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Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

• seibelj 6y ago
  I’m not a conservative but I support free speech. I installed it but the recommended people were Fox News pundits and politicians I didn’t care about. I like the idea of enabling users to hide speech they don’t like rather than a Speech Czar that determines what we are allowed to hear. But it will take some time for something like this to get a critical mass of users to make it work.
  • echelon 6y ago
    Plenty of people on Reddit and TikTok are getting banned on Parler for posting liberal ideas [1]. It's not free speech. It's one-sided. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speech-app-already-banning-users-1514358 https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec... Edit: this post is getting downvoted like crazy. People have strong opinions about this.
    • seibelj 6y ago
      Do you have any evidence of this? From the article that seems like it violates their entire purpose for existing.
      • echelon 6y ago
        Updated my post with a link. I'll find more.
        • seibelj 6y ago
          Wow that’s dumb if true, why even bother!?
          • klyrs 6y ago
            Indeed, indeed. If it's not about the principled and unflinching protection of free speech, then what is it about? I've said it about twitter and I'll say it about parler. Freedom of association is also a first amendment right. Speech is being exercised by the owners of a platform when they edit/curate/annotate posts, and association is being exercised when they ban/shadowban users.
            • loopz 6y ago
              It's all about justifications for being egotistical assholes and believing feelings are enough justification for policy. You can't reason with people who dismiss facts, empathy and consequences. You can reach the middle ground on issues that affect livelihoods of people and try to map where this may be improved.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      > "Pretty much all of my leftist friends joined Parler to screw with MAGA folks, and every last one of them was banned in less than 24 hours because conservatives truly love free speech," one user recently wrote on Twitter. It sounds like they were banned for being antagonistic assholes, not for being liberals.
      • p1necone 6y ago
        It doesn't matter what they were banned for, it's still hypocritical for a platform apparently based around "free speech" to ban people for speech they don't agree with.
        • julienreszka 6y ago
          Spam and flood is not speech it's noise preventing people from having actual conversations.
          • exogeny 6y ago
            Who's to decide what is spam and flood and what's not? The circle never ends. Call Parler what it is - a right-wing circle jerk, for aggrieved snowflakes who think that "free speech" means that you can say whatever and whenever, as long as it's sufficiently conservative, and not only can the government not punish you, but those big meanie private companies can't either.
            • Biganon 6y ago
              Every forum needs human moderation, but that doesn't imply that this moderation cannot be done in good or bad faith. Just like a good judge is not congruent to a big, deterministic computer.
              • lostcolony 6y ago
                So you're saying you believe Parler to be moderating in better faith than Twitter/Facebook/etc? 'cause I think for your statement to be relevant that would have to be the assertion...
    • p1necone 6y ago
      "free speech" is just being used as a dog whistle for far right ideas in this case. These people are not behaving in good faith, don't bother engaging with them as if they were.
      • seibelj 6y ago
        That's the point of "free speech" - I don't care how far right / left / in outer space your ideas are. You can say them, and I won't absorb the message if I don't care. It's the old saying about TV - if you don't like what's on, just change the channel.
        • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
          That ends when you start inciting violence and promoting actions that can end other people's lives. As it should. It's one thing to claim space lizards are controlling Facebook, it's another to start saying you want to shoot up busses full of Facebook workers. Unconvincing? Replace "Facebook" with "Democrats" and you get worryingly close to Parler. But there is another problem. These sites don't just happen. If they were bottom-up spontaneous forums - someone starting with phpBB and taking it from there - they'd be tolerable. (And likely less extreme.) They aren't. These are deliberate attempts to farm and concentrate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of sentiments so they can be used as political leverage for certain interests. They're not free speech at all - they're farmed speech. That is the problem. The people who farm them are knowingly and maliciously using them to spread lies and enflame violent sentiment so they can profit from both, financially and politically.
        • cm2187 6y ago
          No free speech is about only saying things I agree with!
      • odessacubbage 6y ago
        parler is neither a free speech platform by design or a far right one, it's purely an attempt to create the fox version of twitter. their tos are highly dubious. >dog whistle to be reductive, yes far right and even fascist ideas would fall under the umbrella of free speech as would... literally everything else.
    • cptskippy 6y ago
      The fact that it's funded by the Mercers should give everyone pause for concern. They're rolling their own platform to do what Cambridge Analytica did without having to answer to anyone.
      • scottlocklin 6y ago
        C/A as sinister manipulators has to be the most preposterous conspiracy theory to come out of the last 4 years -and that includes Qanon. They were a marketing company also known for the scoundrely manipulations of the.... LL Bean catalog. Maybe they sold some people flannel shirts. Terrible. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/huckster-hack-uk-govt-report-undermines-stars-of-cambridge-analytica-russiagate/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/huckster-hack-uk-govt-rep...
    • imgabe 6y ago
      This is what I was curious about, though I'd like to see what they actually posted and whether they got banned for the speech or for harassing people or other behavior like that. /r/TheDonald was notorious for brigading other subreddits, manipulating votes and other TOS violations then crying censorship when they got banned.
      • fallinghawks 6y ago
        /r/parlerwatch is a bit of a mess, mostly examples of extreme right wing posts, but I believe there are a few examples of people getting banned.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• echelon 6y ago
  How long until America starts putting limits on free speech? IANAL, but we already have laws against libel, slander, and defamation. Section 230 / communications decency could be modified. New laws could be created to prevent amplified spread of factually incorrect information. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to broadcast that speech. I'm not advocating for this, but I see it as a possibility.
  • tcbawo 6y ago
    There are limits to free speech which have been long established. The clear and present danger doctrine describes limits to free speech, in that you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. When/if the amplification possible with social media is connected with mob violence, there could be prosecution. I don't think court systems and law enforcement are sophisticated enough yet, though.
    • giantDinosaur 6y ago
      You mean falsely yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre - an exceedingly important distinction which is core to much discussion about free speech (should offensive speech be allowed if it is stating facts etc.)
      • zebrafish 6y ago
        Is it knowingly falsely yell fire? Or just falsely yell fire?
      • tcbawo 6y ago
        I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I was comparing the amplification of social media with the concept of yelling in a theater.
        • giantDinosaur 6y ago
          You mean falsely, otherwise your 'clear and present danger' part doesn't make sense - the entire point historically with your example is that it is perfectly acceptable to yell in the theatre if there is clear and present danger. Reducing it to simply 'yelling in a theatre' means you're evaluating it just on.. yelling alone? What? Are you saying all 'social media amplification' is the same?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• yabones 6y ago
  For those unaware of the connection, Robert Mercer was also a key investor behind Cambridge Analytica, the data firm which played a large role in the hyper targeted Facebook ads during the 2016 election. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    If I recall correctly, he was also one of the very few rich people to back Trump in 2016, when everyone had written Trump off. Which also caused some drama at Rentech.
    • alphabettsy 6y ago
      He had many billionaire donors and its well documented that GOP voters are wealthier on average, this is a list of just the well-known billionaires that backed his 2016 run: https://fortune.com/2016/08/03/trump-billionaire-backers-list/ https://fortune.com/2016/08/03/trump-billionaire-backers-lis...
      • hiq 6y ago
        > it's well documented that GOP voters are wealthier on average Is it? I could not find a proper reference documenting both the average and median wealth of voters of both parties.
        • alphabettsy 6y ago
          This is based on exit polls and there are better studies out there. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/05/05/donald-trump-average-voter-income-72000-middle-class/83972800/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
          • hiq 6y ago
• throwaway122378 6y ago
  In a group chat one friend asked if they’ve heard about Parler. Another responded “Yeah it’s a new app for right wing circle jerk” That alone is the reason Parler exist. Anything that goes against the views of the liberal left is automatically deemed trash/conspiracy.
  • Biganon 6y ago
    Please go read voat's frontpage and then tell us it's a healthy place. Parler will become the exact same cesspool.
    • mythrwy 6y ago
      I don't think so. This is more then a handful of disaffected basement keyboard Nazis. It's millions of people. Many of them reasonably upset at censorship and ultimate determination of truth by a group of 20-30 something high-top sneaker wearing San Francisco people.
    • throwaway122378 6y ago
      Did I mention Voat? Completely unrelated. And using your prediction to say one thing will become another is also useless.
• gizmodo59 6y ago
  This whole thread is going to be: * I'm not a liberal but.. * I'm not a conservative but.. * Twitter may be a private company, but.. * Freedom of speech but... If there is a new view point on how to analytically break such news down that would be great to hear indeed!
