 6 percent by midday Monday. Twitter also braced for a potential protest outside its San Francisco headquarters, a demonstration that the president’s supporters have sought to organize on pro-Trump forums in recent days.
The flurry of activity reflected the intensifying clash between Washington and Silicon Valley in the days since Trump’s incendiary comments about the 2020 election helped spark a riot that forced the Capitol into lockdown and left five people dead.
Late Friday, Twitter barred Trump, citing two tweets including one that said he is not planning to attend President-elect Joseph Biden’s inauguration. Facebook on Thursday said it was suspending Trump for at least two weeks. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, said in an interview with Reuters that there are “no plans to lift” the ban.
Other tech giants have joined Twitter and Facebook in taking action against the president and his allies in recent days amid mounting political tensions in the United States – and growing fears about potential violence. That includes Parler, which Apple and Google removed from their app stores in a move that further constrained the right-leaning service’s reach. Joining Amazon, the tech giants say Parler has not properly policed its platform for violent threats, an accusation Parler denies.
Trump responded to the Twitter ban with a statement late Friday promising to seek an alternate social network – or build one of his own – in an attempt to get around the vast digital blockade. Trump is expected to spend the final days of his presidency attacking Silicon Valley over allegations of censorship, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“We will not be SILENCED!” Trump said in the statement, which he had tried to tweet from the president’s @POTUS account before Twitter blocked it.
Twitter and its fellow tech giants deny the charges of censorship. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, took to a forum sympathetic to the president, called TheDonald.win, to express their own displeasure – and to sow the early seeds for a potential protest outside the company’s offices on Monday. Such sites teemed with similar talk before the riot at the Capitol last week and have since glorified the violence that took place in Washington. By midmorning local time, no such protests had erupted at Twitter’s headquarters, which have sat empty for months as employees work from home amid the pandemic.
“Maybe the hq should be burned down when everyone goes,” wrote one user on a widely trafficked thread on the forum discussing the protest.
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