E17: Big Tech bans Trump, ramifications for the First Amendment & the open Internet

Evidence strongly supports that this prediction came true.

Jason’s prediction (Jan 11, 2021): that many individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 would be prosecuted and go to jail on multiple felonies, with cases unfolding over the following months and few years.

What actually happened:

• By late 2023 and into 2024–2025, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that over 1,400 individuals had been charged in connection with the January 6 attack, with hundreds facing felony counts such as obstruction of an official proceeding, assaulting federal officers, civil disorder, and other serious charges.
• Hundreds of these defendants have been convicted and sentenced to prison, many specifically on felony charges, including high‑profile cases (e.g., Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders) receiving multi‑year sentences for seditious conspiracy and other felonies.
• Sentencing and trials have continued over multiple years after January 6, 2021, matching the timeframe (“over the months and few years following the attack”) described in the prediction.

Given the large number of prosecutions, the substantial number of felony convictions, and the significant prison sentences imposed over several years, Jason’s generalized prediction that these people are going to go to jail; there’s multiple felonies is borne out by the subsequent facts.

Therefore, the prediction is right.

Donald Trump was criminally convicted in New York on May 30, 2024, on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush‑money payment to Stormy Daniels related to the 2016 campaign, not to his conduct in office or efforts around the 2020 election. 【1search0】 The later criminal efforts that were directly about the 2020 election and his conduct in trying to overturn it have now all been dropped or dismissed: the federal election‑obstruction case and the classified‑documents case were terminated after his reelection, and the Georgia state election‑interference case was formally dismissed in November 2025, ending the last criminal attempt to prosecute him over the 2020 election. 【1news14】【2news13】

At sentencing in the New York case on January 10, 2025, Judge Juan Merchan imposed an unconditional discharge, which, under New York law, means no jail time, no probation, and no fines; Trump remains a convicted felon but serves no custodial sentence. 【2search0】【2search1】【2search5】 Multiple explanations of this disposition emphasize that an unconditional discharge carries no imprisonment or other penalties beyond the conviction itself. 【2search2】【2search3】

As of November 29, 2025, there is no record of Trump having served any time in jail or prison in connection with this or any other criminal case, and the prosecutions tied to his conduct in office or the 2020 election have ended without conviction. 【1news14】【2news13】 Because the prediction required that he both be convicted for such conduct and "go to jail" (serve time in prison) in the ensuing years, and neither condition has been met, the prediction is best scored as wrong rather than merely "inconclusive."

Within days of January 11, 2021, the House impeached Trump a second time (January 13) for “incitement of insurrection,” and the Senate trial ran February 9–13, 2021, ending in acquittal after highly partisan arguments over both Trump’s responsibility and whether trying a former president was even constitutional, with Democrats depicting his conduct as an unprecedented constitutional crime and Republicans framing the rushed impeachment as a political attempt to silence a rival. (en.wikipedia.org) This matches the forecast of a “super messy” institutional response centered on whether to “forgive the guy” or “reaffirm the institution” by sacrificing him.

At the same time, Washington was placed under an extended, militarized security posture—thousands of National Guard troops and razor‑wire fencing around the Capitol—that quickly drew criticism from both parties; senators and representatives questioned why 5,000 Guard troops and fencing were still in place weeks later, with Republicans mocking the complex as “Fort Pelosi” and Democrats like Sen. Tim Kaine saying the fence “sends such an ugly message” and pushing to remove it. (washingtonpost.com) This fits the prediction of “dumb decisions” and visible overcorrection that produced loud complaints on both sides.

Big Tech and corporate America also reacted aggressively in that same period: major platforms banned or suspended Trump and related accounts, and dozens of large companies abruptly halted political donations in response to January 6, moves later criticized as overbroad, ad hoc, or performative. (en.wikipedia.org) Civil‑liberties advocates at the ACLU warned that indefinite or poorly‑grounded bans on Trump highlighted serious problems in Facebook’s content‑moderation regime, and world leaders including Angela Merkel and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly called the permanent social‑media bans on Trump “problematic” and a “bad sign,” underscoring that many saw these as overreaches. (aclu.org) Taken together—the rushed and polarizing impeachment, heavy‑handed security measures that drew bipartisan backlash, and aggressive tech/corporate sanctions widely criticized as overreach—the weeks following January 11, 2021 did in fact feature the messy, error‑prone, and loudly contested response that Chamath predicted.

Jason was partly right that decentralized / federated competitors to incumbent social networks would emerge, but the core claim that they would be “impossible to ban” is falsified.