  • echelon 6y ago
    Money and power has found a way to hack the first amendment. Algorithms are amplifying the most inflammatory messages on both sides to increase engagement.
    • dannyw 6y ago
      Money and power has always hacked the first amendment. Before the internet, a few corporations controlled all media a person would be exposed to.
      • loopz 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the...
    • inZGBl 6y ago
      Is this the endgame of the attention economy? If I show you a picture of a cat and evidence of an existential threat, which are you most likely to pay real attention to? The black box is always going to optimize for the worst aspects of humanity. The best aspects simply aren’t worth enough money.
  • sigmaprimus 6y ago
    How about doing a thought experiment for a minute? Trump told what are generally considered incorrect opinions on corona virus prevention. Eg: Hydroxy Chloroquine works, masks don't and so on... His followers then parroted and posted these comments on social media and were promptly defunded, suspended and even banned for breaking Eula terms. Because Covid is serious and far too important to risk endangering others lives with misinformation like that...fair enough. The campaign rolls on only now a significant portion of Trump's most vocal supporters are no longer able to voice their support and encourage people to vote for him due to being punished for spreading false info that Trump told them regarding Covid, or is that the real reason? Maybe the plan was to silence the right's voice all along but Covid presented itself at an oppertune time, the left leaning social media companies took full advantage and Trump and his followers walked right into the trap! Could that be why right wing supporters might want to find a new forum to express themselves? Somewhere that they wont have their voices taken away right before an election that they feel passionate about? Just a different thought from an outside observer with no skin in the game.
• roenxi 6y ago
  One of the advantages Free Speech has is censorship is only worthwhile if deployed against ideas that have potential to attract people. One of my pet hobbies is arguing against socialism. I don't bother arguing against flat-earthism because nobody sane believes it. But socialism has some compelling points and people keep trying it. That dynamic will help platforms like Parler. Whether or not the ideas are good ones, the people there going to be people who were pushed off Twitter because they had compelling or persuasive ideas. Can't meet bad ideas by silencing people. It doesn't work, people just get the impression that the ideas have power.
  • sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
    Here's one data point that is at least related: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
• ponker 6y ago
  Shouldn’t the liberals be using the app with the French name?
  • 0xfeba 6y ago
    They renamed/rebranded (reprounounced?) themselves as "parlor" rather than "parlay" probably since MAGAs all pronounced it like the former.
  • julienreszka 6y ago
    Fundamental human rights like free speech are also french ideals. Article 10 and 11 of the declaration of human rights. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/droit-national-en-vigueur/constitution/declaration-des-droits-de-l-homme-et-du-citoyen-de-1789 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/droit-national-e...
    • pjc50 6y ago
      However, the interpretation is very different from the American "everything goes" approach. France has a specific ban on Nazi symbols, for example.
• dannyw 6y ago
  1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints. 2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome. 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
  • cycrutchfield 6y ago
    Platforms are not limiting “viewpoints” unless by viewpoints you mean something like hate speech, threats of violence, doxxing, etc.
    • dannyw 6y ago
      On reddit, these reasons you mention are selectively enforced and often actually made by people trying to get the subreddits banned. Bans are also familial: reddit tends to do “ban waves” where they also ban similar subreddits, irrespective of whether they have rule violations or not. There’s no communication; no appeals; no “you got this wrong”. If you’ve ever participated in one of the banned subreddits; you’ll know “hate speech” or “doxxing” are a big fat lie. WE are the ones getting doxxed and brigaded! It’s not too different to police using marijuana laws to target Black communities. In a free-to-join community of thousands to millions of people, you will get people breaking the rules. Moderators clean them up. The only difference is unwelcome viewpoints get their subreddit banned with this as the pretext. Source: moderator of 3 banned subreddits; from political to sexual kinks like consensual rape fetishes (which 31% of women say they have fantasises; just FYI). Admins have never; ever, ever engaged with us during my tenures.
  • rayiner 6y ago
    Donald Trump attacked illegal immigration specifically: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/08/tim-kaine/tim-kaine-falsely-says-trump-said-all-mexicans-are/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/08/tim-kaine/... Also, he attacked accepting refugees from certain high-risk countries (which had been designated as such by the Obama administration). He didn’t say “immigrants bad.” > Kaine has embellished the controversy by saying Trump has said "all Mexicans are rapists." The Democrat doesn’t come close to proving his claim; all of the Trump quotes Kaine’s campaign sent us pertain to unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. Also, it’s not like Clinton didn’t spend four years “disputing ... democracy.” See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum... > Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday. Journalists can’t help allowing their point of view to influence their reporting. But when someone can just pull up as transcript and say “well he didn’t really say that” that damages the credibility of the media. Even if what he actually said was wrong or bad on its own merits. This is what drives people to alternative media silos, and that’s bad because people are no longer operating from the same facts.
• least 6y ago
  When "free speech" is the primary selling point of a social media website, it tends to only attract people who feel slighted by the platform they're migrating from. Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move. I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
  • shakezula 6y ago
    They can claim that all they want but a quick glance at their sign up flow shows you that they’re really only interested in peddling extreme right wing personalities and associated accounts. And it can’t be a coincidence that “Gaming” with a capital G is the only topic that I saw suggested for me to follow.
  • redis_mlc 6y ago
    > Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move. What you're saying is irrelevant at this point. That ship sailed in late 2019. Leftists/Marxists will remain on Twitter and Youtube, and the right must move to alternate platforms like Parler. For example, MRAs mostly use YT to announce their alternative platform links now, since they can be yanked at any time by the SJW moderators working at YT.
  • cm2187 6y ago
    Agree, we will likely end up with right leaning town square and left leaning town square. And because every company seems to think they need to pick a side on political topics, it may extend beyond speech platforms. For instance I wouldn't be surprised if at one point conservative leaning viewers would migrate away from the likes of netflix for been fed up of being preached woke catechism in every TV show. And perhaps calling your customers sexists and bigots isn't the best advertising strategy for shaving products. Etc.
• ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Also being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25095833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25095833
• ThePreacherMan 6y ago
  Are there any good information how advertising works in this network? From my experience its easy to convince "free-speechers" to buy things - think gold investment, self defense equipment, prepping, everything with the US flag colours on it.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    If you want to make a quick, but cynical buck, start on Facebook. My Facebook feed was full of pins, shirts, mugs, and posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a tacky Notorious B.I.G. crown on her head for weeks after her death. Sometimes they’d even say “Rest In Power” whatever that means. They must have been selling like hot cakes.
    • viraptor 6y ago
      Same was happening on Twitter for quite a while with 2 bots chatting to each other on every popular thread about Trump: "just drinking from this <mug with "leftist tears">", "OMG, where did you get that", "<link to shop>". I expect they made lots of money there if they outsourced to print on demand.
    • ThePreacherMan 6y ago
      These are breadcrumbs, the money are in the big time items you affiliate for. During the Ron Paul craze I had some Gold adverts printing money.
  • glangdale 6y ago
    A quick leaf through the ads in the National Review (back when I would occasionally happen across a paper copy) yielded a pretty good indication that right-wing stuff usually comes with a fairly good serving of grift. And that was in a kinder, gentler age, when more of the arguments were about tax policy and the political management of South and Central America. In today's considerably more polarized era... In an amazing coincidence, people who believe that masks have 5G chips in them to allow Soros/Gates to perform mind control (or is it via the chemtrails?) and that climate change scientists are being manipulated by Big Solar turn out to be easy to sell things to. Who would have thunk it?
• 4bpp 6y ago
  Relevant SSC article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ... > The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. I do wonder what the mainstream's response will be when this website inevitably actualises its witch-coven destiny (though it may already have according to some). Based on the apparent billionaire backing, it may not depend on payment processors (which otherwise seem to be among the most willing pieces of infrastructure to summarily cut off "extremist" customers), but it will probably still require Cloudflare to weather DoS attacks, a DNS record and carriers willing to provide it connectivity.
