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.
We have long-established that Facebook, that big mammoth of an organization today knows more about us than we do ourselves. The feat has lost its vanity, it isn't cool anymore. It is not a fact that you clap to when a magician or card-reader reveals something about you that you yourself might have overlooked. You submit voluntarily to them, not so much to Facebook. Facebook today stores far greater information about you than the tidbits you provide to it yourself. And it uses that enormous information to decide what you like, what you might be interested in, what kind of deaths will disturb you more, what news you might be interested to read, what videos pick your interest, which political party you might vote to, are you a fence-sitter, essentially it knows you. You might be confused about what you wish to eat for dinner tonight but I bet Facebook if given a chance will tell you exactly what will interest you at the dinner table. That's not all, we have seen it and read how all this information is also used to manipulate us into voting for certain political parties, to influence our votes and in turn the democracy as a whole. In case, this looks alien to you or superfluous or bombastic, you must watch The Great Hack on Netflix. It will shock your bones to learn how far their surveillance machinery has come, how perilous our life and democracies have become from the new tech whose lengths and reaches in our lives remain unknown to the vast majority. People roam the streets, vent their anger, type their views on online platforms, upload pictures of them smiling on web without knowing what these things are being used for, they are unaware that these data-points are traced and visited over and over again to form a picture of them which is then used to inform on you, and eventually used to influence your actions. You think you are reading a certain article out of your free will, you think you are voting a party out of your choice, you think you are buying a product because you wanted it, let me put it out to you, none of your choices today are originating from your free will. Your free will was long sold when you signed up on “free” platforms. We have long written an obituary of that free will.
