What Trump’s Deplatforming Means for Creators

News Roundup #15: Solutions for creator burnout, Substack announces new features, Cameo reveals 2020 stats, and more

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Welcome to Issue #15 of the Means of Creation weekly news roundup where we break down the latest news on the passion economy, including the happenings related to platforms, creators, startups, and trends.

Community Hangout with Li & Nathan! 

This week we hosted a community hangout and Q&A with Li and Nathan, where they took up some of the questions readers had, touched on some news, and answered questions from past guests!  

Find it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Breaker or wherever you listen to podcasts, or as a video on YouTube here. Or subscribe to the Means of Creation YouTube Channel. Now, onto the news. 

Trump and Trumpists Deplatformed from the Internet

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What Happened?
  • As you are probably aware, many social media and other platforms have banned Donald Trump. Here’s the laundry list of companies that have banned Trump for inciting violence and promoting illegal activity: Apple, Reddit, Twitch, Shopify, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, Pinterest, Amazon AWS, Stripe, (and counting). 
  • After 57K tweets and 12 years, Twitter banned @realDonaldTrump. The AP even wrote an obituary for his Twitter account. 
  • Apple and Google removed Parler from their respective stores. Amazon’s AWS also announced that it would not provide hosting services to the platform. 
  • Incidentally, confused users in search of Parler downloaded another app called ‘Parlor’ by mistake and pushed it to the top of the App Store and Play Store.  
👧 Li:
  • This is cancel culture to the fullest extent. If we call Trump a content creator, which he was — he just got deplatformed. He had been a big driver of Twitter’s success, and they have just taken away his ability to reach his 88m followers. 
  • His only channels now are telephone, email, maybe his own website. This should concern content creators. 

Hank Green@hankgreenWhen you use an online platform professionally, the platform works hard to make you feel like you are building something that is yours. But, guess what, it’s theirs. They own your connections, your followers, your page, your account, and your channel. Sorry. That’s the gig.January 11th 2021, 12:50am EST491 Retweets9k Likes

  • As creators, we feel like we are building something that’s ours, but we have to remember that the audience built on these platforms isn’t built on solid ground. 
  • This also shows how a small handful of platforms really control our ability to reach a significant audience on the internet. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, Discord, Pinterest — that’s only 9 platforms that control almost all the content distribution. 
👦 Nathan:
  • Funny thing about the “He’s not prevented from communicating, he could set up his own website” argument is that it ignores the distinctions between content norms on different platforms. For example: it would be absurd if he issued his tweets as White House press releases. 
  • When platforms take away the networks they enable, they really might be irreplaceable because each one of them is so distinct.
  • I guess he could set up his own Wordpress that mimics Twitter, but it feels shameful to create his own small website.
👧 Li:
  • This illustrates how important it is for creators to invest in their own channels: mailing lists, SMS, etc. 
👦 Nathan:
  • I agree, but I also think this is an exceptional circumstance. Content creators need not be overly worried. If you’re trying to violently overturn the results of a legitimate election, maybe; but most of us aren’t. 
👧 Li:
  • No one worries about this when they are liked, but what happens when you aren’t? There have been quite a few platforms that have deplatformed people, or even countries who have deplatformed platforms. 
👦 Nathan:
  • I think that as a society, it's really important for us to have mechanisms to deplatform people. Not because of ideological differences, but because there might be an imminent societal threat. Like the ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’ test.
  •  It’s much better if we handle deplatfromings through the judicial system rather than the arbitrary whims of tech executives. 

Sam Altman@samaThere are exemptions to free speech defined by the Supreme Court, and we urgently need new ones for the age of social media. What those exceptions are should be decided by the government, and fairly applied by companies.January 9th 2021, 1:56pm EST179 Retweets2k Likes

Hunter Walk’s Fix for Creator Burnout

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