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In the wake of Trump's permanent ban from Twitter and indefinite ban from Facebook, right-wing public figures cried censorship. Media personalities and politicians alike claimed the situation was Orwellian, akin to the events of "1984"; on right-wing cable news networks, show hosts wryly welcomed their viewers to "Communist China."

Author Becca Lewis. Becca Lewis

As an academic who researches social media platforms and the extremist groups that thrive on them, I agree that the Trump bans raise important questions about the role of Facebook and Twitter in shaping political discourse and information online.

But framing this as an issue of censorship distracts from the real issue.

Donald Trump's voice has not been silenced: Until the inauguration, he still has an entire press corps devoted to covering his positions via his press secretary. Even after he leaves office, he will have access to a thriving right-wing media ecosystem that can amplify his ideas and opinions.

What Facebook and Twitter have done is simply decide that he will not have a direct line through their platform to broadcast his ideas to millions of people at a time.

Read more: Trump wanted to dramatically change the way Big Tech ran their platforms. His attempt to overturn the election may have done just that.

These outlets make choices every day about what to cover, who to interview, who to publish in their op-ed sections, and who to invite as talking heads. They even decide when to air video messages from the president and how to contextualize them.

If this decision-making seems strange to us in the context of social media, it's partly because platforms have spent the last 10-plus years telling us that they aren't media companies that, in fact, they're revolutionizing public discourse, removing media gatekeepers, and democratizing the spread of information.

In 2012, Twitter executive Tony Wang famously called the platform the "free speech wing of the free speech party." Mark Zuckerberg has consistently claimed that Facebook is not an "arbiter of truth." As internet scholar Tarleton Gillespie has pointed out, even using the term "platform" was a strategic decision the word is flexible enough that it evokes both the vaguely progressive ideal of giving everyone a voice while also suggesting it is merely a "neutral" technological architecture.

As internet policy scholars Robyn Caplan and Phil Napoli write, "Being in the business of providing content to audiences, while selling those audiences to advertisers is a defining characteristic of the media sector."

Caplan and Napoli likewise point out that, while these companies claim they are neutral arbiters who make no editorial interventions, the algorithms they build make these interventions all the time. They surface, recommend, and suppress content, and in the process, they shape what information we see and engage with.

As social media companies have gotten more involved as intermediaries in news and political coverage, the difference between how they present themselves and how they actually function has been reaching a breaking point.

This's why, in the past few years, we have begun to see platforms make decisions that implicitly, if not explicitly, acknowledge their roles as media companies.

If they acknowledge it too openly, that would put them at risk of increased regulation and oversight, and it could potentially put them on the hook for more costly and robust moderation decisions. It would also force them to develop a more rigorous and consistent approach to the difficult decisions about which voices deserve to be amplified.

Read more: Author of book on how Trump's Twitter presidency ushered in white rage says social media companies must be held accountable for not taking action sooner

Even Pornhub, the adult entertainment giant built on the premise that anyone can upload amateur videos, officially announced at the end of 2020 that they are now removing all videos not uploaded by official content partners.

None of this is to say that there aren't important consequences around political speech and information, or that the removal of Donal Trump is not something we should take seriously. To the contrary, it shows just what powerful media forces Facebook, Twitter, and others have become in our contemporary political world. Neither am I claiming that these companies are the same kind of media companies as TV news networks or print newspapers.

They come with a host of their own challenges and concerns that don't apply to older forms of media and that have important consequences. And on the flip side, they also lack certain civic ideals that have become entwined with traditional media companies for example, there's no public broadcasting equivalent in the world of social platforms.

But these are precisely the problems we need to work through in the coming years. We now know that a lot of what we were told about platforms early on wasn't ultimately true: They haven't revolutionized speech, spread democracy throughout the world, or given everyone a neutral platform from which to speak.

By making claims of censorship, we partially reinforce the expectation that platforms play these roles that they don't. Instead, we need to acknowledge their role as editorializers so we can hold them accountable for what they actually do.

Becca Lewis is a PhD candidate in communicationat Stanford University and a graduate affiliate at the University of North Carolina Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. She researches online social movements and their uses of digital media technologies.

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The Trump ban wasn't censorship; it was an editorial decision - Business Insider - Business Insider

After Twitter and Facebook kicked President Trump off their platforms, and his supporters began comparing his social media muzzling to Chinese censorship, the president won support from an unexpected source: China.

Legally hes still the president. This is a coup, said one comment, which included an expletive, that was liked 21,000 times on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.

