The censorship imposed by big tech companies on social media has drawn more backlash, with Twitter shares plunging 12 percent on Monday (Jan. 11), wiping $5 billion off its market value, as investors appeared unhappy with the social network’s decision to ban President Trump‘s (Trump) postings.
Since the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Twitter Inc. announced on the evening of Jan. 8 that it had permanently banned President Trump’s personal account, saying it posed “a risk of further incitement to violence.
In a statement, Twitter wrote: “After carefully reviewing recent tweets from the Trump account (@realDonaldTrump) and the context surrounding them, we have permanently suspended the account because of the risk of further incitement to violence.”
But those claims were accused of a double standard by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who said Twitter blocks the free speech of the U.S. president and ordinary Americans when leaders and officials of dictatorships such as Venezuela, Iran and the Chinese Communist Party are allowed to tweet at will.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can tweet, but Trump can’t,” Graham said. That says a lot about the people who run Twitter.”
Twitter’s permanent suspension of the outgoing president sparked an uproar in the market and a heated debate about the role of technology companies in regulating speech.
Before Trump was blocked, he had more than 88 million followers on Twitter and was retweeted billions of times. Trump supporters and conservatives have said they want to boycott Twitter’s decision, a move that may cost Twitter a certain level of its user base.
Andrea Cicione, head of strategy at TS Lombard Consulting, told Reuters, “Trump has very highly loyal supporters, and a lot of those eyeballs (meaning users) will disappear if Trump’s posting is permanently restricted.”
In a research note, Bernstein analysts noted that if Twitter and other companies decide to ramp up efforts to regulate content, it will again increase costs, “which is not cheap and could benefit Facebook, which already (employs) an army of censors (about) six times larger than Twitter’s army six times larger.”
Facebook’s blocking ban was tweeted a day earlier, and Facebook shares fell 2 percent before early trading Monday.
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