by Tristan Justice
Android users may still download the Facebook and Instagram applications from Apple and Google’s online marketplaces Thursday morning, while former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social remains banned over content moderation.
On Wednesday, both platforms still available for download by Meta were used by 19-year-old Ezekiel Kelly Thursday night to broadcast a shooting spree that left four people dead, according to police.
“No faking, this s–t for real,” said the crazed gunman on Facebook livestream as he walked into an AutoZone and shot a man point blank.
While apps for Facebook and Instagram remain in the Google Play store, Android users are barred from downloading Truth Social.
Last week, Google announced Trump’s free speech-branded Twitter alternative would continue to suffer an app store ban until the platform embraced Silicon Valley’s censorship regime and adopted proper content moderation policies.
“On Aug. 19, we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” the Mountain View-based company told CNBC.
The announcement coincided with a hit piece from the New York Times published one day prior smearing Truth Social as a haven for extremism.
Headlined, “QAnon Accounts Found a Home, and Trump’s Support, on Truth Social,” the paper highlighted a few dozen accounts supposedly associated with QAnon to justify the platform’s destruction, despite more than half a million active users.
The allied censorship regime between corporate media and big tech is closely following the Parler playbook, where Apple, Google, and Amazon colluded to de-platform the rival social media company.
Funny how all these leftist social platforms say, “if you don’t like our censorship of conservative views, create your own platform”, then they block access to those platforms. It actually appears they fear free speech over everything else.