Evidence that decentralized platforms did emerge and compete:

• Mastodon, an open‑source, federated microblogging platform, grew to around 9 million accounts and about 1–1.5 million active users, explicitly positioned as a decentralized alternative to X/Twitter.(thinkimpact.com)
• Bluesky, built on the decentralized AT Protocol, launched publicly in 2023–24 and surpassed 30–38 million registered users with ~4.1 million daily active users by mid‑2025, widely described as a strong decentralized competitor and credible alternative to X.(socialplug.io)
• Protocols like Nostr (2020+) explicitly aim to provide censorship‑resistant, decentralized social networking.(en.wikipedia.org)
  These confirm the “free‑market solutions” and decentralized competitors part of his prediction.

Evidence against “impossible to ban” by centralized actors (app stores, governments, etc.):

• Apple threatened to remove, and then did remove/force changes to Damus, a popular Nostr client, from the iOS App Store over its Bitcoin tipping (“zaps”) feature; Damus’ developer ultimately removed the feature to remain in the store.(forbes.com) This is a direct example of a decentralized social client being effectively deplatformed or functionally constrained by an app‑store gatekeeper.
• The same Damus app had earlier been removed from Apple’s Chinese App Store, demonstrating that regional bans by centralized intermediaries are straightforward even for decentralized protocols.(9to5mac.com)
• Reports indicate China has blocked or banned use of the Nostr network for enabling censorship‑resistant communication, showing that a state‑level actor can significantly restrict access to such protocols at the network level.(nostr.com)
• In the U.S., Bluesky itself blocked all Mississippi IP addresses rather than comply with the state’s stringent age‑verification law, meaning users in that jurisdiction must resort to workarounds (e.g., VPNs) to reach the service.(theverge.com) This illustrates that access to a decentralized social platform can, in practice, be cut off for an entire region.

Collectively, these cases show that while decentralized and federated social platforms have indeed emerged and now act as meaningful (if smaller) competitors to incumbent centralized platforms, they are still vulnerable to deplatforming, blocking, and feature‑level coercion by centralized intermediaries such as app stores, national governments, and ISPs. That directly contradicts Jason’s stronger claim that such peer‑to‑peer platforms would be “impossible to ban.”

Because the most specific, risky part of the prediction (effective impossibility of bans by centralized actors) has clearly not held up, the overall prediction is best classified as wrong.

Evidence shows that all three named figures did in fact face civil and/or criminal legal actions tied to their conduct around efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the events of January 6.

Donald Trump
• Civil: Beginning February 16, 2021, Rep. Bennie Thompson and other members of Congress, represented by the NAACP, sued Trump under the Ku Klux Klan Act, alleging a conspiracy with Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to incite the January 6 attack and prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote. (cnbc.com)
• Additional civil suits by members of Congress and Capitol Police officers likewise accuse Trump of inciting or inflaming the mob that attacked the Capitol. (newsweek.com)
• Criminal: On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted Trump on four counts (including conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding) for his conduct after the 2020 election “through the January 6 Capitol attack.” (en.wikipedia.org) Although this and related prosecutions were later halted or dismissed after his reelection, he nonetheless faced those criminal charges.

Rudy Giuliani
• Civil: The same NAACP/Thompson lawsuit named Giuliani alongside Trump, alleging they conspired to incite the Capitol riot in violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act. (cnbc.com)
• Rep. Eric Swalwell separately sued Trump, Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., and Rep. Mo Brooks in March 2021, again under the Ku Klux Klan Act and D.C. law, claiming they incited the January 6 attack and aided and abetted the violence. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Criminal: Giuliani was later indicted as a co‑defendant with Trump in Georgia’s 2023 racketeering case over efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, part of the same post‑election scheme that culminated in January 6. The indictment was ultimately dismissed in 2025, but he still faced those criminal charges. (en.wikipedia.org)

Donald Trump Jr.
• Civil: Swalwell’s March 5, 2021 lawsuit expressly named Donald Trump Jr. as a defendant, alleging that Trump, Trump Jr., Giuliani, and Brooks violated the Ku Klux Klan Act and D.C. laws by inciting the January 6 riot and conspiring to prevent Congress from certifying the election. (en.wikipedia.org) Judge Amit Mehta later dismissed the claims against Trump Jr., but the fact remains that he was sued and had to defend against civil claims tied to alleged January 6 incitement. (cbsnews.com)

Because, in the months and years after January 2021, Trump, Giuliani, and Trump Jr. each became defendants in civil actions explicitly alleging they helped incite or conspire to incite the January 6 attack—and Trump (and Giuliani in Georgia) also faced related criminal indictments—the prediction that “the people who really incited this … are going to face some amount of civil and criminal charges” is best characterized as right.

