Twitter permanently banned President Trump last Friday following Facebook announcement that the social media giant will keep the president's account locked through at least presidential inauguration January 20.
Other platforms like shopify and Snapchat have also banned Trump in what appears to be a coordinated effort by the left-wing tech companies.
Thousands of conservatives' accounts including those of prominent journalists and pundits, were also purged from Twitter Friday. Many conservative journalists and activists also reported inexplicable drops in their follower counts. Popular conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh deactivated his Twitter account Friday evening, following Trump’s ban from the platform.
The brazen and unprecedented move against a sitting president have sparked outrage even among the president's critics.
In response many Trump supporters and some Republican party leaders, late Friday, flocked to alternative pro free speech platforms like Gab and Parler. The surge of new users on both platforms were so large that they experienced temporary outages. "The traffic just keeps growing," Gab CEO Andrew Torba announced. "Hang tight, even more servers on the way today."
Big tech giants were apparently not satisfied with banning Trump supporters from their social media platforms. Google without warning dropped Parler app from Google Play store Friday, cutting off access to Android phone users who may want to download the app.
Again in what appears to be another coordinated action on Saturday, Apple and Amazon following Google, took steps to further cut access to Parler on their platforms.
Apple said it was suspending the fledgling social media app from its app store, stopping iPhone users from being able to download the app. At around the same time, reports emerged that Amazon was cutting off the site from its web hosting service, meaning Parler will go offline unless it finds a new host.
"We are the closest thing to competition Facebook or Twitter has seen in many years," Parler CEO John Matze said in a statement. "I believe Amazon, Google, Apple worked together to try and ensure they don’t have competition. They will NOT win! We are the worlds last hope for free speech and free information. What they are doing is unprecedented, unfounded and absolutely disgusting. Shameful."
Matze said the social media site may be temporarily offline for a few days because of Amazon's action.
Following Amazon's move, many Parler users started joining Gab Social. Unlike Parler, Gab has no hosting issues to deal with since they host their data on their own servers. And many users seem to prefer the 'Facebook-Twitter hybrid' user interface style of Gab.
Republican leaders have called out Twitter and other big tech platforms for their authoritarian censorship practices.
“Silencing speech is dangerous," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted. "It’s un-American. Sadly, this isn’t a new tactic of the Left. They’ve worked to silence opposing voices for years. We cannot let them silence 75M Americans. This isn’t the CCP[Chinese Communist Party]."
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) also slammed the tech giants. "Big Tech’s PURGE, censorship & abuse of power is absurd & profoundly dangerous," he tweeted. "If you agree w/ Tech’s current biases (Iran, good; Trump, bad), ask yourself, what happens when you disagree? Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?"