I suspect there'll be a lot to discover over what happened last Wednesday. I have no doubt that many, if not most, of the rally goers were people exercising their rights to protest what they thought was a conspiracy of left-wingers to steal last November's Presidential election. (I think they are wrong, but I'll defend their constitutional rights to express their opinions.) Some people, however, clearly took Trump's encouragement to fight quite literally; as I tweeted earlier, this is the same Trump who advised police not to be so nice to suspects (e.g., rough rides), had suggested he would foot legal fees for anyone who physically assaulted a heckler/protester at one of his events. that his supporters wouldn't desert him, even if he shot someone in New York City. In fact a couple of his supporters in Boston (before he was elected) came across a sleeping homeless Latino and peed on him and beat him with a pipe. Oh, of course, he'll pay lip service, like in the Boston incident, to violence being wrong, that his minions were simply very passionate in their anti-immigrant views. But we could talk other instances, like the Charlottesville incident where a right-winger drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, that he knew there was a strong possibility, if not probability, at least some of his supporters might respond forcefully to his appeal for them to confront the Congress over the "stolen" election.
Now this post is not to rehash Wednesday's events; I've made it clear that I support a second Trump impeachment over them. It's really more of a backlash from Big Tech, perhaps worried about a public perception they aided and abetted the insurrection through their services, quickly turned against Trump and his right-wing support. Trump was suspended, at first temporarily, then permanently from Twitter. More importantly, the lightly moderated Parler, a minor Twitter competitor mostly attractive to right-wingers annoyed by Twitter's tilt against conservatives and libertarians, was considered Trump's likely alternative, was evicted from its web hosting service, Amazon AWS, with short notice. Finally, Ron Paul, who penned a critical column against Big Tech on Facebook, found himself suspended from managing his own page. (This last item hasn't gotten much attention beyond us libertarians.)
Now I've recently blogged in reference to cloud computing; AWS is the market leader although almost every big name in tech (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc.) also provides competitive services. The concept isn't new in computing. Many enterprises own computing resources, including servers, which can interface with the Internet; Parler could do the same (and I've seen some posts implying Parler is considering that option). Of course, the resources have to be professionally administrated (although it's possible to outsource this support). Many smaller companies don't have the internal expertise or state-of-the-art technology to meet technical challenges like Distributed Denial of Service attacks; there are internal issues like what happens if a server hardware or disk corruption issue affects your website/ application availability, you have an outage caused by geographic issues (say, power outage, local natural disaster issues, etc.). So basically cloud computing models provide a rent vs ownership proposition or extension in a hybrid solution where you can scale up operations instantaneously, hedge against geographic risk, etc.: client managers don't have to acquire or upgrade new equipment, recruit IT personnel, schedule maintenance outages, etc. Cloud computing provides certain economies of scale and lets its clients focus on their distinctive competencies/missions.
I recently opened a Gab account. Gab itself faced a similar situation as Parler when their cloud computing vendor GoDaddy similarly kicked them off their platform after an anti-Semite had posted hate messages on it prior to a Pittsburgh area attack on a synagogue. (Let me clearly say I have zero tolerance for neo-Nazi types. But I think a free market of ideas is the best way to deal with hate-based ideology; bans don't eliminate bad ideas. If anything, they promote them. I had a couple of skinhead types reply to my tweets on Twitter, of all places.) The point is that Gab was back online (using its own servers) within a week or so, and I'm sure Parler was paying attention and may likely do the same.
For the most part, I am sympathetic with the fact that Amazon, Twitter, Google et al. are private companies and have a right of voluntary exchanges over the past week. There is a whiff of political correctness over the concentrated, maybe coordinated actions of Big Tech. I'm far more concerned about federal regulators using the kerfuffle to intervene, and make no mistake: there will be regulatory capture that will favor Big Tech over their smaller competition, less able to bear the cost of extra regulatory expense.
I am less sympathetic to cries of "censorship" of Trump. First of all, the Twitter action only affected his personal account. Official White House accounts are functional. He's got a Press Secretary. His speeches are released on White House websites and widely available, e.g., on Fox News. I can think of many offensive tweets on Trump's account which have violated Twitter's guidelines. As someone who has been suspended by Twitter multiple times over choice of terminology, I'm personally appalled by an apparent double standard. Instead, he's squealed like a stuck pig, not because his tweets were removed, but because they were tagged as disputed.
I'm mostly dismayed by the treatment on Ron Paul, hardly a Trumpkin. Facebook targeted him coincidentally (?) after he published a column critical of Big Tech--something he has done on numerous other occasions. Ironically it took me a while to find the column, but I believe it is available here. Ron Paul espouses the non-aggression principle. The idea that he has become collateral damage in the backlash against Trump's insurrection is morally unacceptable.
