Trump loves attention more than anything else. Usually, the story of the election is about the winner but it’s amazing how Trump’s been able to suck up all the oxygen even after losing. The man instinctively understands the value of attention in the cognitive economy.
But it’s tiring!
The good news for Biden is that he might be able to get away with - even strongly induced to - being a boring president after years of Trump’s mercurial presidency.
However, for Biden to do so, he will need a media landscape that Trump can’t dominate. Even if he’s better off staying behind the scenes, Biden has to steer and shape the political landscape and not let Trump do so without having any of the constraints of power. For that to happen, there has to be consensus that Trump cannot continue to hog the limelight.
As of right now, it looks like the tech industry as a whole has decided to take a stance against Trump’s actions. Not only has Parler been banned by both the Google and Apple app stores, AWS (whose servers Parler rents) has also banned Parler from using their services.
It seems that these bans are usually triggered by credible threats of imminent violence or evidence of violence already committed. Cloudflare’s ban of 8Chan set the frame for much of this action, but the bans of the last two days have far greater impact. Today, if you want to create a far right social network, you will need to manage your own server farm, find a way to get your words and images on screens that will be increasingly policed. It’s possible but will require an extraordinary combination of media vision, engineering talent and money. If that happens, whatever emerges will be way more virulent than what’s on display today.
Are we seeing an extraordinary, standalone response to one event or the beginning of a major shift in the tech industry’s view of hate speech and violence?
For example, the next time a Kapil Mishra or someone like him clearly incites violence on Twitter, will he be banned? Or is the ban only for the first world?
