The Alt-Tech Landscape After the Capitol Riots

Two years ago, hundreds of pro-Trump rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol building, forcing lawmakers underground, disrupting the certification of the 2020 presidential election, and resulting in the deaths of at least 7 people. The January 6 attack led to the largest federal investigation in U.S. history, charges of seditious conspiracy for members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and a bipartisan select committee that has spent the last year parsing reams of evidence in an effort to establish culpability at the highest levels of government. Last week, the committee ended its investigation by releasing a final tranche of documents that included Senior Trump Advisor Hope Hicks complaining on the day of the attack, “We all look like domestic terrorists now.”

New America’s Future Frontlines program has delved into the role that the alt-tech ecosystem played in organizing the “Stop the Steal” movement that culminated in the events of January 6, 2021. Our report last year found that the design of social media platforms like Parler dropped users into a discourse “hothouse,” which convinced many that civic institutions had failed, the stakes were existential, and violence was the only recourse. Our research also exposed the role that elected officials played in fueling grassroots rage and paranoia, finding that members of Congress posted more extreme content on Parler than on sites like Twitter.

Our Parler Influencer Dataset contains approximately 40,000 posts from prominent and prolific Parler users with ties to the Trump White House, Trump’s presidential campaign, and/or militia groups such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three-Percenters. The dataset collected these posts from the 1.0 version of Parler within hours of the Capitol attack. The events of January 6th, these posts, and the investigations that have come after all have had drastic consequences on our government and tech industry.

The January 6 attack and Amazon’s deplatforming of Parler sent shockwaves through the alt-tech industry, which has responded by redoubling its efforts to construct a parallel internet comprised of web hosting, domain registration, payment processing, content delivery networks, and of course the social media sites that rely on these core web services.

For example, Donald Trump’s Truth Social network was originally hosted on conservative web service Rightforge before moving to alt-tech video-streaming site Rumble. In 2021, media personality Dan Bongino launched Parallel Economy, a payment processing company that aims to compete with the likes of Stripe and PayPal. Similarly, Gab owner and self-described Christian nationalist Andrew Torba recently launched GabPay, which Torba pitched as a PayPal alternative. White nationalist Nick Fuentes launched the live-streaming platform Cozy.tv with the help of staff from Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. The goal of all these projects is the same: to render users impervious to deplatforming.

The messaging platform Telegram has even recently seen significant growth as the Pro-Trump crowd has adopted the platform to bolster its organizing efforts (and even profit from it).

As Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, we can expect members to continue to protest against “Big Tech,” which has proven to be a rich narrative that resonates with their base. Expect the return of politicians grilling tech CEOs in combative hearings about their companies’ moderation policies. Republicans will likely also attempt to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts companies from liability for content posted on their platforms. The House GOP’s “Commitment to America” agenda calls for scrapping “Section 230 for the largest tech companies and [starting] over with rules that promote free speech.”

Alt-tech also has major challenges within itself to contend with. The House January 6th Committee missed an opportunity to publicize how social media and tech companies contributed to the Capitol attack, never holding a hearing dedicated to alt-tech or technology in general, and lacking policy recommendations for fixing platform governance in the committee’s final report Even though the committee uncovered evidence that Facebook and Twitter resisted internal calls to crack down on “Stop the Steal” messaging “to avoid angering the political right,” Congress has essentially left Silicon Valley and alt-tech entrepreneurs in the position of figuring out these challenges for themselves.

Many alt-tech startups are far from profitable and have a challenge common to the entire tech industry: venture capital is increasingly fleeing to “quality” investments that are already profitable. For example, Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, reported a loss of $6.5 million in the first half of 2022. Indeed, it is an open question whether a business model that attracts extremist voices and repels “normies” is viable in the long-term. With Elon Musk’s Twitter unbanning thousands of controversial accounts and dominating news cycles, many alt-tech companies may find that their funding disappears before the competition does.

At the root of the January 6, 2021 attack are deep fissures that persist in U.S. society. Online, Americans continue to exist in discrete information bubbles with entirely opposing sets of facts and narratives about what took place during the 2020 presidential election. Still, there are signs that the country is moving on. Election deniers appear to have underperformed in the 2022 midterms, and Trump’s current chief rival for 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has so far avoided repeating the stolen election narrative. In the end, electoral math may convince political leaders to put the “Big Lie” to bed, but without significant changes to the alt-tech landscape another January 6 is plausible.

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Images featured in these article are accredited to Sebastian Portillo and lev radin on Shutterstock.com.