{"id":9274,"date":"2021-01-16T08:33:10","date_gmt":"2021-01-16T08:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=150905"},"modified":"2021-01-16T08:33:10","modified_gmt":"2021-01-16T08:33:10","slug":"after-trump-ban-serbian-politicians-migrate-to-alternative-networks-until-something-better-happens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/16\/after-trump-ban-serbian-politicians-migrate-to-alternative-networks-until-something-better-happens\/","title":{"rendered":"After Trump Ban, Serbian Politicians Migrate To Alternative Networks ‘Until Something Better Happens’"},"content":{"rendered":"
BELGRADE — Donald Trump and his American supporters have complained loudly about bans on the outgoing U.S. president by the biggest names in social media since the violence at the Capitol that sparked Trump’s impeachment this week.<\/p>\n
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon Web Services are among nearly a dozen tech giants to cut off Trump<\/a> or his allies over their unfounded accusations of vote fraud or perceived incitement of political violence ahead of the U.S. inauguration.<\/p>\n There has been a huge ripple effect in the United States, including a robust debate about free speech and a social-media shakeout<\/a> that could further insulate like-minded users from being challenged by those outside their “epistemic bubbles.”<\/p>\n Some of the political Twitterati in Serbia have meanwhile sought to affect their own minor social-media shake-up in the Balkans in response to the Trump bans.<\/p>\n “We’re hanging out here until something better happens,” Vladimir Djukanovic, a lawmaker from President Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), shared on the Gab social network<\/a> on January 11, under a cover photo that zoomed in on the left-wing Antifa movement’s logo.<\/p>\n It was the Serbian politician’s first post on the 3-year-old microblogging platform, which employs a sort of mash-up of the Facebook and Twitter formats and has thrived as a digital congregating ground for the alt-right.<\/p>\n The @RealDonaldTrump account on Gab has some 1.2 million followers, including Djukanovic and at least a handful of his SNS party colleagues, a fraction of the 88 million who followed the U.S. president’s now-deleted Twitter account.<\/p>\n