meetdheeraj

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Reddit have suspended or banned accounts of or related to Donald Trump. You want to believe in it or not, the sad truth is Donald Trump is President of the United States of America. He is the most powerful man on the earth. And God did not make him this powerful nor did he acquire Aladdin's lamp, scratched it and become President. People, a large number of them, voted him into this office. They chose him to be their president. And by these platforms, he was reaching his audience. And that platform has been snatched from him now. And this snatching was not achieved after thorough parliamentary or congress' dialogue or arguments in court, this pulling away of carpet from underneath his motormouth-empire was decided by few men behind the closed-doors of these platforms in total secrecy. Their decisions are beyond the purview of public scrutiny. There is no set of logic that applies to what went behind these decisions. This is, believe it or not, arbitrary. Trump, to all our delight, was banned from these platforms by platform owners out of their own volition. He cannot reach his audience now because few men decided so. The most powerful man on the planet holding public office was blocked, his means of reaching his audience were shut because some men beyond the scrutiny of the public eye decided so. Was he really the most powerful man on the planet to begin with if he can be shut this way? If he is not powerful then who is? Have these platforms grown so powerful, so to say, that they can now blackout President of the United States of America?

Oh, make no mistake, I wanted that buffoon to be blocked from these platforms long ago. This came rather too late. Almost at a time now when he has become powerless. The havoc he was capable of raising has been raised already. These platforms let him set fire to this world and now when those very fires were reaching their doors, they shut him off. They shut him not because he was evil, which he was no doubt, but because the curtain behind which they shared meals and drinks with the clown was about to come down. But anyways, less talked about that the better. The problem isn't how hand-in-glove tech companies were with Mr Trump or politicians like him but how people come to elect them in the first place. These platforms allow vilest of the vile disinformation and propaganda to spread without any checks. It is these platforms that trap like-minded and disillusioned people into a bubble and serve them more and more of the vile gobbledygook; it is they who make them slip down and down the rabbit hole so much so that they see in a clown-like Donald Trump or in a fascist authoritarian tinpot (like Modi or Erdogan) their messiah. It is they who facilitate or prepare the ground for their crowning. The elections work like clockwork once the ground has been prepared for the same. So by blocking Mr President, these platforms have given the propagandists the very real reason or coloured glasses through which they happen to see this world anyways. This will only help legitimize their faulty victimhood. Fascist conspiracy theories thrive on the precise belief that they're the victims in this world, that their existence is at stake in the new world. And by blocking their demigod we have given them the real meat on their big red plate.

Of course these platforms today enjoy unrestricted power over the public conversations we have in private. These platforms dictate what is accepted and what is controversial, it is they who decide what is cool and what is objectionable. Their false objectivity and obscenity called community guidelines have spilt into our drawing rooms. Our understanding of this world and our surroundings is by virtue of the information we acquire from these platforms. But since these platforms control what we can see and what we cannot (facebook for instance decides we might not be interested in a piece of certain information and so blacks out this information which its algorithms have decided we would not like), the final understanding we have is by design faulty. And naturally the decisions we make from this faulty understanding will be faulty too. So the people we hate, the people we vote, people we admire, everything that we do is tinkered. These platforms can make us believe in unbelievable things and also make us disillusioned. They enjoy sweeping powers in this regard and we need to think about this power and the precedent this ban is setting. But on the other hand, we also need to think about the lost opportunity here. However hard we have tried we would not have been able to acquire similar minded people at one place as Trump had. His supporters rallied alongside him and they waited for his tweets, they read his posts and followed them through. Attack on the Capitol proves that loud and clear. These tech giants shouldn't have banned Trump from their platforms instead delayed publishing his updates and in the interim fact-checked his tweets, labelled and explained how right or wrong his updates were. This was a missed opportunity to reach his audience and explain to them with real data that they were being blinded by these men or his kind. We have lost it now.

By blocking Trump we have played into their conspiracy theories, we have legitimized their victimhood. They had written their playbook and sadly, we ran by those dotted lines, just as they wished. This cannot be undone now.

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