The first Vergecast of 2021 focuses on the topic we’re thinking about the most at The Verge this month (and probably the foreseeable future): content moderation on the internet.

The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Adi Robertson, and Casey Newton chronicle the past week of social media platforms taking action since the Capitol riot: Trump getting banned from sites like Twitter and Facebook and social app Parler being removed from app stores.

The crew also dives into what this means for the future of content moderation for Big Tech, regulation surrounding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the role of competition for social media platforms.

You can listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear the full discussion.

Further reading:

• It’s 2021, and the pandemic is still here 
• FDA tells US health providers not to modify COVID-19 vaccine dose schedule
• Florida counties use Eventbrite to schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments
• Twitter permanently bans Trump
• Twitter is deleting Trump’s attempts to circumvent ban
• Twitter bans QAnon supporters, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn
• Twitter pulls Trump video that it said posed a ‘risk of violence’
• Facebook bans Trump ‘indefinitely’
• YouTube says it will punish Trump and other channels that continue to spread election lies
• YouTube removes Trump video addressing Capitol attack
• Platforms take action against Trump after Capitol mob attack
• Reddit bans r/donaldtrump forum for inciting violence
• Twitch disables Trump’s account indefinitely
• Big Tech pauses political spending after Capitol riot: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Airbnb are pausing spending
• Shopify takes down Trump’s campaign store
• Google pulls Parler from Play Store for fostering calls to violence
• Apple removes Parler from the App Store
• Parler CEO says even his lawyers are abandoning him
• Parler is gone for now as Amazon terminates hosting
• Parler posts, some with GPS data, have been archived by an independent researcher
• Parler sues Amazon for kicking it off the internet
• Why the post-Capitol deplatforming was necessary
• Trump’s ban from Twitter creates the ultimate case of link rot in posts across the internet