Did US Big Tech finally submit to Big Government?

After almost four years of America’s far-right feeling itself in the ascendency, last week was a bucket of cold water as the country's Big Tech firms acted in union to pull down their Commander in Chief, US President Donald Trump.

If impeachment doesn’t end Trump’s future political ambitions, a move that he is rumoured to have considered for 2024, the soon to be former president now has to contend with an unprecedented attack on his social media machine and the ecosystem surrounding it which he has relied upon in his path to power.

Facebook and Twitter no longer host Trump on their platforms following the violence instigated by the President last week. A plethora of other companies have also moved to ban Trump including YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and Pinterest. But also payment platforms like PayPal and Shopify in a bid to throttle Trump’s revenues.

But it hasn’t stopped there, Apple, Google and Amazon have moved to censor a little known platform called Parler, a platform similar to Twitter but used mostly by conservative or right-wing voices.

Unsurprisingly the move has been condemned by the American right as an attempt to silence their voices on the platforms.

Big Tech companies, and in particular their founders, have made no secret of who they supported in the 2020 presidential elections. About 98 percent of donations from the internet tech billionaires and their companies went to support Joe Biden.

The move to silence far right-wing voices and platforms has predictably raised the spectre of the immense, and some would say unaccountable power that giant tech companies wield in deciding who can and can’t speak on their platform.

Alexey Navalny, a Russian political activist who recently was allegedly poisoned by the Russian state condemned Twitter’s move to ban Trump as an “unacceptable act of censorship.”

The decision to ban Trump, Navalny went on to add, was based “on emotions and personal political preferences.”

Navalny isn't alone. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel described Twitter’s ban on Trump as “problematic.”

Merkel argued that the right to the freedom of speech is fundamental and only politicians can restrict it according to legislation and “not according to the decision of the management of social media platforms.”

The European Union has already moved to restrict the power of Big Tech firms and accused them of having too much power in the market space. Now EU politicians may also focus on the political power those companies wield.

One European analyst argued that another reason Big Tech companies moved against Trump and other right-wing voices was to placate Democratic politicians who have threatened to break them up, and more broadly, they signalled their intention that they would submit to the state when needed.

An investigation led by Democratic Senators on the US judiciary committee focused on Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google found that they held abusive monopoly power over the internet.

The report found that “As they exist today, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways."

Whereas the Democrats have chosen to wield the weapon of investigating the Big Tech companies for their monopolistic behaviour the Republicans have chosen to threaten the same companies through removing the protection they get from a little law known as section 230.

That law protects online companies from legal liability for their user’s posts, where such protection to be removed online social media platforms would potentially face lengthy legal battles from users.

Trump has held that law over the head of Big Tech firms throughout his administration.

Now with Democrats coming into power and keen to show that these platforms can self regulate and cognisant that the incoming Biden administration may seek to tighten the screws on these companies, the actions of the past few days may placate lawmakers.

The American Civil Liberties Union was, however, more reticent and in a statement said “We understand the desire to permanently suspend [Mr Trump] now.” Given what they stand for they are struggling with the decision by Facebook and Twitter.

“But it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier,” the statement went on to add.

That political reality, of course, is that Trump lost the election. Had Trump won, the platforms may not have been so bold and would have continued to accommodate him.

Perhaps and ultimately that’s the message Big Tech is sending to Washington that it will work with and cooperate with whoever is in power, Democrat or Republican.