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Mixed Signals

Social media platform Parler, which was used largely by the Trump supporters has been banned by both Google and Apple from their appstores. If being kicked out from the basically two only viable mobile platform wouldn't have been enough to kill a service the insult to injury came from Amazon who was providing platform capacity for the service. With nowhere to host or distribute it's app there is little hope for a small actors in this space.

Now I'm sure no one will be missing Parler. It deserved the treatment it got by allowing all the hate speech and agitation to happen within it's platform. It has also been said there was heavy censorship happening toward leftist opinions despite the fact it advertised itself as a true free speech platform with no moderation whatsoever.

What's scary is the sheer power of these mega corporations. How easily they can shut down things they don't like. And only one of those companies have promised to do no evil however much that's worth.

On an unrelated news Facebook started to enforce users to accept their new terms of service on Whatsapp giving Facebook full access to the data from the messaging app. Along the public uproar world most second richest person Elon Musk tweeted "use Signal" sending the stock speculators on a spending spree. Unfortunately on a completely different company. This unfortunate misunderstanding skyrocketed a company that had close to zero revenue into being a 3 billion dollar company overnight. Also scary when you can do that with a single message to a social platform.

Facebook didn't come clean from the latest Trump insider's either. A lot of Capitol hill events was definitely planned over it's network as much as over Parler. Only when it was certain Trumps side was lost did they took more strict stance against such content. So when will we see the same takedown happening for these other platforms?