The coordinated take down of Parler has all the signs of Putin-style government arm twisting. At the minimum the government has been complicit in allowing monopolistic practices to shutdown a rising competitor. Consider the response from Democrats about the silencing of their political opponents:
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post ’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.
The alleged threat of political extremism has been used to deny Parler internet access using the monopoly powers of big Tech combined with not-so-subtle threats of retribution from the incoming administration. Yet according to Greenwald, Parler was not the primary platform used by those who breached the Capitol:
. . . of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter .”
With such obvious censorship, the old Russian saying appears to coming to the US: “There is no news in Truth, and no truth in News.”