Parler was effectively deplatformed in January 2021 when Apple and Google removed its app from their stores and Amazon Web Services suspended its hosting, taking the service offline and severely disrupting its business.(cnbc.com)

Within the following 1–2 years, multiple alternative social platforms explicitly targeting the same right-leaning, “free speech” user base launched or significantly expanded, constituting a clear market response:

• GETTR: Founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller and launched on July 4, 2021, described as an alt-tech social media platform and microblogging site targeting American conservatives, positioning itself as an alternative to mainstream networks like Twitter.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Truth Social: Founded in October 2021 and launched publicly on February 21, 2022, characterized as an alt-tech social media platform created in response to Donald Trump’s bans from major networks after January 6, and explicitly framed as a Twitter-like alternative competing with Parler, Gab, and Mastodon.(en.wikipedia.org) By January 2025 it had an estimated 6.3 million monthly active users, indicating non-trivial scale.(en.wikipedia.org)
• A 2022 Pew Research Center study identifies Truth Social, Gettr, Parler, Gab, Rumble, BitChute and Telegram as a cluster of “alternative social media sites” that explicitly present themselves as alternatives to established platforms, especially by opposing perceived free-speech restrictions, each with at least 500,000 unique visitors by December 2021.(pewresearch.org)
• During Parler’s downtime specifically, Gab—a similar “free speech” network popular with far-right users—gained about 600,000 new users, showing immediate user migration to rival services.(cnbc.com)

These developments show that, following Parler’s deplatforming, a set of alternative platforms both emerged (e.g., GETTR, Truth Social) and expanded (e.g., Gab, Rumble, Telegram) to compete for the same audience and positioning (conservative, anti-“censorship” social media). This is exactly the kind of “free market response” the prediction described, and it occurred well within “the next few years” after January 2021. Therefore the prediction is right.

Evidence since January 2021 shows that major platforms did broaden and systematize content moderation and deplatforming rather than treating Trump’s ban as a one‑off.

• Shortly after Trump’s suspension, alternative network Parler was itself deplatformed by app stores and its hosting provider in early 2021, demonstrating that coordinated infrastructure‑level bans expanded beyond a single political figure. (arxiv.org)
• YouTube repeatedly widened its rules: first extending its COVID‑19 vaccine misinformation ban to all vaccines in 2021, then introducing broad medical‑misinformation policies in 2023 that remove content contradicting health‑authority guidance and target a wide range of conditions and treatments. These policies have led to removals of major anti‑vaccine channels and large volumes of videos. (forbes.com)
• Meta (Facebook/Instagram) formalized long suspensions and escalating sanctions for public figures, created a dedicated “Crisis Policy Protocol,” and embedded broader rules for restricting content that could contribute to civil unrest or election delegitimization—explicitly going beyond the singular Trump case. (about.fb.com)
• The scale and persistence of moderation and deplatforming were significant enough that Texas passed HB20, an anti‑deplatforming law in 2021 aimed at curbing large platforms’ ability to moderate based on “viewpoint,” indicating that broad, ongoing content restrictions—not an isolated event—were occurring. (en.wikipedia.org)
• By 2024–25, some platforms began loosening certain rules (e.g., Meta ending third‑party fact‑checking and narrowing enforcement; YouTube carving out more exceptions for “public interest” content; X under Elon Musk dismantling many prior policies), but these moves themselves confirm that a prior period of expansive moderation had been built up and was influential enough to provoke political and legal backlash. (techcrunch.com)

Taken together, the post‑January‑2021 trajectory shows several years of expanded, more formalized use of deplatforming and moderation powers across multiple major platforms. That means Sacks’s core claim—that Trump’s ban marked the beginning of a broader, continuing exercise of these powers rather than a one‑off—has largely been borne out, even though there has since been some partial retrenchment.

There was a major, formal investigation of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, comparable in seriousness and scope to the 9/11 Commission or the Ukraine (Trump–Ukraine) impeachment inquiry.

Key points:

• On June 30, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives established the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol via H.Res. 503. This was a high‑profile, official congressional investigative body with subpoena power, public hearings, and a broad mandate to investigate the causes and events of January 6 and make legislative recommendations, much like prior major congressional inquiries.
• The Committee conducted extensive hearings (including widely watched televised sessions in 2022), interviewed hundreds of witnesses, collected voluminous records, and issued a lengthy final report with findings and recommendations—mirroring the scope and style of the 9/11 Commission and the Ukraine impeachment inquiry processes, even though its institutional form (a House select committee rather than an independent commission) differed slightly from the 9/11 body.
• In parallel, the Department of Justice and other federal law‑enforcement agencies pursued one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history related to January 6, further underscoring that the events were indeed “all going to get investigated” in a major, formal way.

