Facebook and Twitter Finally Respond to Trump
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2021
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New year, new ... coup? On Wednesday, angry supporters of President Trump stormed the US Capitol building and violently disrupted a congressional session to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. They were spurned on in no small part by the president himself, who urged them to march on the Capitol and then later took to Twitter to double (quintuple?) down on his false claims of election fraud. As result, a slew of social media companies opted to suspend Trump's account for varying lengths of time, citing his rhetoric as inflammatory and dangerous.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED politics writer Gilad Edelman joins us to talk about why companies like Facebook and Twitter decided to finally take action to shut down Trump's accounts. Then he gets a crash course on the wild world of CES—the first-ever all-virtual staging of the consumer tech industry’s tentpole event kicks off Monday.
Show Notes:
Read Gilad’s story about Facebook and Twitter suspending the president’s accounts here. Follow all of our CES coverage here.
Recommendations:
Gilad recommends that if you buy an item of clothing that you like, consider buying more than one. And also the Anker Soundcore Bluetooth Speaker. Lauren recommends the Headspace meditation app. Mike recommends a Black Manhattan cocktail.
Gilad Edelman can be found on Twitter @GiladEdelman. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone. Happy New Year. |
| 0:08.6 | Gadget Lab 2021. What up? Welcome. I am Michael Collori, a senior editor, Wired. I am joined remotely, as always, in the new year by my co-host, Wired senior writer, Lauren Good. Happy New Year, Lauren. |
| 0:22.0 | Happy New Year, Mike. And our producer Boone Ashworth just told us that this is our 40th remote |
| 0:27.6 | episode since we started working from home during the pandemic. I mean, I'm sure we've taped |
| 0:32.7 | remote episodes before, but I guess that means it's almost been a year at this point. |
| 0:38.0 | 40 weeks of delivery truck noises and cats meowing and toilets flushing and door slamming in |
| 0:45.3 | the background. So thank you for bearing with us. Yes. Thank you for being forgiving of our |
| 0:50.1 | less than ideal audio. Wait, your cat can flush toilets? I trained her, yes. I trained her to do that. It's way better than scooping. That voice that you just heard, the voice of God, is, of course, Wired's politics writer, Galad Edelman, who's coming to us from Washington, D.C. Hello, Galad. Hey, guys.'re doing New Year's resolutions? Maybe later in the show. Save that for... |
| 1:12.3 | Restore democracy. That's the resolution. |
| 1:14.9 | Actually, that's true. |
| 1:16.5 | So normally this time of year, the beginning of January, we would be dedicating an entire |
| 1:21.2 | episode of this show to CES, the giant consumer electronics show that's happening next week. |
| 1:27.4 | But of course, given the events happening in D.C. this week, we feel that we really need to |
| 1:33.0 | address the news. So we'll be talking about CES in the second half of the show. But we're going |
| 1:38.6 | to spend the first part of this episode talking about the events of January 6, 2021, the day an armed mob of Trump supporters |
| 1:47.4 | stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop Congress from verifying the results of the 2020 |
| 1:53.7 | presidential election. We're taping the show on Thursday. So from where we sit right now, |
| 1:59.8 | the Capitol was stormed 24 hours ago. |
| 2:02.5 | And since then, we've seen a lot of developments, not only in government or procedure, but also on the big internet platforms, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. |
| 2:12.2 | That's where we're going to concentrate today. The show is called Gadget Lab, so we're going to zoom into our phone screens and go deep. |
| 2:18.4 | Galad, we have you on the show because you've been following this issue closely. You just published a |
| 2:23.6 | story about it. So let's start with this. Once all the action in DC started yesterday on the sixth, |
... |
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