New York Magazine: “Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey didn’t kick Trump off Facebook and Twitter, respectively; Stacey Abrams did. Within 72 hours of Democrats taking control of the Senate, Dorsey and Zuckerberg found their better angels and suspended Trump’s account. You think it’s because they finally came to the realization that this was bad for America? Or that Trump had crossed a new red line? No, it was because they recognized that Democrats were going to be the heads of the Senate committees regulating them. Zuckerberg and Dorsey got tough on Trump 1,447 days into his 1,461-day tenure.”

“Twitter and Facebook built businesses in which shareholder value was directly correlated with the president’s rage and disinformation. Twitter stock, which I bought for the first time in 2019, was in the teens when he became president; it was in the 50s last month; and now that Trump’s account is gone, it’s off by 10 percent. Hannah Arendt alluded to tyranny as an informal alliance between the elites and a mob. What we have in Twitter and Facebook is tyranny with stock options. During the most dire threat to democracy, we were left hoping our tech overlords would save us. Our outrageous current reality is that when we have an insurrection, we don’t turn to our laws, our enforcement agencies, or even the media. We turn to 30-something CEOs, some of them sociopaths, hoping that they’ll mete out justice. I’m happy that Parler is out of business. But I’m uncomfortable with a private entity putting another out of business on 24 hours’ notice. It should have been shut down by the FTC or by lawyers who sued them for libel and slander.”