  • axguscbklp 6y ago
    >It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. It would probably be a terrible place to live physically, but not necessarily a terrible place to visit online. Places such as the ones SSC refers to are terrible places to visit for people who get deeply emotionally hurt when they see hateful discourse and for people who lack the skill of filtering low-value content in search of high-value content. However, both the skill of being unaffected by hateful discourse and the skill of rapidly finding high-value content in an ocean of low-value content can be learned. I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
    • odessacubbage 6y ago
      didn't scott erase his entire community and body of work out of fear of being subjected to a witch hunt? the witch doth protest too much. >I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places. i have had far more positive experiences & formed some of the most valuable connections in my life on 'toxic' freespeech sites than i ever have on twitter. it's actually shocking sometimes how much more caustic and genuinely awful twitterposters are than anons. you see the same thing in online games. free for alls tend to breed a certain amount of community enforced values while games with heavy oversight & no shit talk end up being much more miserable experiences.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  No one wants to spend time on the Internet listening to a bunch of randos talking about how the Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections except other such crackpots. These platforms are lightning rods. Let these people go there and convince each other of their fringe conspiracy theories. Freedom of association and all that. If they will stop polluting normal places with their crackpottery we're all better off.
  • Grustaf 6y ago
    Yep. If you’re not a liberal you are by definition a jew hating tin foil crackpot. I wonder if this new not so nuanced view has anything to do with conservatives leaving Twitter?
    • karlshea 6y ago
      The citizens here in the US do not appear to be interested in “nuanced views” at the moment.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Haha, this kind of sarcasm is what everyone used when I said this about Voat.co. Went there to check if perhaps my prediction was wrong but no, it's full of crackpottery of all kind by disaffected losers. So yeah, everyone is welcome to their parler too. I'm not signing up to find out.
    • didibus 6y ago
      I'm mostly a classic liberal person, think founding fathers, enlightenment era. And to be honest, I'm curious about what your definition of conservative is? To me, there's only two way to define it. Either the old way, where conservative means you are a feudalist, monarchist, theocrat, oligarch, autocrat, statist, fascist, etc. Basically you want to go back to a pre-liberal establishment style of society, and are opposed to a liberal democracy. In this definition, as you see, all these today are generally known as morally bad. Jew hating tin foil crackpot would fall under here, or any other form of A hates on B, since all prior forms of government are about having a ruling individual or class over others, thus a way for A to rule over B. So in that definition, being conservative means being against liberal democracy, thus against democracy, reason, liberty and equality. Or the new way, where conservative means liberal but not progressive. In this sense, you believe and value liberal democracy, thus democracy, reason, liberty and equality, but you are content with the implementation of government that we currently have to drive and uphold those liberal values. Therefore you oppose yourself to progressives who think that we're not doing a good enough job at implementing liberal values, in that you believe it is either too risky to change the current implementation or that the proposed changes would result in a worst realization of liberalism. As you see, in the second categorization, you're still a liberal, so it doesn't make sense to speak about conservative vs liberal in that second one. And because in the US I see people put liberal and conservative at opposite ends, I tend to assume the first categorization. Which would imply that conservatives, to me, are a huge treat to democracy, reason, liberty and equality. So I'm genuinely looking for clarity. Is there some miscommunication here? How do you categorize "conservative". I ask because it is very confusing to me. You speak of nuance, and I want to understand that nuance, so would love an explanation.
• nl 6y ago
  Parler is banning users already. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
• homero 6y ago
  Will this outlast voat or gab? The site is horrific function and design wise
  • pjc50 6y ago
    What happened to gab? I saw the last generation of frog-emoji posters move over there and now it seems irrelevant.
    • deadalus 6y ago
      Nothing happened. Its alive and doing well. It is community supported, just like Voat.
    • odessacubbage 6y ago
      torba had a meltdown about evil pornographers and censored the shit out of his free speech platform.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Big Tech and Big Media really overplayed their hand this time, IMO. Millions and millions of people are now skeptical and looking for an alternative, even from Fox News. It might not be to Parler, or to the next site after that, but fragmentation will continue to happen. Facebook and media at large only have power if they have viewers, which is a far less stable resource than iron, or oil, or other corporate mainstays. A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
  • grey-area 6y ago
    2020, or more likely 2016 will perhaps be seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the US Republic, when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets. The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
    • blackrock 6y ago
      Why can’t the dissenting States just secede from the Union? It is a democracy after all.
      • Rick1 6y ago
        Well some have tried. There was a civil war about it.
        • axaxs 6y ago
          Exactly. Many of the people who make civil war/anti south jokes are the same people who want California to secede, which makes no sense. In its simplest form, the civil war wasn't fought because the north thought slavery was bad. It was fought because several states tried to leave the United States.
• FreeTrade 6y ago
  Switching one private plaform for another is dumb. You'll spend years building a following only to have the rug pulled if you start to matter. A public platform is the only solution that fixes our free speech problem.
• dustinmoris 6y ago
  In mid October I deleted almost all my tweets and likes (but Twitter being so shit they are still showing my likes except it’s not liked anymore lol) and have not been tweeting anything anymore. I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”. I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a look what is going and and oh my god, the more I am absent the more I see how rotten Twitter is and all of its users. Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention. Everyone just posting negative stuff to make other people feel bad, down or guilty about something. I was part of the problem too. Lots of this: > “When I was a kid, I once had to work at my uncle’s shop. Let me tell you about <insert bullshit here>. A thread...” I don’t know what Parler is, but Twitter is THE WORST of social media and if Parler is an alternative then it’s going to be equally bad!
  • alkonaut 6y ago
    I think it’s down to who you follow. First, never ever read “trends” or random tweets. Never trust Twitters official app to show you anything useful. Using third party apps also saves you from ads. Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology. Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.
    • garmaine 6y ago
      Block early, block often. Think twice before following someone.
      • chrisseaton 6y ago
        People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
• alkonaut 6y ago
  Anyone think this is an operation to gather info on voters of a certain category? Seeing the investors and the fact that you need a real telephone number to register seems like a big red flag.
• bawolff 6y ago
  Meh, so what. There's been tons of platforms in the past that rise up because of disagreements over moderation policy (voat anyone). Maybe they will succede maybe they won't. Not sure what the fuss is about.
  • in3d 6y ago
    Was voat one the top two most downloaded apps in the whole App Store for a week? That’s what the fuss is about.
• paulpauper 6y ago
  I look forward to alternatives to big tech . It is about time.
• AntiImperialist 6y ago
  As much as I would like to see this happen, I don't think it is going to happen this time around either... or ever. We've seen this movie before. Minds, Gab, Patreon alternatives, Voat, all of this has been done with no success. Whatever you open to the public will be infiltrated by the enemy. I think the new model is to do it secretly in closed groups away from the public, preferably local groups where you meet with people in person, have strict rules and only sign up new users via strong referrals: family members, close friends etc. Once some of them work well, they can be franchised. A very good example of this is Freemasonry. Yes, such social networks will be much slower and decentralized but they will be much more effective and better for the members long-term.
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    > Whatever you open to the public will be infiltrated by the enemy. Can you explain what you mean by this? I wouldn't have thought that the average user of social media had that many enemies, but i could be wrong.
    • ohgodplsno 6y ago
      Especially considering that all of these failed not because they were infiltrated by "the left", but because they're now a haven for literal nazis.
      • AntiImperialist 6y ago
        Agent provocateurs are used to supress online communities just like they're used to supress physical protests. In fact, one can do much more damage to an online community, specially if it can have anonymous users.
        • watwut 6y ago
          I guess then, Twitter and such Mahe better job of keeping agent provocateur in check?
        • 6y ago
• karmasimida 6y ago
  I am more interested in Parler's business model moving forward. One reason of censorship becomes so prevailing is because of advertising. The advertisers ultimately defines what is 'toxic' and what not. If Parler can stick to its current path and manage to survive, it would pretty significant to the internet ecosystem.
  • nemo44x 6y ago
    I guess it depends on the bottom line for the company. Who their customers are. Nike shoes is an interesting recent example. They embraced the controversial NFL player Colin Kaepernick in various advertising campaigns, playing in his bravery for kneeling during the National Anthem of the United States. However this was not some sort of altruistic, egalitarian business campaign. It was a cold calculation from their data which said young people buy their products and young people are sympathetic to his cause and therefore we will sell more shoes going with this endorsement. It helped make Nike, a company with a very spotty humanitarian history and questions of exploitive labor practices, a corporation their audience of largely young progressive people felt identified with them. Advertising is about as cynical as it gets. For some companies it will make sense to “choose a side” which when thinking about it is as absurd and ridiculous as something could be. What would Adam Smith make of this?
• mschuster91 6y ago
  It will go the same way as its direct predecessor Gab.ai, Voat and other "alternatives for conservatives" - it ends up as a self radicalizing Nazi hole, as no one except right-wingers wants to be on a network dominated by right-wingers.
