Tech platforms banned Trump. Now what?

Deplatforming Trump won’t stop the big lie.

Former President Donald Trump has now been kicked off of social media platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Shopify. But the misinformation he spread on those platforms lives on.

His suspension followed a violent insurrection on the Capitol in his name and came months after Twitter had begun flagging hundreds of his posts for false statements about the election that he lost. But, as Platformer’s Casey Newton explains, banning Trump was actually the easy part.

Now tech platforms have a new problem: How do you combat misinformation when it’s become bigger than any single user?

Deplatforming can be very effective at limiting a single voice. Alex Jones is a good example of that. But these platforms can’t be defined by just what they won’t allow. How are they going to create an online ecosystem based in one reality?

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