By Isabel Van Brugen
Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have collectively seen $51.2 billion in combined market value wiped out over the last two trading sessions since they banned President Donald Trump from their platforms following the U.S. Capitol breach.
Large tech firms and a number of Democratic political figures have claimed Trump incited violence at the U.S. Capitol last week. The incident disrupted debates in both the House and Senate as lawmakers were forced to shelter in place while police and security attempted to seize back control.
Trump took to Twitter following the outbreak of violence to call on protesters to “go home in peace.” He denounced the violence as a “heinous attack” that “defiled the seat of American democracy” on Jan. 7. It is unclear who instigated the breach of the building.
Last week, Twitter first placed restrictions on a video the president posted, before temporarily suspending his account, an action followed closely by Facebook. Twitter two days later permanently suspended Trump’s account over two Twitter posts it cited as having violated its policies.
A large number of pro-Trump accounts were also deleted by Twitter and Facebook.
As users attempted to flee to Parler and other social media websites, Amazon Web Services suspended its service with Parler on Monday morning, triggering a lawsuit from the company hours later.
Most recently, Google’s YouTube removed new content from Trump’s account and suspended his channel for at least a week, saying that the channel violated its policies for “inciting violence.”
“After careful review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to the Donald J. Trump channel and issued a strike for violating our policies for inciting violence,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“As a result, in accordance with our long-standing strikes system, the channel is now prevented from uploading new videos or livestreams for a minimum of seven days—which may be extended. We are also indefinitely disabling comments under videos on the channel, we’ve taken similar actions in the past for other cases involving safety concerns.”
Google did not have any further comment when asked about what aspects of the content on Trump’s channel had violated its policies.
The president has argued that companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook will fail due to censorship.
Big Tech is “doing a horrible thing to our country. … And I believe it’s going to be a catastrophic mistake for them,” Trump said.
Jack Phillips and Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.