• AsyncAwait 6y ago
  I have no doubt there's censorship going on, but to paint this as uniquely an issue for conservatives is what gets me about this. It's an anti-mainstream censorship if anything. Left-wing, (not neo-liberal mind you), outlets are getting censored too, just ask The Grayzozone, Jacobin etc. As for your average Twitter consensus, if you say i.e. Biden, even Sanders is a radical socialist then you're going to get laughed at, because it's far from true. But as far as the reach of conservatives, #ProudBoys is trending on Twitter right now and am getting conservative YouTube recommendations about the 'culture war' on a regular basis, that's despite me not being logged in, not watching conservative channels and having history/personal recommendations etc. turned off. It just seems to be popular content right now.
• wpdev_63 6y ago
  I thought the alternative to twitter would be maston[0]. It's 'uncensored' federated twitter clone that anyone can create a node and create a social community of their choosing. Not sure how "Parler" is going to be better than twitter with a central point of failure. More political fodder I guess. [0]:https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about
  • sparkie 6y ago
    Mastadon is not "uncensored" either. They put significant effort into blocking gab when it tried integrating into the fediverse. The only real solution to censorship will be a completely distributed system, where users control their own data and associations, and all communication is peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted, with zero middle-men.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      > They put significant effort into blocking gab when it tried integrating into the fediverse. Who is 'they' ? The most used servers ?
  • numpad0 6y ago
    Mastodon didn’t work. The architecture couldn’t handle Japanese Twitter migrants overwhelming the network and Gab issues that came later. In current form, it is just an on-prem Twitter clone.
    • kemenaran 6y ago
      As far as I know, Mastodon is quite active, they’re releasing features and improvements monthly, and the number of active users is still growing.
      • input_sh 6y ago
        > ...and the number of active users is still growing. I use Mastodon and am definitely a fan, but the rudimentary stats we have (https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/) don't show the growth. The number of monthly active users fluctuates between 400k-500k this entire year.
• Der_Einzige 6y ago
  Wake up Dang, this is another one of those "political flame-bait threads"!
• Rick1 6y ago
  Well that's because they _are_ censored...
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  It’s worth noting that the first thing Parler did was start censoring anyone unsupportive of their form of conservatism. They’re not offering freer speech, they’re offering a safe space. Maybe that’s a seller, maybe it’s not, but it’s an important distinction. This is really just /r/conservative taken to its logical conclusion.
  • hntossaccount12 6y ago
    I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics. Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy. But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies. I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy theories on the same platform as your cousin's family photos, or nobel winners, has a legitimacy-building effect on the outrage content. Maybe on its own platform it will look more like what it actually is. Nobody mistakes the tabloids in the checkout aisle for a legitimate newspaper.
    • entropea 6y ago
      >I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics. I'd love to see people go back to early 2000's PHPBB-similar specific topic/hobby/interest forums with tens to hundreds, maybe a couple thousand members. The good days.
      • jrnichols 6y ago
        I wouldn't even mind seeing more actual usenet groups again. but then the same problems will creep up again. and spam. relentless spam. in my view, spam and spammers are the worst thing that happened to forums. a constant arms race against spammers and then script kiddie types trying to break into forums, often so they could spam even more ads. but I like the sentiment. there are still plenty of phpBB type forums out there, and I like them. It's much better than having everything hidden away behind the barbed wire wall of Facebook Groups.
    • 6y ago
• kxrm 6y ago
  Censorship largely comes from a desire to appease advertisers. So long as users aren't paying anything to support a platform, censorship pressure will be an issue.
• spiritplumber 6y ago
  Bring back the personal website already!
  • logicchains 6y ago
    It's almost impossible to post hate on a page making extensive use of the <blink> tag.
• victorbstan 6y ago
  Bigotry and hate speech should not have a platform. I’ve been reading a lot of comments here and it seems like most of them aren’t even critical or touch on the point of NOT allowing certain kind of speech or false information sharing. In Germany nazi related sympathizing, propaganda is banned from social media. But some how it’s ok in USA? I honestly fail to understand how little criticism there is of unfettered free speech, as if it’s universally a good thing. Same with guns, given overwhelming evidence to the contrary yet still USA sticks to these strange “rights”.
  • thinkingemote 6y ago
    > I honestly fail to understand Do you think its possible for you to understand? Would you want to understand and learn new things? If you knew that honestly understanding would lead to mental pain and anguish as you literally would have to admit you were wrong in your past judgements and admit your view of the world was wrong, would you still want to understand? Because it will cause you pain. It even might lose you friends. Changing your mind is hard. Learning new things about the way the world works means you have to remove whatever was in that place before and you do that by admitting you were wrong. If you've been on HN for a while you will agree with me that having people admit they were wrong is extremely rare! It hurts. Most people don't want to understand. It's much easier not to. I applaud a sincere expression of not understanding, so congratulations! It means that somehow you know that your view of the world is not complete. I would suggest that instead of asking for answers from others which you can disagree with, true understanding requires a fundamental and painful change in your own brain. Empathy is just one tool to help understand and work out how you were wrong, there are others. It won't mean you start to believe the ideas just that for the first time you will start to see that there are other ideas. There is potential danger, however, that what caused your initial attachment to a particular view of the world might switch to these other newer ones. Like how an ex-cult member is always the most vocal anti cult activist, or how a recent Vegan is always the most evangelistic about their new way of life. Empathy alone doesn't cause that, but maybe a kind of stockholm syndrome, so take it slow and try not to be overwhelmed. Even if you feel like you could start to understand, there is also the fear and disgust of the other which you would need to overcome to begin. For many this fear and disgust is so strong it's enough to stop any thoughts of change. (it's why fear and disgust is so often used as a political tool) I'm not asking you to change and I don't expect you to change. Change hurts. I'm warning you about the dangers of understanding others if you really wanted to understand what's going on which I hope you might.
• wyoh 6y ago
  I registered to Parler because that's where my guns aficionados are going to, leaving Instagram and Facebook censorship behind.
• bni 6y ago
  How come Parler wasn't removed from iOS app store months ago? I mean Apple will demand that content violating their policies in apps are removed. I'm sure Parler is full of exactly the kinds of things Apple wont tolerate.
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  We are censored every day. A newspaper editor censors their writers, your boss censors your reports, your friends censor your bar room bullshit by calling you out on it, your spouse tells you you will not argue with your brother in law again. But this is all implicit censoring - adhering to social norms through social signals (a raised eye brow, being told to buy your round and shut up) The thing is computers do not do any implicit censoring - and so we are expecting FAANG to step up. But we need firstly a set of agreed rules, then the ability to automatically understand the rules before we even get to due process. The issue is firstly one of scale - HN kinda sorta works because it had clear rules from the start, abs had a lot of moderation, from early users and mods. Multiply by 1000x the volume and suddenly dang's keyboard explodes. Facebook is trying to produce moderation at scale with thousands of human moderators, but they probably will never "succeed" - because success is not defined well enough. Let me restate that. There are thousands of groups on FAANG - each one has its own evolving rules on what is and is not acceptable. But facebook can only really deal with one set of rules. It will try and manage the lowest common denominator - no child porn, no murder, but it slowly heads towards "define free speech" The main indicator here is that both sides of every political debate think FAANG is censoring them.
  • lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Just to expand a little - If you are the moderator and both sides think you are biased, you are probably in the right zone. The problem is do we as society, really want a handful of private companies deciding what the rules are - deciding for example if a Philipino politician can use FAANG to talk to his electorate (because the electorate is all on facebook, say de facto facebook are garejeeping this) Society does not particularly want this, Zuckerberg definitely does not want this. So we need to find a way to have regulations that deal with a set of poorly defined globally circumstances (Philipino election law as well as German hate speech laws), some areas of which are the companies problem, some are individual, some are societal and some a mixture. And we want those solutions to be technically achievable, auditable and not constrain us in the future. That's quite a lot for a few thousand human moderators in poorly air conditioned offices to deal with.