A country as big as the United States cant tolerate Trumps mouth, another popular comment said. U.S. democracy has died.

The comments were solicited by Guancha.com, a nationalistic news site, which created the hashtag #BigUSappsunitedtosilenceTrump# on Weibo. They were echoed by Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the Communist Party.

Mr. Trump lost his right as an ordinary American citizen, it wrote in an editorial. This, of course, goes against the freedom of speech the U.S. political elites have been advocating.

Mr. Trumps expulsion from American social media for spurring the violent crowd at the Capitol last week has consumed the Chinese internet, one of the most harshly censored forums on earth. Overwhelmingly, people who face prison for what they write are condemning what they regard as censorship elsewhere.

Much of the condemnation is being driven by Chinas propaganda arms. By highlighting the decisions by Twitter and Facebook, they believe they are reinforcing their message to the Chinese people that nobody in the world truly enjoys freedom of speech. That gives the party greater moral authority to crack down on Chinese speech.

Some people may believe Twitters decision to suspend the account of the U.S. president is a sign of democracy, Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, wrote in an opinion piece with the headline Twitters suspension of Trumps account shows freedom of speech has boundaries in every society.

It would be tough for the United States to come back and play the role of the beacon of democracy, Mr. Hu added in a Weibo post.

Many Chinese online users bought the official line. Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 2,700 participants in one Chinese online poll voted that Twitter shouldnt have shut down Mr. Trumps account. The polls sponsor was a newspaper owned by the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese governments official mouthpiece.

I just learned in the past few days that the U.S. social media platforms frequently delete posts and suspend accounts too, wrote a verified Weibo account called Su Jiande. I lost the last hint of respect for the country.

The user thanked Weibo for allowing users to say whatever they want in pursuit of truth. (I read through the users Weibo timeline and found no hint of sarcasm.) Many Weibo users urged Mr. Trump to open a Weibo account.

This is not the U.S. as we know it, commented a Weibo user named Xiangbanzhang. This is Saddams Iraq and Gaddafis Libya.

Trump defenders compare the presidents ouster from social media to China-style censorship. This is not China, this is United States of America, and we are a free country, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trumps former press secretary, wrote on Twitter.

Chinese censorship doesnt work that way. In China, speech about top leaders is closely monitored and harshly censored. The people who run Facebook and Twitter have the First Amendment right to choose what can and cant go on their platforms.

The Chinese government requires news websites to dedicate their top two daily items to Xi Jinping, Chinas paramount leader. On Tuesday, for example, online outlets extolled a speech Mr. Xi gave at a party seminar, while another piece explained the classical literary allusions used in an article under his byline in a Communist Party magazine.

The government has strict rules regarding which social media accounts and websites can post articles and photos of leaders like Mr. Xi. Young censors spend much of their workdays blocking and deleting links that contain photos of the leaders, even if the content supports the government. In other words, ordinary Chinese dont even have the right to post photos of Mr. Xi, much less criticize him.

Those who dare to criticize him face severe punishment. Ren Zhiqiang, a retired businessman and an influential social media personality, was silenced on Chinese online platforms in early 2016 after he criticized Mr. Xis directives that the Chinese news media should serve the party. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison last year after writing an essay that was critical of Mr. Xis response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Chinese internet companies conduct their own censorship, but they do so out of fear of what Beijing officials might do to them. Last February, ifeng.com, a news portal, was punished for running original content about the coronavirus outbreak. Under the Chinese regulations, these websites cant produce original news content.

According to the national internet regulator, websites and regulators in December processed more than 13 million items deemed to be illegal and unhealthy, an 8 percent increase from a year earlier. Among them, six million were processed by Weibo.

For those reasons, many Chinese are dumbfounded by the idea that private companies such as Twitter and Facebook have the power to reject a sitting American president.

When Twitter banned Trump, it was a private platform refusing to serve the president, a Weibo user called Xichuangsuiji wrote in trying to explain the distinction. When Weibo bans you, its simply executing government guidelines to censor an individuals speech.

Some Chinese dissidents and liberal intellectuals oppose the bans because they suffered harsh censorship in China or because they support Mr. Trump, whom they see as tough on the Communist Party.

Twitter and Facebook permit propaganda from the Global Times and the Peoples Daily, and yet today, they went to war with their own president by censoring his expression, Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist, posted on Twitter in Chinese. He was famously censored online in China, harassed by the police and confined to his home by the authorities before he was allowed to flee.

Freedom of speech, Mr. Ai added, is a pretense and nothing more.

