Bookmark Please log in to listen to this story. Also available in French and Mandarin. Log In Create Free Account Getting audio file ... This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy. Full Disclaimer Taylor Owen is the director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill and the host of the podcast. Last week, social-media companies held hands, plugged their noses and jumped together, suspending the President of the United States from their platforms and delivering, in effect, the de-platforming of Donald Trump, which many thought was long overdue. The kindest interpretation of this move is that the platforms, responding to the insurrection in Washington, acted swiftly and decisively to protect the country from further unrest, marking an evolution from their youthful and naive pretenses of neutrality to a more mature stature as responsible gatekeepers. More cynically, this moment could be seen as a deferential move for an incoming president whose party now has a lock on the White House and Congress, done in the dying days of an administration that these very same companies had welcomed for four years.