Now that former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has stepped down, the company has appointed his successor. The new person to helm the e-commerce company could signal how it will handle issues related to online speech in the future.
Andy Jassy, who previously headed Amazon Web Services (AWS), will replace Bezos later this year. You might remember him from such hits as “Let’s Deplatform Parler Because We Don’t Like Conservatives Expressing Their Ideas Online.”
That’s right. Jassy led the department responsible for blacklisting Parler in January under the guise of protecting public safety. Shortly after the assault on the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, the company decided to stop hosting the social media platform, claiming to be concerned over the possibility that its users might “incite violence.’
The incitement narrative was used by other Big Tech companies who used the riots as an opportunity to start diminishing conservative voices, including former President Donald Trump and several influential right-wingers online. Twitter carried out a comprehensive purge of conservative accounts, pretending that these users were violating terms and conditions or inciting violence. Their claims were questionable at best; It was clear to many that it was a shameless effort to censor views with which they disagree.
Parler retaliated against Amazon by filing an antitrust lawsuit, accusing the company of being “motivated by political animus” in their decision to stop providing its hosting services to the social media platform.
However, there is a major problem with the claims that Big Tech has made about Parler. Breitbart News noted that “a criminal complaint filed a few weeks ago revealed that a search warrant was issued on a protester’s Facebook account, as mounting evidence suggests that individuals used Facebook to help organize the Capitol Hill protest.”
The Justice Department filed several charges against rioters who used Facebook to coordinate their trip to Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, none of these Big Tech companies have silenced Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube despite the fact that each of these platforms was used by rioters to collaborate with one another.
This news is yet another sign that conservatives must figure out how to subvert the far-left’s attempts to silence their voices online. January’s censorship efforts are only the beginning. As right-wingers develop more platforms and other means to communicate their ideas, the Marxist element in Big Tech will continue trying to silence them. Conservatives have figured out how to get around the left’s stranglehold on mainstream media before, they can certainly do it again.
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