Free speech
It would be misguided to lay all the blame for the spread of disinformation at the doors of Twitter and Facebook, but banning Donald Trump certainly seems to have had an effect. Amid warnings of uprisings and protests across the US, an image from inauguration day that went viral showed a lone Trump supporter with a bedraggled flag in front of the New York State Capitol. "I was hoping that we’d have more supporters out here," he is reported to have said. Obviously, the causes and mechanisms of disinformation are complex and multi-layered, but research by Zignal Labs found online misinformation about election fraud fell by 73% in the week following Twitter’s decision to ban Trump on January 8.
Meanwhile, China has been stepping up its efforts to discredit western vaccines and spread virus conspiracy theories, according to The Washington Post (R). But the China Media Project says posts by Chinese news outlets have been less prominent since Twitter made changes to its algorithms and started labelling them as state-affiliated.
Back in the US, the Twitter alternative, Parler, is continuing to try to get itself back online after failing to force Amazon to restore hosting services. It's reported to be planning to route traffic through servers located in the Russian Federation. So, that's bound to work out well.
The dedication with which rioters on Capitol Hill recorded their antics has created an extraordinary record of the attack on Congress. Every video ever posted to Parler can be downloaded (though they amount to terabytes of data). ProPublica has created a more manageable, interactive collection.
The fallout from the attack on Capitol Hill has also extended to the world of online dating. Tinder and Bumble are among platforms that are using images from the events to identify and ban the accounts of rioters. But, as The Washington Post reports (R), users of dating apps have also "taken matters into their own hands by striking up conversations with potential rioters and relaying their information to the FBI."