It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use.
Payment-processing company Stripe is the latest tech company to kick Donald Trump off of its platform, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
That means the president’s campaign website and online fundraising arms will no longer have access to the payment processor’s services, cutting off the Trump campaign from receiving donations.
Sources told the Journal that the reason for the company’s decision was the violation of company policies against encouraging violence.
The move comes as the president has remained largely silent through the official channels at his disposal in the wake of last week’s riot at the Capitol building.
While Trump has been silent, technology companies have been busy repudiating the president’s support by cutting off access to a range of services.
The deplatforming of the president has effectively removed Trump from all social media outlets including Snap, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify and TikTok.
The technology companies that power most financial transactions online have also blocked the president. Shopify and PayPal were the first to take action against the extremists among President Trump supporters who participated in the riot.
As we wrote earlier this week, PayPal has been deactivating the accounts of some groups of Trump supporters who were using the money-transfer fintech to coordinate payments to underwrite the rioters’ actions on Capitol Hill.
The company has actually been actively taking steps against far-right activists for a while. After the Charlottesville protests and subsequent rioting in 2017, the company banned a spate of far-right organizations. These bans have so far not extended directly to the president himself from what TechCrunch can glean.
On Thursday, Shopify announced that it was removing the storefronts for both the Trump campaign and Trump’s personal brand. That’s an evolution on policy for the company, which years ago said that it would not moderate its platform, but in recent years has removed some controversial stores, such as some right-wing shops in 2018.
Now, Stripe has joined the actions against the president, cutting off a lucrative source of income for his political operations.
As the Journal reported, the Trump campaign launched a fundraising blitz to raise money for the slew of lawsuits that the president brought against states around the country. The lawsuits were almost all defeated, but the effort did bring in hundreds of millions of dollars for the Republican party.
Jonathan Shieber
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