‘Deplatformization’ is now a word in the tech world’s vocabulary. It’s what the Tech Giants did to Donald Trump. First one, then another, and then all of the herd followed last week:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”.
And just like that, Trump’s vast influence was neutered. This site makes the case that after years of hand-wringing, the tech giants took action simply because it had become clear that Trump no longer held political power:
For years Facebook and Twitter were unwilling to enforce their own rules against those inciting violence, in fear of upsetting a substantial part of their userbase… Not only is this [deplatformization] too little too late, but needs to be understood as an admission of complicity… Could it be that after the electoral shake-up what used to be an asset became a liability?
One of the mega trends we explore repeatedly on this site is that of Audience as Capital. You can’t discuss that trend without recognizing the fantastic power now held by social media companies which, if user bases were populations, would be the world’s largest countries:
- Facebook itself: over 2.5 billion active users
- Youtube: over 2 billion
- Whatsapp (Facebook): over 2 billion
- Instagram (Facebook): well over 1 billion
- Wechat: ~1 billion
- Tiktok: ~800 million
- Twitter: ~300 million
- Linkedin: over 300 million
Add to this Google Play Store with about 2.5 billion users on Android and Apple’s App Store with over 1.5 billion iOS devices controlling app distribution. They took the right-wing-dominated social network Parler offline.
Further add to this Amazon’s dominance of online commerce, Stripe’s of online payment acceptance, the decades-old Visa-Mastercard duopoly of payments processing [1], and Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform’s cornering of the internet applications, including such basic internet plumbing as DNS. AWS took Parler’s infrastructure down too.
We have never before seen such global concentration of attention and distribution.
[1] Not to mention local leaders: China Unionpay and India’s Rupay
(Part 2: so what’s the future?)
(Featured Image Photo Credit: Willian Justen de Vasconcellos/Unsplash)