• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 28, 2021

Social media texts? That’s so 2020. When you are involved in a big-time insurrection, you need a quicker form of communication, like a “push-to-talk” mobile app.

But authorities might be on to you. Is there other technology? Always, it seems.

Heightened activity around Zello, a mobile walkie-talkie app, occurred when it found itself being used by right-wing militia members who participated in the insurrection on January 6.

The company deleted more than 2,000 channels after a report was published about its use.

Just like text-based social media, voice-based social media networks need to ramp up efforts in monitoring possible violence-related content -- which costs time and money.

And if those companies can’t do it, other app distributors will, like the big app stores from Apple and Google.

Apple and Google kicked social media platform Parler off their mobile app stores. And then Amazon went one crushing step further, when its Amazon Web Services refused to host Parler. That effectively shut down the app.

Those thrown off Zello (and other platforms) now see bad actors moving to encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram, according to reports. This can protect user chats from being eavesdropped on by law enforcement/government agencies.

Modern media technology always seem to offer alternatives -- to all comers, sometimes unfortunately.