    • 6y ago
• zone411 6y ago
  When Twitter blocked the NY Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop for "hacked content" (and it wasn't factually disproven) and then was very petty and wouldn't unblock their account unless they deleted it, they lost whatever remaining trust they had left among right-wingers. Twitter has been slowly becoming more and more restrictive with many users cheering every ban of voices they disagreed with based on their ideology. Trump will probably be banned soon after he becomes a former president due to pressure from these same users and that could give Parler another influx of people. I don't buy the argument that Parler needs celebrities and mainstream journalists to survive. Do Discord or Reddit have any? Yet they are doing fine. It will probably stay an echo-chamber and with fewer right-wingers, Twitter will become more of an echo-chamber. 8 days on the top of both app stores is a real momentum for Parler, let's see what they do with it. When I saw Twitter's head of site integrity post this: "a phenomenally documented (and illustrated) study from @3r1nG about the ways that inauthentic social media accounts can be deployed to attempt to discredit an activist movement" and actually followed the link and saw that it was just a blog post about very obvious Antifa parody accounts and journalists falling for 4chan-like trolling, it became clear how bad is Twitter's company culture. They've been drifting around, not innovating, and their underperforming stock price reflects it well.
• victorbstan 6y ago
  One very negative effect of platforms like Reddit and hackernews is that downvotes and upvotes system exacerbates groupthink and opinions contrary to the ones of the people reading your post at a given time. Lots of posts could easily get upvoted or downvoted based on circumstance and dissenting opinions shut down.
• forgingahead 6y ago
  If you look at Donald Trump's Facebook account, every post of his (including one about getting a new COVID relief bill to him to sign and one wishing people Happy Diwali) is "flagged" by Facebook with their "helpful notice". Twitter has plenty of their own notices as well, spawning several memes already[0][1]. Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, made a post about "lining up and shooting" people. AOC recently tweeted about "making lists" of opposition supporters, which was amplified by many others. There were 3 years of unfounded accusations of foreign involvement in the 2016 election, amongst many other titillating rumours, gossip, and slander against an elected official and his family and cabinet members. None of those were flagged by social media companies the way Trump and others are being flagged now. Whatever pretzel-like justifications one may come up with for the obvious double-standard, the average person no longer believes in neutrality of media or of any of the major tech platforms. [0]https://twitter.com/tysmith12206/status/1326669493817516034 https://twitter.com/tysmith12206/status/1326669493817516034 [1]https://img.ifunny.co/images/f9cf7b18c206377f293432986acf677d78afb9e0803c458404b409b3d292e49c_1.jpg https://img.ifunny.co/images/f9cf7b18c206377f293432986acf677...
  • indigo945 6y ago
    > Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, made a post about "lining up and shooting" people. AOC recently tweeted about "making lists" of opposition supporters, which was amplified by many others. The former Twitter CEO is not the POTUS, and while the tweet is distasteful, is it really surprising that Twitter doesn't have the resources to flag tweets by every user on the platform? Auto-flagging works for links, not for inciteful remarks. AOC, on the other hand, wasn't talking about death lists, like you imply in your comment, she was talking about people taking responsibility for their actions under the Trump regime. > Whatever pretzel-like justifications one may come up with for the obvious double-standard, the average person no longer believes in neutrality of media or of any of the major tech platforms. Yes, because the average American is a fascist at this point. This says more about average people than it says about tech platforms, though.
    • forgingahead 6y ago
      Thanks for proving my point about "pretzel-like justifications"! The downvotes are also helpful since they clearly demonstrate the refusal of one group to engage and simply censor differing viewpoints by greying them out. I hope your last sentence is made in jest, because that is not a good basis in which to engage with the world.
• andybak 6y ago
  I signed up out of morbid curiousity. The thing seemed mainly full of porn accounts hijacking right-wing hashtags. There seemed to be much more spam than there was on Twitter - at least from my brief look around.
• everdrive 6y ago
  This is just an expression of the larger, ongoing culture war. There may be some truth to the claims that conservatives are being censored more often, but I don't really believe that this is the primary thing driving them away. They view Twitter as a left institution, and view its users as primarily leaning left. As the American culture war continues to escalate, more institutions (and companies, and websites) get dragged into it. The entity in question "must" be either right or left. Even COVID-19 has taken a very partisan bent in this climate.
• blunte 6y ago
  I wonder if parler will start policing posts it's right wing leaders dislike... and will the allow posts which violate laws? Will they allow a post claiming that the Mercer family also funds a major child theft and transport ring? In other words, will they allow blatant lies or slander to stand?
  • taxicab 6y ago
    They already do. Try going there and posting even moderate opinions. See how long your account will last. "Free speech for me, but not for thee"
• polytely 6y ago
  I'm getting a lot of value out of Mastodon. I found a medium sized instance who's moderator I trust, and whose culture matches matches what I want out of a social media website. Not having posts algorithmically shoved into your face helps a lot, because it is clear where posts on you home timeline are coming from and thus easier to customise your experience by blocking people. The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research. I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter. For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
  • thelastname 6y ago
    Your diverse group isn't very diverse.
    • BrianOnHN 6y ago
      Why? Because it's missing hate groups?
      • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Because it's missing half the country, many of whom are not part of hate groups.
        • polytely 6y ago
• AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Conservatives seem to be fine with censoring BDS voices, with legislation on the books against it in several states.
  • ajvs 6y ago
    What's the acronym?
    • gwilikers 6y ago
      Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanc...
• permo-w 6y ago
  I’m starting to think that this could actually be good news for left-leaning people. It’s entirely possible that separated from the people they usually fight against, and isolated in their own platform, conservative voices, people who have made careers out of rhetorical conflict, will begin to fight among themselves. and this can only benefit the left. It’s also very possible that Parler will only go uncensored for so long. At some point, if they get big enough, it could easily become apparent that they’re losing ad revenue by hosting certain opinions, resulting in similar changes to those of Twitter and Facebook
  • kace91 6y ago
    > It’s entirely possible that separated from the people they usually fight against, and isolated in their own platform, conservative voices, people who have made careers out of rhetorical conflict, will begin to fight among themselves. The same is true for the left, isn't it? this will just increase the social bubbles we live in. Now instead of different recommendations and content shown in an app, you've got a different app.
    • troughway 6y ago
      It's already been happening, with Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Yglesias, Taibbi and others leaving their respective companies because they can't stand the bullshit rhetoric anymore. "The left eating itself" is a trope that goes back a number of years to JRE and others. What a platform like Parler does is that it gives a voice to "the right" and unites it, regardless of whether they are stoking the flames of conspiracy, or are simply "conservative" in whichever way. Having your own turf is a powerful thing. After all, see Twitter and the blue checkmarks. I'm sure more of this is to come in various forms. There is also the reddit alternative Voat but I'm not sure if it took off properly at all. I don't have a dog in this race but it's fascinating to watch it all the same. Edit: Thanks to perardi for corrections.
      • perardi 6y ago
        Minor correction: Matthew Yglesias left Vox, not Ezra Klein.
• treeman79 6y ago
  That Caphia, wow, can not not pass it My vision isn’t the best but I can usually manage.
• tim333 6y ago
  It's a bit like they're making a fantasy second reality where stuff like >All of the mechanical “glitches” that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes. They succeeded plenty, however, without getting caught. Mail-in elections are a sick joke! is true. (recent presidential tweet). Not quite sure what the endgame is.
  • Bedgeseb 6y ago
    Neither side is being factual or unbiased. There are now two realities as a result.
    • tim333 6y ago
      Maybe but the 'mainstream media' seems to have some connection to physical reality.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  It’s sad because these companies had a very easy solution to activate once we got in the season. Simply limit how far something can go viral. Let any family photos take precedence. Let at most 1000 people view any news article, and shadow ban the rest.
  • Tenoke 6y ago
    I don't go to Twitter for family photos and very much want to see what's popular in the circles I follow so this seems like a horrible solution there. Maaybe for Facebook that makes sense but I still follow some Pages and Groups there and this would make it worse for me.
• yodelshady 6y ago
  I really don't think Twitter's problem is "not right-wing enough". Woke Twitter hasn't produced any great thinkers, because the core concept discourages it. Conservative Twitter would be the same. In fact, modern conservatism seems to mostly be paranoia. If I was going to make a social media platform (I know, this is YC... it's not my sphere of interest but maybe it should be), I'd rate limit everyone to one post per day. I'd also ban short (<500 words) posts. Lincoln needed 250 words, MLK 400, you're not as good an orator as either of them and you can, and therefore should, provide citations in written media. Readers can freely highlight unsupported claims, and annotate - annotations need to be accepted by the author to be visible, but highlights do not. Let's encourage thought, research and yes, silence. Listen first, then only say things if they are worth taking a long time to say. Making money off this is left as exercise to the reader.
  • microtherion 6y ago
    We already had a social network that favored long posts (not sure whether by design or culturally): Google+. I remember it as a haven for gasbags who were overly fond of their own verbiage; essentially a write-only medium.
