 Donald Trump's response to last week's attack on the U.S. Capitol led Twitter to permanently ban him from its platform, and Facebook and YouTube closed his account on the grounds that he had used their platforms to incite violence. Next, Apple and Google banned the Twitter competitor, Parler, from its app stores on the grounds that the perpetrators of last week's attack used it to coordinate and because the service doesn't engage in adequate content moderation. Then Amazon, which owns about a third of the global cloud storage market, evicted Parler from its cloud hosting service, taking the site down entirely. These decisions drew a ferocious reaction, both for and against, from people of all political stripes. Or better or worse, as Edward Snowden put it after Trump was kicked off Twitter, this will be remembered as a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech. It is stunning to watch now as every war on terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combating Trumpism, wrote Glenn Greenwald. So how should those who value a free and open society feel about the deplatforming of the commander in chief? The ongoing purge of many of his supporters and repression of discussion of 2020 election voter fraud claims. Twitter is a private company and CEO Jack Dorsey's capacity to evict even the president of the United States is something worth valuing. But what if the network power of a handful of Silicon Valley giants is so great that there's nowhere else to turn? And are Facebook, Twitter and Google acting independently or bending to the will of Congress at a time when tech has been so deeply politicized? The takeaway from the great deplatforming of 2021 is that we need now more than ever an open digital commons where individuals can maintain ownership of their own identities and speech is highly resistant to political pressure. Decentralized networks are vital to protecting open discourse not only from Twitter, Facebook and Google, but from Ted Cruz, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley or Kamala Harris, which is where the real power lies to stomp on the free speech rights of American citizens. It's easy to forget that not long ago, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg embraced the concept of a neutral public square. We do not want to become the arbiters of truth. The shift from digital commons to actively curated newsfeed was underway long before the election. In October of 2020, Facebook deranged and Twitter blocked the sharing of a New York Post story claiming that Joe Biden met with an executive at a Ukrainian gas company where his son held a board seat. Twitter also blocked the nation's oldest newspaper from using its account for more than two weeks. When the New York Times' Cara Swisher grilled parlor CEO John Matzi about parlor's role in inciting the capital breach, he defended its hands-off approach. If it was organized on your site, what should happen on your site? Look, if it was illegally organized and against the law on what they were doing, they would have gotten it taken down, but I don't feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform, considering we're a neutral town square. The handful of companies that own the dominant share of social media and the underlying infrastructure of the internet disagree and have made it increasingly difficult for parlor to operate. But the most dangerous threat isn't coming from Silicon Valley. To get what they want from tech CEOs, both Republicans and Democrats have regularly threatened to strip away the liability protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act, which is known as the Internet's First Amendment. Through the effect of Section 230, a special immunity from liability that nobody else gets, Congress has given big tech in effect a subsidy. That's a pretty foundational love of the modern, modernized internet. Exactly right. It should be revoked. Democrats want to leverage Section 230 to force them to weed out misinformation, which they falsely imagine can be sorted out by panels of accredited experts or finely tuned algorithms. Republicans have threatened to repeal 230 unless platforms commit to viewpoint neutrality, a standard which Stanford technologist Daphne Keller says is impossible to uphold. I don't even know what being neutral would mean. Would it mean allowing every single thing to be uploaded and just showing it in chronological order? Can you be neutral if you have search features? Can you be neutral if you allow people to mute things? I think a truly neutral meaning showing everything that is legal, social media platform, would be full of content that most users don't want to see. is making a public push for a new domestic terrorism law and red flag laws, which would make it easier for federal agents to seize firearms based on a user's online posts. Perhaps Americans' way of thinking about free speech is not the best way, wrote Emily Basilon in the New York Times magazine. At the very least, we should understand that it isn't the only way and that European speech regulations have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort out what's true from what's not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. But in the EU, these regulations have created unintended consequences of flagging content that's disturbing yet vital to the public interest, such as an archive of Syrian war crimes wrongly flagged as terrorist content under the EU guidelines. Right now, we don't have any clear information telling us that taking down all of these videos really is making us safer. In fact, a lot of people who are expert researchers on security are concerned that this will effectively drive more people into darker corners of the internet, into echo chambers where they only ever hear from people who agree with a violent agenda. What do you think when people are saying, it's time for civil war, I'm bringing my guns to Washington? You think you just let them say that? Well, if it was up to me, we wouldn't be in this situation. I get it, but here we find ourselves whether or not it's Parler, it's Twitter, it's Facebook, it's Google, it's Telegram, WhatsApp, whatever it might be. You can't stop people and change their opinions by force, by censoring them. They'll just go somewhere else and do it. A study from social psychologist Richard Rogers found that a robust network of D platform figures has already emerged over the past several years on encrypted apps like Telegram, the preferred platform for pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong trying to avoid Chinese censorship. A transition to a new, more decentralized and private web may be accelerating as privacy centric Duck Duck Go has experienced significant growth in search as a Google alternative. And the encrypted messaging app Signal saw a big bump after Elon Musk encouraged the masses to install it. With a crackdown in progress and likely to intensify once a new Congress and president take office, we should focus instead on enhancing encrypted communication platforms that make online speech harder to control and resisting law enforcement efforts to weaken vital tools like end-to-end encryption. There's a lot that still needs building to create an alternative digital commons, but it can be accomplished. Communicating freely might take more work in the future and your favorite politician might get banned or your favorite app taken out of the store. But in this cat and mouse game, the mice far outnumber the cats. That said, in the short term, the decision makers at Twitter and Facebook may want to consider that repression tends to have the unfortunate effect of pushing legitimate dissidents and dangerous unsavory extremists into the same channels. Sigmund Freud theorized that when thoughts or experiences are repressed, they inevitably resurface in more deranged and damaging forms. When our dominant communication platforms seek to repress widely held beliefs and opinions, those beliefs and opinions aren't likely to simply disappear, but rather reemerge elsewhere in less visible forums where they'll face less scrutiny. The next few years may be ugly, but silencing dissenters will ultimately fail. Information wants to be free as Stuart Brand famously quipped. The Great Repression will almost certainly have unintended consequences, but it can't last forever.