After rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, some of the most powerful US institutions sprang into action to punish the leaders of the failed insurrection. But they weren’t the institutions you might expect. Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts of President Trump for posts praising the rioters. Amazon, Apple, and Google effectively banished Parler, an alternative to Twitter that Trump’s supporters had used to encourage and co-ordinate the attack, by blocking its access to web-hosting services and app stores. Financial service apps, such as PayPal and Stripe, stopped processing payments for the Trump campaign and for accounts that had funded travel expenses to Washington DC for his supporters.
The speed of these technology companies’ reactions stands in stark contrast to the feeble response from the governing institutions. Congress’s efforts to establish a bipartisan, 9/11-style commission failed amid Republican opposition. Law enforcement agencies have been able to arrest some individual rioters but in many cases only by tracking clues they left on social media about their participation in the fiasco.
