What’s Next for Conservative Voices on Social Media?
President Donald Trump has been impeached, again; President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated in less than a week. The long-term political brawl between the diametrically-opposed sides of congress will continue on as it has. The question is, what will the changing role of social media play in the next four years? It is clear that conservative movements, both mainstream and fringe, will have to heavily adapt after a slew of changes made by social media platforms within the last week. Not only was Donald Trump and other conservative voices taken off of Twitter, but popular alternative platform Parler was taken offline for an indefinite amount of time.
The January 6th riot was a melting pot of different conservative groups, ranging from seemingly harmless to very dangerous. There were groups like “Women for Trump,” a relatively straightforward group with roots in the Tea Party movement, to outright hate groups such as the infamous Proud Boys, to fringe political movements like the Boogaloo Boys and QAnon. While some of these groups already “crossbred” and intermingled with people associating with multiple different groups, this is one of the biggest events where they all came together with a single purpose. That purpose, as we all know, was to stop the certification of Biden’s electoral victory, and commit insurrection by invading and occupying the Capitol.
Now, many are being punished for the involvement in this event. While some groups, such as QAnon, are already familiar with the issue of being blocked by social media platforms. But now, as their rhetoric has become both increasingly more popular and more dangerous, social media is taking more decisive action. Facebook decided to remove all posts including the hashtag #stopthesteal, what sounds like (and is) a fringe idea, yet it has gained incredible traction from not just outcast QAnon followers, but a large portion of mainstream Conservatives. Now that many have been banned from Twitter, and Parler is on ice for the foreseeable future, we are seeing a large amount of individuals moving to other apps like Telegram and Signal, both with stronger privacy features such as end-to-end encryption.
This indeed is the future of both the violent alt-right movements and the more conventional “soccer mom” conservative movements. They are seeing themselves as martyrs, either cast out from mainstream social media for their “true faith” to Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election, or willfully abstaining from it due to others that have been “martyred.” Even those who have not been outright banned are moving en masse to those platforms.
This will lead to a couple of interrelated outcomes. One- it will potentially be harder to track dangerous, revolutionary activity. While much of the planning for the January 6th riot was done out in the open, now many of these groups will, at least in part, move their discussions to aforementioned private alternatives. This will obfuscate the motives and tactics for these groups, both to outside world and to the groups themselves. Now, instead of going to a couple of main Parler accounts or Facebook event pages, we will likely see a much more fragmented, disjointed group of planners as they attempt to host other potentially rebellious and insurrectionist activities on disparate social media platforms. So, there may be a net positive effect if these groups are not able to communicate on the same scale as they have to this point. Time will tell if Parler will ever return from Hosting Hell, or if other “alt-tech” platforms such as Gab will be able to grow to meet the surging demand. No matter what happens on that end, it will be imperative for federal authorities and open-source investigators both to stay vigilant as they investigate threats of domestic terrorism.
