[3][5][6][7] Alt-tech platforms describe themselves as protectors of free speech and individual liberty, which researchers and journalists have alleged may be a dog whistle for antisemitism and terrorism.
[15] Hope not Hate researcher Joe Mulhall identified the deplatforming of Britain First in 2018, and Tommy Robinson in 2019, as two major events that spurred British social media users to join alternative platforms.
Parler, a website with a large proportion of Trump supporters among its userbase, was taken offline when Amazon Web Services suspended its hosting several days after the January 6 storming of the United States Capitol.
[26] In July 2021, an example of alt-tech hardware was announced as the "Freedom Phone" – a smartphone that promoted privacy-oriented features and an "uncensorable" app store.
"Truth Social" has banned content mentioning liberal views on abortion and the Congressional hearings on the January 6th Capitol attack.
[37][38][39] Deen Freelon and colleagues, publishing in Science in September 2020, wrote that some alt-tech websites are specifically dedicated to serving right-wing communities, naming 4chan (founded in 2003), 8chan (2013), Gab (2016), BitChute (2017) and Parler (2018) as examples.
[2] Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, in contrast, described alt-tech services in explicitly political terms in a 2021 article for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University: We use the alt-tech term to refer to platforms that offer a promise of uncensored speech, which exist specifically to give a space for far-right, nationalist, racist, or extremist points of view, and which harbor a broad sense of grievance that speech has been "censored" for failure to be "politically correct."