Illustration by Ryan Garcia.
President Trump has left the building. In his final days, in one of the most symbolic moments of his short period in the White House, after his supporters had haphazardly stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, the inveterate (ab)user of social media was banned from, first, Facebook and then his favourite platform, Twitter. For the farthest right in North America, digital platforms’ decision to ban Trump represented the fulfilment of fears of “socialist” censorship; everyone else saw the enormous drop in the spread of misinformation and hate speech across the entire social media ecology. But this moment was more than simply symbolic. Donald Trump, although by this stage the lamest of lame duck presidents, was still the president of the most powerful state in the world, and yet system administrators working for platform corporations could cut off his main lines of communication to his supporters and, indeed, to the American people more broadly.