Kuang Biao, a political cartoonist in the southern city of Guangzhou, has had multiple Weibo accounts shut down and has created many cartoons that were censored, including one last year about Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who was silenced by the police for sharing information about the coronavirus. In the cartoon, Dr. Li was wearing a mask of barbed wires.

But when Mr. Kuang created two cartoons to express his displeasure at Mr. Trumps bans, Chinas censors did nothing. In one of them, President Trumps mouth was brutally sewn up. In another, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as Qin Shi Huang, Chinas first emperor, a brutal tyrant who burned books and executed scholars more than 2,000 years ago.

By Tuesday evening, the first had garnered more than 170,000 views on the short video site Douyin, a sister site of TikTok.

Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech, Mr. Kuang said. Its a sacred human right. He said hes a strong supporter of President Trump, who, he believes, is a man who serves the people wholeheartedly.

Some people in China have noted the disconnect, saying people who are defending Mr. Trumps freedom of speech are the victims of a far worse type of censorship.

Sheep that can be eaten up by the tiger at any time are angry that the tiger has been put in a cage, wrote Chen Min, a former journalist who usually goes by the pen name Xiao Shu.

On his account on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, Mr. Chen wrote that a powerful leader like President Trump has a lot of responsibilities, including the consequences of his speech. Mr. Chen is frequently censored and harassed by the state security officers for what he writes online.

The journalist Zhao Jing, who goes by the name Michael Anti, is puzzled why Chinese Trump supporters so zealously defend his freedom of speech. Mr. Trump has the White House, executive orders and Fox News, he wrote: What else do you want for him to have freedom of speech?

Chinas censors dont seem to agree. He Weifang, a renowned law professor at Peking University, wrote a long post on WeChat supporting the restrictions on Mr. Trump. The article has since disappeared.

This content has violated rules, said a message with a red exclamation mark where the article was once posted, so cant be viewed.

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Twitter and Facebook Barred Trump. China Is on His Side. - The New York Times

In a significant first, Amazon Prime Video agreed to censor its political drama series Tandav, and has removed two scenes in the first episode. MediaNama confirmed that the scenes were removed from the show. Tandav attracted complaints from politicians and the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting got involved. We have reached out to Amazon and the Ministry for comment.

Right wing groups and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati flagged two scenes, both in the first episode, as offensive: the first was a stage play where Shiva and Narada muse over what they can do to improve the deitys social media reach (Should I put up a new photo, Shiva asks at one point.) The other was a scene where Devki Nandan Singh, the prime minister, castigates a Dalit politician after the latter asks to get his two cents in on an issue.

The pushback to the show was likely far from organic, being egged on by the usual conservative ecosystem that trended #CensorWebSeries and protested a single shot in A Suitable Boy featuring a kiss with a temple in the background. Leaders like Kapil Mishra and Ram Kadam voiced their disapproval of the show. But the ranks of people claiming to be outraged by the show increased like rarely seen before for a web series. More FIRs were reported after the first one in Lucknow, this time in Gautam Buddha Nagar and Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh, in Jabalpur and Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, and in Noida in Uttar Pradesh. Legions of right wing leaders sent letters to the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, which summoned Amazon and the shows creators. Former UP Chief Minister Mayawati said that the show needed to be censored.

Initially, Ali Abbas Zafar, the shows creator, unconditionally apologized if [the show] has unintentionally hurt anybodys sentiments. As complaints mounted and the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting got involved, Zafar put out a second statement pledging to remove the two scenes from the show.

Is this the first time the government has censored a web series?

While some indicate that this is the first time that explicit government action is resulting in a show being censored, this is not the case. I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar personally intervened in a smaller controversy surrounding the ALT Balaji/Zee5 show Virgin Bhasskar to rename a hostel featured in the show. Zee5 also suspended the release of a show after Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy reached out to Zee group chair Subhash Chandra.

What does this mean for censorship of web series in India?

There are two things that may happen: the first is that the streaming industry may feel under greater pressure to give in to some of the governments demands to make self-regulation of streaming content more stringent. For instance, a list of prohibited content and greater independence in the complaints mechanism are two of the governments asks that the industry has tried to reach a middle ground on with an implementation toolkit. That middle ground may not be so convincing to the government anymore.

Second, the chilling effect: Given the sheer scale of the backlash against the shows creators and cast, creators and streaming services may shy away from commissioning content that scrutinizes religious themes, or other things that may lead to mobs being mobilized. This has already been happening, with several shows in recent memory, such as A Suitable Boy and Paatal Lok, being the subject of right wing complaints that have translated into some legal action. Not all streaming services may have the appetite to give creators the freedom to challenge these forces.

