The House committee investigating the riot avoided detailed discussion in its report for fear of offending Republicans and tech companies:
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms -- especially Twitter -- failed to heed their own employees' warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. [...]
"The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin," the staffers wrote in their memo. "These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones." [...]
That focus on Trump meant the report missed an opportunity to hold social media companies accountable for their actions, or lack thereof, even though the platforms had been the subject of intense scrutiny since Trump's first presidential campaign in 2016, the people familiar with the matter said.
Confronting that evidence would have forced the committee to examine how conservative commentators helped amplify the Trump messaging that ultimately contributed to the Capitol attack, the people said -- a course that some committee members considered both politically risky and inviting opposition from some of the world's most powerful tech companies, two of the people said. [...]
The Washington Post has previously reported that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee's co-chair, drove efforts to keep the report focused on Trump. But interviews since the report's release indicate that Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose Northern California district includes Silicon Valley, also resisted efforts to bring more focus in the report onto social media companies.
I wish I could be surprised by any of this. :-(
I knew what was coming and canceled plans for the day to watch a few livestreams. I don't think congressional Democrats and the media really fully grasped what the risks were. If Pelosi, AOC, or any number of other folks had been accessible to the mob, they would have been butchered on livestreams. If the ballots from the states hadn't been included with the evacuation, they would have been destroyed by the mob and the Supreme Court would have had to figure out how to make the transition of power 'legit' according to the constitution.
Good thing the largest social media platforms didn't restore the accounts of the guy behind the ri-- oh...
🤬🤬🤬
Yet them fascists keep crying they're being canceled, while it they had been the Jan 6 shitshow might have been avoided.
In other words, to a large extent we are in this shithole timeline in the first place in large part because the social media platforms made themselves part of the puke funnel by becoming bullshit amplifiers instead of bullshit filters.
Just another day in the American Kakistocracy.
So the conclusion that social media kept quiet out of fear of political repercussions is kept quiet out of fear of political repercussions?