• BlueTemplar 6y ago
  So, why Parler and not Mastodon ? Did Mastodon present itself as too 'left-wing' ?
  • input_sh 6y ago
    I mean, Mastodon's founder and most of its userbase are definitely left-leaning, but I think the sole reason that it's Parler seeing the surge is because that's where a lot of right-wing pundits decided to go to. Dinesh D'Souza, Ted Cruz, Devin Nunes, Sean Hannity, etc. It also kinda helps that Parler has a central authority that's able to verify certain accounts. Mastodon's designed not to support that "feature".
  • ajvs 6y ago
    Most Mastodon instances blocked Gab trying to federate with them so there's little benefit at this stage trying to link with the fediverse.
• blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  There's a lot of mistaken assumptions and misinformation here about Parler; it looks like most of the commenters haven't actually used it, or have only given it a cursory glance. To wit: 1. Parler is actively recruiting liberals and moderates, to build a "big tent" of diverse opinions and perspectives. 2. The moderation guidelines are quite explicit: don't censor anyone for expressing a political opinion of any sort. Don't censor people you disagree with. Do moderate extremely toxic content -- but it has to be pretty clear, like "I'm going to kill you" or a stream of expletives with zero redeeming content. Or spam, or nonsensical posts. 3. The parleys (their version of tweets) are largely sociopolitical commentary of the type that's being downvoted or censored on the major platforms like Twitter and Facebook. For example, you can post freely about hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment for covid19. You can say "The 2020 Election was stoken". Pretty much all of the "3rd rail" topics that have been restricted elsewhere. You can link to an article by Alex Jones or Q. Their attitude seems to be, read and decide for yourself. 4. Competition is a good thing. A lot of people here have a reflexive notion that "fringe" sites like Parler and Gab will just create more echo chambers to keep "those people" ignorant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Giving people a free speech platform is a breath of fresh air, a return to a broader and more civil discourse. Censorship does not encourage civility; it does not foster broadminded attitudes. On the contrary, it causes more extremism.
  • voganmother42 6y ago
    Really? I see people being banned for mocking conservatives, doesn’t sound free: https://mobile.twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1277723152894681088 https://mobile.twitter.com/mmasnick/status/12777231528946810...
    • blisterpeanuts 6y ago
      Well, there are 4-5 accounts named "Devin Nunes Cow" or some variation thereof. There's no way to tell which one is the "real" Devin Cow. One that I clicked on had the following content: I have a confession... my boss, @devinnunes is a closet computer geek. He just bought his first domain! www.loser.com Not really the most stellar example of insightful and meaningful content, but it's not been censored, at least not yet in the past three days. It doesn't violate the terms of service, though it's hardly content that most Parler users would be interested in. Maybe on Twitter they find it worthwhile.
• DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  For the last year or so, I've been trying something new with my social media usage, to mixed results. My theory is that while I'm interested in the personal lives of the people I follow, for the most part I couldn't care less about things they post with the direct intent of emotionally-manipulating me. So much of those kinds of posts are driven by loneliness, boredom, existential angst, and the comfort that public clanning brings people. While I'm completely committed to supporting and caring for my friends, these posts never bring them the relief they seek. Instead, it always ends up in a more-and more frenetic argument. I am almost beginning to think that for many of them, if they can't find that comfort online, they'll settle for a good fight. And after more than two decades online, I have never seen that comfort successfully delivered, aside from in a performative way. So every time one of my friends re-posts or shares something I find emotionally manipulative, whether I agree or disagree with the sentiments, I take a look at the original source. Is this a source with, say, more than 10K followers? If so, my friend's participation in this communication stream is much more like a little propagandist than somebody who is either seeking or offering comfort. So I block the original source; after all, it'll just keep appearing again and again in my freed until one day it causes an argument. This, for the most part, leaves honest-to-goodness things my friends are actually experiencing in person, instead of vicariously. As long as that's the case, I try to allow wide latitude, after all, I want to learn and share from as many people as possible with differing views. If, however, I notice a pattern of pain, either pain they're experiencing that I can't help with or pain they're seeking to inflict in others in order to fight with them, I start the snoozing and nofollowing. I wish I could say that this strategy has been highly successful. It has certainly made social media much less painful, but over time I'm finding that I'm pretty much zapping everybody. Very few people have the editorial discipline to actually be responsible worldwide publishers. Most of us will far too easily choose attention over quality conversations. Social media isn't helping us; it's hacking us. I wish my friends on the right the best of luck. I think it's a good move. Anything to advance the destruction of this cognitive and epistemology monopoly is a win in my book. I look forward to seeing how it goes for them.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  Parler is like the mirror spinning through space, the nutjobs are contained.
• nxpnsv 6y ago
  I thought they were on gab already?
• Bedgeseb 6y ago
  Ironic
• motohagiography 6y ago
  This is how the internet is supposed to work. Encounters damage, routes around it. Censorship is damage, and people are routing around it. As someone who never engaged with FB/Twitter from the beginning because I thought they were terrible ideas (all the rules, risks, and challenges of elite-level competition with none of the benefits), I was very glad to read this because this kind of divergence is precisely what creates growth. The platforms were becoming a ceiling on growth, and their policies have created the critical mass to start new ones. This will be a great time to be in tech.
  • SmokeyHamster 6y ago
    I mostly agree. However, it'll be interesting to see how well new competitors can fair in an industry like social media where the product (i.e. us) is already near monopolized on a few large platforms. Personally, I like Parler's interface, and don't mind that it's kind of a conservative bent, but I've heard from other conservatives that the interface isn't as good as Twitters. And it's smaller audience is already keeping some big-names away from it, even people who would theoretically really like the platform, like Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams. They've both created accounts there, but have both signaled that it's just too small of a platform and is a waste of their time to post there, so they stick with Twitter.
    • motohagiography 6y ago
      Those personalities you mention (Shapiro, Adams, etc) are artifacts of the prior platforms. It's meaningless if not better that they do not move. What makes this exciting is new characters and economics will emerge. Former British PM Tony Blair once related an anecdote about why he decided to run for the leadership, when Labour had just lost hard in an election and he heard their campaign lead rant, "I can't believe it, the people voted against us...what's wrong with them?" And that is how he saw his opportunity. Between this cultural shift, tons of idle cash sitting on balance sheet sidelines looking for productive assets and growth, and a winter of semi-lockdowns ahead of us with nothing to do but code, next summer is going to be the most epic year for startups since '96-97. That is, assuming civilization isn't wiped out, but I'm pretty well hedged.
• throwaway4good 6y ago
  I think social media will split along political lines just like traditional media is split along political lines. Parler already has some big names on its platform and I think the big fish, mr. Donald Trump, will leave Twitter shortly for this platform and bring with him millions of new users. Big monopoly social media have succesfully prevented being split up by capturing regulators, ironic if this is how the monopolies finally are broken.
• bpsh 6y ago
  Sadly both platforms are practicing censorship and are being run by people that think they are best suited to distinguish between good and evil. Reality is usually not black and white, which is why it is sad to see many platforms these days pushing strict narratives.
• okareaman 6y ago
  My Twitter is great. I follow AI, VR, Philosophy, Zen, Mindfulness, Twertzog, etc... all high quality. Same with Facebook. I'm very happy with my feed. I follow vintage photography, various art focused groups, philosophy groups, hacker and tech groups and I've unfollowed friends who post toxic shit. I enjoy looking at Twitter and Facebook in the morning. Twitter and Facebook AI's are constantly surprising me with cool stuff they surface for me, even ads. Twitter and Facebook don't have to suck.
  • gpanders 6y ago
    They suck because this is not the default path or the path of least resistance. Without intentionality and vigilance, your Facebook/Twitter feed does inevitably turn into shit because that’s what their engagement algorithms push you toward. I think it’s great that you’ve tailored your content so well. But you’re the exception rather than the rule.
    • okareaman 6y ago
      It does take constant tuning. Some twitter accounts get manic and tweet storm. I unfollow and save a bookmark to come back when they calm down. Some FB groups turn toxic or get a new dictatorial moderator. I'm constantly pruning and adding, but I enjoy the curation. I realize I'm the exception. My point is only that those sites can be really good with effort and awareness.
• troughway 6y ago
  Why Parler Exists: The Thread. Now you know.
