This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 14th, 2021.

I'm cable Brown.

Big Tech has taken big steps in the last week to restrict the activities of the

president, right-wing outlets, and other supporters of

the president online. So what does that mean for Trump's super-fans will they now need to

create their own internet? Is it Orwellian or fascism as many have claimed on the right?

Cato's Will Duffield and Matthew Feeney comment. The president lost his

Twitter account, to paraphrase a president, rendering him almost mute, and lost a bunch of other social

media perches as well.

A lot of other right-wing groups lost their social media or were restricted in some way on various

platforms. Some left-wing groups lost theirs, we have to note as well. Parlor, the so-called Twitter alternative, which is mostly right-wing folks

there, was told by Amazon we're not going to host your site again and this was

after Apple and Google both said we don't want your app in our stores.

So what is notable about this is of course all of this occurred in the wake of that

the deadly pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol last week.

But a lot of this did happen at once

and seemed to be, at least from a right-winger's perspective, pretty broad.

So Will, answer me this, this is not the first time that social media companies have appeared to act in concert

in restricting or doing something about high profile people doing things they don't like on their platforms?

Well, all of this happened at around the same time, but it didn't happen at exactly the same time.

So rather than being a coordinated effort in which platforms communicated ahead of time about the sorts of decisions they wanted to make.

This was instead a cascade.

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