Where are we on regulating streaming services?

With government oversight over television and cinema being particularly stringent in India, frustration has grown in some quarters over what is perceived as a free pass that streaming services get (though they, too, tread with caution, as their censorship record shows). Recent opinion pieces on DNA and News18 (twice) have cast streaming services as irresponsible and unregulated, with Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh arguing for regulation. CBFC chief Prasoon Joshi also made clear his support for regulating streaming services, something he had only loosely implied earlier. Now that creators choosing unconventional themes have been cast as an irresponsible content industry run amok, and the we may be closer to the end of the debate than we are to the beginning.

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Brief: What led to Tandavs censorship, and what it means for streaming regulation in India - MediaNama.com

QUINCY - A Quincy resident upset with the censorship seen in America is flying an American flag upside down on his personal property, and he isnt the only one.

On Wednesday, iFIBER ONE News stopped by the home of a man who doesnt affiliate himself with any particular political party. The Quincy resident requested that his identity remain undisclosed for privacy purposes, but was quite vocal about why he flipped his star-spangled banner.

I turned my flag upside down when Amazon censored Parler, and when the (former) president (Donald Trump) was censored on social media, he told iFIBER ONE News.

According to Business Insider, Apple removed Parler from its platform in the wake of the deadly Capitol siege after it found the network did not adequately police content that promotes violence. Google and Amazon also both removed Parler from their platforms.

Parler is a microblogging and social networking application.

The local man compared the censorship in America to the censorship seen in Nazi Germany.

This has nothing to do with Donald Trump or Joe Biden, it has everything to do with our rights and freedoms being taken away, he went on to say.

He says hes a little worried about the backlash from the display, but feels important that he show his disdain in that fashion.

I will leave that flag upside down until Parler and free speech is restored; until that happens, it will fly upside down. If it gets ragged, Ill get a new one and will fly it upside down, he said.

According to the United States Flag Code, "The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."

Earlier this week, iFIBER ONE News spotted a flipped American flag hanging from irrigation equipment down the road from our interviewees home. The person we interviewed does not own the property that the irrigation equipment sits on and did not know that it was there.

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Non-partisan Quincy resident disgruntled with state of censorship in U.S. flies American flag upside down - iFIBER One News

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) Turkey on Tuesday slapped advertising bans on Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest over their non-compliance with a controversial new law that requires social media platforms to appoint legal representatives in the country.

The law which human rights and media freedom groups say amounts to censorship forces social media companies with more than one million users to maintain representatives in Turkey to deal with complaints about content on their platforms.

Companies that refuse to designate an official representative are subjected to fines, followed by advertising bans, and could face bandwidth reductions that would make their platforms too slow to use. The ban is on selling online space for ads, which is what many social media companies make their money from.

Facebook avoided the advertising ban after it announced Monday that it had begun the process of assigning a legal entity in Turkey, joining LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Dailymotion and the Russian social media site VKontakte, which have agreed to set up legal entities in Turkey.

We hope that Twitter and Pinterest which have still not announced their representatives will rapidly take the necessary steps, said Omer Fatih Sayan, the deputy minister in charge of communications and infrastructure, after the advertising bans for Twitter, its live video-streaming app, Periscope, and on the image sharing network, Pinterest, were announced on Turkeys Official Gazette.

Sayan added: It is our last wish to impose bandwidth reductions for social networks that insist on not complying with their obligations.

Twitter said in an email to The Associated Press that it had no comment over Turkeys move. There was no immediate response from Pinterest.

Under the law that came into effect in October, the local representative of social media companies would be tasked with responding to individual requests to take down content violating privacy and personal rights within 48 hours or to provide grounds for rejection. The company would be held liable for damages if the content is not removed or blocked within 24 hours.

The law also requires social media data to be stored in Turkey, raising concerns in a country where the government has a track record of clamping down on free speech.

The government insists the legislation is needed to combat cybercrime and to protect the rights of Turkish social media users.

Rights groups have said the decision by international tech companies to bow to Turkish pressure and appoint representatives would lead to censorship and violations of the right to privacy and access to information in a country where independent media is severely curtailed. The Freedom of Expression Association says more than 450,000 domains and 42,000 tweets have been blocked in Turkey since October.

Facebook said Monday it remained committed to maintaining free expression and other human rights in Turkey.

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Associated Press writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed.

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Turkey slaps advertising ban on Twitter, Pinterest - The Associated Press