• rektide 6y ago
  I avoided this discussion like I avoid Parler itself. Hard to imagine an upside. But there are almost 500 comments and thus far no one has mentioned Dave Troy's unbelievable thread res arching how Parler got started. He very much points out that coverage like NPR gives here, reviewing it as it wants to be seen, carries water for the team, fails a necessary obligation to report on just how shady & murky the founding & running of Parler is. Until someone gathers better research, this is, by far, the most important write up on Parler. A company with strong ties to russia, trying loudly to undermine the safe harbor & free speech protections we enjoy, & as a company a gathering place for political swindlers & ultrapartisans. This kind of intel on who Parler is is extremely important, at least as much so as who joins & goes there. The amazing Dave Troy: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327259427481800704.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327259427481800704.html
• frasermince 6y ago
  I think a lot of people in these comments are missing the core dilemma a lot of these tech companies are dealing with. How do you deal with rampant misinformation that might be harmful to society as a whole? I think moving to putting disclaimers on posts instead of deleting them might be the right move but it’s honestly just a hard problem.
  • arkanciscan 6y ago
    Parler doesn't deal with this problem at all.
  • humanrebar 6y ago
    > How do you deal with rampant misinformation that might be harmful to society as a whole? Maybe I don't want big tech incumbents solving that problem for me. The dilemma as posed makes a lot of assumptions that I don't agree with. Maybe I would be OK with some curation or annotation service. If I had some say in hiring, firing, and replacing that service separate from my choice of social media platform.
• rapht 6y ago
  From the article: "Once you start fact-checking content, you introduce bias." As a European, I just stopped and wonder in what world America lives.
  • gpanders 6y ago
    We often wonder the same thing.
  • carapace 6y ago
    You can't really understand America unless you've seen "Gummo". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/ (Please note: I am not recommending watching Gummo. Once you've seen it you can't un-see it. I'm just saying that you're picture of America is incomplete if you haven't encountered that side of the nation.)
• jackfoxy 6y ago
  All of this could have been avoided with more robust filtering capabilities in the hands of users, which Twitter has consistently refused to provide. The big social media platforms should be treated as common carriers, and as such only be responsible for preventing malware and flat-out illegal content. Expecting Big Tech to moderate content (for what?) while allowing them to force feed unwanted/unrequested content to users is the perfect shit-storm we have today.
  • ponker 6y ago
    “All this could have been avoided” implies that Big Social Media wanted to avoid this. I don’t think they did. A ton of content that they’ve been wrestling with is just fleeing by itself. I imagine they’re thrilled.
    • jackfoxy 6y ago
      That is completely true. Although I don't think at the beginning Big Social Media realized how it would play out. They seem to be now committed to the we are moderating as fast as we can approach/excuse.
  • arkanciscan 6y ago
    There was a time that I thought that Twitter should do what Parler is doing; let the original author approve replies before making them visible. Now that I've seen Parler demonstrate it, I think that Twitter would never have become as popular as it is if they had done so from the begining. The feature that allows for the wide conversation that Twitter is famous for is also responsible for it's abusability.
• muststopmyths 6y ago
  It always boggles my mind that people who supposedly "grew up on the internet" thought it was a good idea to massively scale blog comments (effectively) to 7 billion people.
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  I tried Parler, and everyone is missing the point. Parler doesn't censor content because replies aren't linked to "Parleys" by default. All replies must be "approved" by the author. You can troll, but nobody will ever see it except OP. It absolutely solves the abuse problem that Twitter has, but it also limits discussion. The appeal of Twitter is that you get to see what everyone thinks. Parler is for sycophants only.
• atoav 6y ago
  I am unsure whether the people claiming censorship here would register as "conservative" in any dictonary definition of the word. Note that where I grew up "conservative" is more in line with the policies of a centrist US-democrat. What the republicans campaigned for this election would be more in line with right wing fascist parties like NPD (basically a party for neo nazis in Germany, AFD, Marie Le Pen's right wing party in France etc). I think actual US conservatives should draw a border at some point. Because there is nothing conservative about dreaming of returning to a past that never existed (it is usually a ethnic clean past, where everybody was happy and agreed what the good values were, nobody had to pay taxes, etc)
• gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  I tried to create a throwaway account and comment on a Reddit thread yesterday. It was denied due to lack of karma. A few weeks ago I tried to create a throwaway on Reddit to create a new post but the post was immediately removed due to lack of karma. Twitter now requires I provide a cell phone number to create an account. It throws up on me by suspending my account if a new account is unused for a few days. Requires I prove I’m not a bot to unsuspend it. Facebook basically requires that I provide a birth certificate to sign up. If you want to spread misinformation you basically need to be on an alternative platform but it’s also helpful for people like me who don’t want to give up my privacy to a social media company.
  • yashap 6y ago
    The Reddit and Twitter controls, at least, are attempts to stem the tide of bots and spam. They’re trying to keep the quality of discussion higher on their platform, and I appreciate that as a user. I think the controls are reasonable. Facebook is creepy as fuck though. Recently I was logging on from a new location, and haven’t given them my phone number for 2FA. The only option they provided was for me to send in photos of my DRIVER’S LICENSE - are you kidding me?
    • Freak_NL 6y ago
      I think you can trigger that on any account that hasn't bit the bullet and send in copies of their identification papers by telling Facebook the user is using a fake name. I am surprised no national government has stepped to tell Facebook to desist.
      • yashap 6y ago
        Yikes, that seems like a massive privacy issue.
  • ulzeraj 6y ago
    I've deleted my Facebook account early last year. Then some service I wanted to experiment released with only Facebook login support. Facebook won't let me re-enable my account regardless of what I do or information I send. Creating a new account is also impossible since the number was assigned to that account. I've basically gave up because this is worse than a bank KYC and Facebook itself isn't worth it.
• franczesko 6y ago
  It is extremely difficult to disagree with Eric Schmidt: "The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended".
• sabujp 6y ago
  if these networks end up being used to organize terrorist activity, as they have been, they will be shutdown
• NelsonMinar 6y ago
  These right wing cesspools are dangerous places. Because the hate can be nurtured there and grown out of sight of decent people. A clear example of that was the way the Charlottesville murder at the Unite the Right rally was planned on their private Discord. The deplorable subreddits also incubated a lot of very harmful people.
• tylershuster 6y ago
  I've been using urbit a lot recently. Not exactly a traditional social network, but a lot of high-value conversations.
• notananthem 6y ago
  White supremacists congregate in America there is just a fight to capitalize on it now that it's being called out in public and driven into the shadows
• sabujp 6y ago
  when being fact checked is being censored, there's a problem with your reality.
• atlgator 6y ago
  Unfortunately, “alternative” social media sites lack the polish and usability of the overlords.
• whydoineedone 6y ago
  Echo chambers are boring, parler is probably going to be like gab. Everyone likes Twitter because of the disagreement and drama. Conservatives try to goad and piss off liberals and liberals try to get them banned. Fun for everyone
• mancerayder 6y ago
  This can only lead to a further bifurcating of the electorate, and exacerbates the echo chamber phenomenon. I'm not conservative, not even close, but I do blame Facebook and Twitter for picking winners and losers and alienating conservatives. A free speech obsessed person myself, I've been keeping a close watch. In the old days, hate speech to block meant, imminent harm. Today, someone saying I don't feel Safe has become an acceptable argument. The argument was made against a liberal signatory of the Harper letter, the argument was made against the editor of the NYT who published the Cotton piece. We've rapidly descended to calling disagreement Hate Speech. And we have double standards like the NY Post Biden debacle, where it was clear that Silicon Valley can rationalize away the most basic values of journalistic freedom. Hypocrisy does down the memory hole, it's tossed into that chute like in 1984's Ministry of Truth. It didn't have to come to this. For those who think squashing dangerous right-wing views is good and just: what do you think will happen on Parler? Moderation? Lessons learned? What is the end goal here, Facebook and Twitter? How do you see online discourse in ten years time?
  • mancerayder 6y ago
    I'm actually curious what's downvotable here. Is it because we are not to criticize Facebook and Twitter, here? Because there's a (probably incorrect) assumption about my political views? Because I'm suggesting that maybe the line "censorship will lead to more problems, not less" is to be "voted against" a if it were a design choice in reality itself? Let's put it this way. Going back to Twitter. How would you feel if your views were suppressed. And if we can suppress views now that you don't like, what happens one day when the views you LIKE are suppressed? It cuts both ways. Your eagerness to shut something down today can come down to bite you and you'll have no argument to stand on. That's why we defend those we disagree with, on principle.
