Joe Biden’s Big Tech takeover

Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump is like bolting the stable door after the QAnon shaman has gone. The damage was done long before the assault on the Capitol was planned on social media. Long before Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, social media had reduced American democracy to a lurid freak show.

The ban also shows how far the big-tech oligarchs are prepared to go in order to retain their absurd and damaging monopolies. After the 2016 elections, social media promised to clean up their act. The digital fiascos of the 2020 election and its aftermath confirm that Big Tech is incapable of being the value-free guarantor of the modern public square. Instead, it has been heavy-handed and incompetent: blatantly intervening on behalf of the Democrats (the silencing of the New York Post for running the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the pompous tagging of Trump’s tweets as unverified), yet incapable of stemming the tide of cross-party incitement and lies.