I've always hated Facebook, and the oversharing, fake-presenting nature of social media. It's not a surprise at all that platforms owned by Google, Facebook and Amazon are blocking more and more even mildly controversial material. It's been past time to stop using products by these monoliths, which is wildly difficult, but doable.

The bigger problem now is the question of whether upstart competitors will be allowed to even exist to give us the alternatives. The shutdown of Parler was just the tip of the iceberg. If Amazon, Google and Facebook show they're willing to play ball with the party in power, and move information in their favor, they're awarded additional protections (adding clear first amendment violations - and who knows what else - to their already illegal monopolistic practices).

I don't think its unreasonable to think that the internet will be a closed system in a few years, where only companies with a great deal of start-up capital being able to even enter. Think of it like the FCC: created to give space and voice to the community on the airwaves, but over time kept everyone except for the big players off radio and TV. Think of how controlled speech is on broadcast radio and TV to this day. Now apply that to the internet.

(The censoring of text messages is way, way, way over the line. At this point we can only hope that neither of our political parties gather enough power to make any significant changes to anything. This situation is beyond dire.)