Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

Today, can America's politicians heal the divisive wounds of online hatred?

We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and we've got to stop the divisive rhetoric.

If we're going to expect Democrats to stop with the division, then we've got to initiate it on our side as well.

We're looking at the silencing of a U.S. president in today's program, on social media at least, are Facebook and the other platforms right to ban him, or is deeper surgery required?

We have a choice. We can try to fix Facebook or we can try to fix the internet.

I think that if we try to fix Facebook, we will be sorely disappointed. But if we try to fix

the internet, we might save our civilization. That's all to come on Business Daily from the BBC.

The violence that attended the storming of Congress last week, it has been all over the media and indeed social media in recent days.

And this week, the corporate fallout has really hit us.

Firstly, in terms of the social media platforms, Parlor was set up two years ago as a potential rival to Twitter and Facebook,

platforms that had increasingly begun, at least to consider curbing some of the extreme content on their sites.

Parla, though, not so much it seems, at least according to its critics.

And increasingly popular with a conservative fringe, it was accused of fermenting racist, xenophobic,

and other types of hate speech,

for example, promoting the argument that the recent presidential election was rigged.

Over the weekend, the platform suddenly went dark.

Google and Apple, which, between them run,

iOS and Android, the software deployed on the vast majority of mobile phones.

News by Americans delisted the company.

Amazon's web hosting service also cut it off.

The BBC's North America business reporter Michelle Flurry told me how it all happened.

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