Following the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, that left 5 dead, Big Tech and a growing list of companies have basically canceled President Trump. According to Washington Post, Twitter and Facebook/Instagram temporarily suspended the President’s accounts following the President’s speech blamed for inciting the assault on the Capitol by his supporters. Those bans soon became indefinite citing the risk of “further incitement of violence”. Since then, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitch have banned President Trump’s accounts and purged posts and accounts related to the President and his supporters. Even Shopify has closed President Trump’s merchandise stores, and Stripe, an online financial services company, is refusing to process any payment linked to the Trump campaign’s website.

As a result of canceling direct communications between the President and 80 million Americans, Twitter and Facebook lost over $51 billion in combined market value as their stocks tumbled. Yes! Billions with a B. Finally, when President Trump took his followers to Parler.com, a platform dubbed the conservative Twitter, Google, and Apple took the app off of their app stores and Amazon pulled the rug from under Parler by kicking their website off of Amazon’s cloud servers. Instead of easing after the inauguration, social media platforms have extended their bans to President Trump’s allies. According to NPR, the CEO of My Pillow, Mike Lindell, also known as the “My Pillow Guy” and a vocal supporter of the President, has been permanently banned from Twitter, starting January 25, 2021, citing “repeated violations of our Civil Integrity Policy,” although Twitter did not point out what post or specific claim it used as an excuse to ban him.

Although this move by high-tech executives and corporate America was applauded by the mainstream media and many at home, some foreign leaders have sounded the alarm. Despite being at odds with President Trump over the years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the closing down of the account of an elected president by big online platforms“problematic”.

So why should YOU care? The simple answer: you could be next. No matter your opinion on President Trump and MAGA, it is crucial to look carefully at the dangers of censorship. Not only does censorship transform our media and social media platforms into echo chambers where we only hear one side of the story but where does it end? Branko Marcetic, writer and author pointed out that “Censorship – and any type of oppression, really – always begin by targeting particularly unsympathetic people, those who it is uncontroversial to censor. But once you set that precedent, inevitably, the bounds of what is considered acceptable or wrong always ends up expanding.” The United States Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the press under the 1st Amendment by limiting the government’s power to restrict speech.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This sounds great but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the likes are corporations and they have the right to restrict speech on their platforms, the government is the only one unable to do so. With this in mind, maybe we should ask ourselves why we’ve allowed Big Tech to get so big. Have they become a de facto government in control of what we say, know, and share?

Is it time to restrict Big Tech’s monopoly on our lives before it comes back to bite us? When some of us get canceled for being considered too far off-center, whether right or left, who can we blame? With President Trump and his tweets now in the rearview mirror, let’s get some perspective and never forget how valuable the freedom of the unrestricted exchange of ideas is, no matter how offensive those ideas might be.