Employee Pressure Not a Factor in Deplatforming, Tech Companies Say

When Amazon, Twitter and other tech companies booted President Donald Trump along with social networking app Parler and others blamed for last week’s mob violence from their platforms, workers at the tech companies were thrilled. In some cases, the moves came after employees had been asking for years for precisely such action.

Those same companies want to be clear, though: Employee pressure had nothing to do with the steps they’ve taken against prominent right-wing figures and organizations in recent days.

At Stripe, for example, for several years some workers have been telling the digital payment company’s leaders, including CEO Patrick Collison, about their discomfort with the fact that it processed donations for the Trump campaign and asked them to end the relationship, according to current and former Stripe employees. But a Stripe spokesperson said the company’s move to do just that in recent days was unrelated to how its employees felt and was based instead on the Trump campaign’s violation of a Stripe rule prohibiting working with customers who celebrate unlawful violence and similar behavior.