The former president's former aide is trying to get him back online.
 | By Nayeema Raza Senior Editor, Opinion |
What speech is acceptable on social media? And who gets to decide? |
These are questions that the veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has been grappling with for over a decade, and that have become a central focus of Times Opinion's podcast, "Sway," which she hosts. |
They are also questions that came to a head on Jan. 6 when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and the sitting president issued a stream of divisive tweets. |
That afternoon, the "Sway" team rushed to book an interview with John Matze, the chief executive of Parler, the right-leaning social media app where some of this mob were sharing videos and issuing rallying cries to "burn D.C. to the ground." |
We asked Matze if he felt any responsibility for what happened on his platform. He said he did not and "neither should the platform." His answer was cited by Apple in its decision to eject Parler from its app store and by Amazon in its own decision to stop providing the site with web-hosting services, effectively taking the platform offline. |
After Jan. 6, Parler got another chance — it is back online and in the app store after some tweaks to its content moderation policies and its leadership. But Donald Trump is not. The former president was deplatformed from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. "Sway" covered these events too — most notably in a May conversation with Facebook Oversight Board member Alan Rusbridger. |
Yet Trump's social media future may not be over. On a recent episode of "Sway," Kara speaks with Jason Miller, Trump's longtime aide and former spokesman, about when the former president might pick up his next social media megaphone. |
Miller is now the C.E.O. of Gettr, a new platform that he says "rejects this notion of cancel culture," and is angling to get the former president signed up and back online. |
Kara and Miller do not agree on much — and in this interview she presses him in particular on this notion that right-leaning voices are being censored, and asks him what lines he will be drawing on his own site when it comes to violent speech, vaccine misinformation and the Big Lie. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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