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It’s been more than a month since the app stores of Google and Apple joined forces with Amazon Web Services to knee-cap an upstart competitor, Parler. The stated reasoning was Parler’s lack of content moderation policies, which Apple, in particular, claimed led to Parler’s use as a forum to “plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.”
This reasoning was confidently repeated across the corporate press. “The Capitol mob began organizing … on platforms like Parler and Gab,” Vox asserted. Planning for the “mob violence that descended on the U.S. Capitol … took place openly on websites popular with far-right conspiracy theorists,” National Public Radio proclaimed. Facebook shut down Stop the Steal groups, said The New York Times, so planning moved to Parler and Gab.