Because Jason’s prediction was about the existence and scale of a major official investigation—rather than the exact legal form (independent commission vs. select committee)—and such an investigation clearly occurred, the prediction is best classified as right.

Evidence from the final 10 days of Trump’s term (January 11–20, 2021) shows he did not “sit tight” or stay out of the spotlight, but instead engaged in multiple conspicuous public and political actions:

• On January 12, 2021, Trump held an informal press gaggle before boarding Marine One, taking questions from reporters on impeachment and the Capitol riot, and insisting his January 6 speech was “totally appropriate.” (trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov)
• The same day he traveled to Texas and delivered a televised border wall speech near Alamo, Texas, attacking impeachment and warning that the 25th Amendment would “come back to haunt Joe Biden.” (abc13.com)
• On January 13, 2021, under heavy criticism, he released a new video statement about the January 6 attack, and also issued at least one executive order (amending restrictions on investments in certain Chinese military–linked companies), both of which are official, high‑profile presidential actions. (congress.gov)

All of these occurred within the final ~10 days of his presidency and are exactly the kind of conspicuous public and legal/political moves Friedberg described (unscripted press interaction, major speech, executive order), rather than Trump remaining quiet or passive. Therefore, the prediction that he would not simply “sit quietly and wind out the last ten days” is right.

As of November 29, 2025, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms, Inc. has not been broken up by antitrust or regulatory action:

• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Facebook/Meta (seeking, among other things, potential divestitures of Instagram and WhatsApp) has been ongoing for years, but no court-ordered breakup has occurred. News coverage and court updates consistently describe the case as pending litigation rather than a completed structural remedy.
• Meta continues to operate Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other businesses under a single corporate umbrella, and there has been no legally mandated corporate breakup, spin‑off, or forced divestiture imposed by U.S. or major foreign regulators.

Because the prediction was that Facebook “will… be broken up” and this has not happened by the current date, the prediction is wrong based on presently available public information.

(Note: Web search confirms there are active and past antitrust actions involving Meta/Facebook, but none has yet resulted in an actual breakup order or executed structural separation.)

The prediction assumed that within roughly 2–3 years from January 2021 (by early 2023–early 2024) the U.S. would take decisive policy or regulatory action on Big Tech that clarified whether major platforms would be broken up or subjected to a clearly defined new regulatory regime.

In Congress, the main Big Tech antitrust bills — the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Open App Markets Act, and later the AMERICA Act — advanced out of committee but stalled and were never enacted; AICOA never even received a House floor vote, and OAMA/AMERICA remain only proposed legislation. (en.wikipedia.org) Instead, the only significant competition laws that actually passed in this period were narrower measures like the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act and the State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act, which mainly adjust merger filing fees and litigation venues rather than establishing a new regulatory framework for Big Tech platforms. (en.wikipedia.org)

On the executive side, President Biden’s 2021 Executive Order 14036 launched a whole-of-government push for tougher antitrust enforcement, signaling a more aggressive posture toward large firms, including tech, but it did not itself create a detailed new regulatory regime for platforms; it was later revoked by President Trump in 2025, underscoring that U.S. policy direction on competition remains contested rather than settled. (en.wikipedia.org)

Enforcement actions ramped up, but they did not produce clear, final outcomes within the 2–3 year window. The Justice Department’s search-monopoly case against Google went to trial in 2023, with a liability ruling finding Google an illegal monopolist issued in August 2024 — after the prediction window — and a 2025 remedies decision that rejected the most radical structural remedy (breaking up Chrome/Android) in favor of behavioral rules, leaving Google intact. (en.wikipedia.org) A separate DOJ suit filed in January 2023 targeting Google’s ad-tech business likewise aimed at potential divestitures but only produced a monopoly-liability ruling and ongoing remedy fight in 2025, well beyond early 2024. (justice.gov) Other major cases — such as the FTC’s long-running attempt to unwind Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp — were still being litigated past the end of the window and ultimately resulted in Meta winning dismissal in 2025, not a breakup. (en.wikipedia.org)

Contemporary overviews of antitrust reform note that, by late 2024, sweeping Big Tech legislation had failed, while enforcement had intensified but remained a slow, case-by-case process, with no comprehensive “rules of the road” in place. (theverge.com) Taken together, this shows that by early 2024 the U.S. still had not clearly decided in policy or law whether Big Tech platforms would be broken up or put under a stable, heavy regulatory regime. Even as of late 2025, that question remains unresolved. Therefore, the prediction that we would "find out in the next 2 to 3 years" was wrong.