Whilst for most of us the 'suspension' of Donald Trump's Twitter and Facebook accounts may seem like a 'no brainer', it was in fact the last decision these platforms would have wished to take.

Since the inception of the sector, they have lobbied and campaigned against being categorised as media companies - in the traditional sense - so as to avoid responsibility for the content on their platforms.

By suspending Trump's accounts they have effectively been forced into making an 'editorial decision'. Trump's posts were in violation of their policies, but if he were 'a random' with five followers/friends etc. would they have acted?...

In addition, the knock-on effect of these decisions could be huge...

Exponents of extreme views who were previously banned from the main-stream social media sites typically gravitated to Parler - a platform which prides itself on 'free speech', and subsequently morphed into an 'echo-chamber' for conspiracy theories.

Amazon has now been dragged into the debate, by stating that Parler will prevented from using AWS. All these moves could prove to be highly divisive, in a country that does not need more division...

Trump has always proclaimed that 'big-pharma', 'big-tech', 'left wing media' and 'the establishment' were against him... given that 75M Americans voted for him, and around half of them believe the election was rigged, the future looks volatile - to say the least. 

The last 'twist' in this complex situation is that Trump's successor as President, the Democrat Joe Biden, was elected on a manifesto which - in part - was 'anti big-tech'.

After 2020 I was hoping that 2021 would be 'boring'... it's looking anything but...