• throwawaymanbot 6y ago
  Parler will fail. Twitter has the respectable center ground. If Hard Righters (Being polite there) cant have manners and stop saying some of the things they are saying then that has consequences for their accounts on a private business site. Parler will fail because teh very people who will flock to parler wont stay there as there is no non "hard righters" to antagonize.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• AHappyCamper 6y ago
  > "even though there is no evidence for these allegations of systemic anti-conservative bias" This is simply not true. Twitter blackballed the Hunter Biden laptop story and locked you out of your account if you DARED to tweet a link to it, saying that it violated their code of not publishing hacked material. It was not hacked. But they happily allowed news outlets to publish Donald Trump's hacked alleged tax returns (we never received a source, so quite dubious).
• xyst 6y ago
  I can only imagine what kind of sub-culture that platform will create. Since it is now considered the "right-wing" platform, will it also breed a sub-culture that is considered too extreme for the "far right"?
• gitweb 6y ago
  I hate Facebook and Twitter as much as anyone but it generally takes saying some crazy stuff to get blocked on Twitter or Facebook. Now they suddenly have a social network for their cult where Donald Trump is their leader and is somehow taking down the deep state and will uncover massive voter fraud while simultaneously getting hundreds of thousands of votes thrown out making him the winner and using martial law to mass arrests all the Democrats for operating undeground pedo rings in pizza shops. Do I have that right?
• addicted 6y ago
  This will end up being like Conservapedia.
• specialist 6y ago
  Popular mediums are fads. Magazines, genres of music, social networks, chat applications, whatever. Far more interesting questions: Why are Facebook and Twitter more durable than the historical average? Where are they in their lifecycle? How much time do they have left? What are the lessons learned by their outsized success? My personal hot take (prediction market bets): Facebook (et al) has plateaued. Twitter will tank when Trump leaves and takes his following with him.
• thelastname 6y ago
  I thinks the main problem isn't the platform itself, but the form itself. Twitter is toxic, Parler as well, but perhaps to other people. What's the point?
• marsdepinski 6y ago
  Those platforms sell a product and that product is your attention. Their customers are advertisers. Hence they don't give crap about your tweets which actually are not yours but theirs. Parler will not be any different.
• egberts1 6y ago
  I miss SlashDot hey-days.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• zarkov99 6y ago
  Now we just need a conservatie NPR alternative. Could this article be written in a more biased way?
  • clairity 6y ago
    npr has never been unbiased, but it's fallen heavily into partisanship in recent years. that's problematic even for folks who agree on a lot of their positions, as unsavory methods overwhelm credibility. we don't need a conservative npr (there are alternatives for that), we need an independent and diverse npr, which is something we're truly lacking in the media landscape.
    • zarkov99 6y ago
      It just strikes me as odd that NPR should have positions at all, other than "our mission is to inform the public to the best of our limited ability".
      • clairity 6y ago
        agreed. it’s a non-profit with some gov’t funding, but major donors and sponsors (advertisers), along with competitive pressures from other national media, hold significant sway over their (im-)partiality. it’s concentrated capital again using our heads and hearts to hoard more money and power for themselves.
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I recommended mewe.com to conservative friends as an alternative to Facebook but some of them wouldn't have anything to do with saying parler.com was the only alternative according to their talking heads and I gave up. I actually quit bothering answering those friends texts after I told them they were just being conservative sycophants. They weren't happy with that but they needed to hear it from someone. Trump really has brainwashed a large swathe of people to his erratic braindead life path.
• TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  "Where did Parler come from?" https://mobile.twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327253991936454663 https://mobile.twitter.com/davetroy/status/13272539919364546...
• nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Isnt Parler still centralized and still collecting and selling your data and still doing all the shit bad corp does? Why don't people switch to Mastodon or something similar?
• microtherion 6y ago
  Parler actually exposes its users to a nasty legal risk that Twitter & Facebook do not: > 14. You agree to defend and indemnify Parler, as well as any of its officers, directors, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees) TL;DR: if Parler gets sued over a post of yours, you get to foot all their legal bills. Not an ideal setup for a “free speech” platform.
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  I suspect that twitter's growth and becoming profitable is directly correlated with the election of Donald Trump and the outrage culture that followed. Biden's staff will now just tweet the odd photo of his rescue dogs in the White House.
• satisfaction 6y ago
  I listened to a national news correspondent say, "...are not being censored they are just cleaning things up...". It's "cleaning things up" when the result benefits your cause but censorship when it harms your cause. It's sickening how editorialized national news has become. Why not just report the facts, "...twitter has deleted these tweets..."? Why does some talking head on television need to try to tell me what I should think and feel about an event or statement by a third party?
  • permo-w 6y ago
    I agree with what you’re saying, but the answer(s) to that last question are fairly obvious First I’d say that if you’re running a 24 hour news channel, you need to fill the time with something, and people would complain equally if you just rephrased and repeated the facts over and over. Second, perhaps you don’t, and perhaps I don’t either, but a lot of people want to hear opinions on the news. They want context, and how certain groups view the news, and I suspect, more than anything, they also just enjoy hearing opinions. So the news companies are meeting a demand. Now I’m quite a left-leaning, pro-govt-intervention person, so I would support government regulation of the news to prevent them playing too heavily to this demand. However I know that a lot of HN users are not like this, and I’m curious to see where they think the solution could lie
• hpcjoe 6y ago
  I once thought that Facebook was Usenet in a prettier/more user friendly package. Twitter is simply horrible. You can make a completely innocuous comment on a current conversation, and someone will barge in, exhort in a hyperbolic and frenzied manner, and make you regret signing back into Twitter. This isn't a quality control problem. People, and sadly specifically those with advanced education, tend to be easily triggered by random things. They say, often, terrible things. They bully. They argue over minutiae. They blast those with ever so slightly differing opinions. Imagine what they do to people with significantly different opinions. They must be destroyed. So those folks leave. And go somewhere more friendly to the free exchange of views, without the automatic pile on shutdowns, and cancellations we see with FB/Twit. Its tiring to me as an infrequent twit-er. Its tiring on FB as I use it for family communications and dad jokes. Apparently, it is in vogue to call these companies out for their complicity ... their participation in the actual undermining of democracy (should be read in a tone dripping in sarcasm). It is considered bad form to say you use them. It goes against goodthink. I'm really tired of this. Social media has very low value to begin with. This toxic behavior, this is what should be canceled. This is what should be deplatformed. Not the viewpoints that have people with different ones running to the exits.
• bernardv 6y ago
  Let it be a black hole.
• tonfreed 6y ago
  Twitter constantly encourages new levels of batshit because everyone is fighting for attention. I had a troll account with over 1500 followers that got nuked in I think 2017 after I posted a screenshot of the twitter stock price and tagged Jack Dorsey, I'd got a couple of suspensions before that for just being a dickhead but I was really surprised that was what got the permanent ban. Honestly, it was good thing in the end, fewer distractions and the super secret cabal chats I was in I'd added them on other platforms anyway. The thing I saw even then was selective enforcement, I'd get death threats all the time from various tough guys over posts where I'd mocked them for being socialists or whatever, which I'd report, they'd never get banned. I didn't care that much because it's the internet and I wasn't posting under my real name, what were they going to do. But then I'd see people getting banned for telling others threatening them that they were strapped and it wasn't a good idea to make those threats. There's a hierarchy on Twitter when it comes to following the rules, and if you draw the ire of the people in the protected upper echelons you'll be threatened and bullied without any recourse.
• hansthehorse 6y ago
  If you go to Parler I suggest you post something Democratic, Liberal or Progressive and see how long your account lasts.
• rekabis 6y ago
  > and you start fact-checking, you're introducing bias Fact-checking is biased? TIL that the Scientific Method, critical thinking and bullshit detection is “biased”. Wow. The depths of conservative delusions know no bounds.
  • equalunique 6y ago
    Facts can be cherry-picked. Half-truths can and slightly inaccurate statements can be construed as either hard-TRUE or hard-FALSE. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, "nuance" in political discussion is an accepted reality. Gatekeeping is acknowledged as a problem - we know those who position themselves as arbiters of truth are not beyond scrutiny. It would be contradictory to know these are true but also believe conservatives are deluded in believing that fact-checking is fraught with bias. >Indeed, conservatives have long claimed that fact-checking was riddled with anti-conservative bias and even conflicts of interest (as when PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s six United States-based fact-checkers, shot down a critique of a Clinton Foundation initiative without disclosing that one of that program’s principal funders was a major donor to PolitiFact’s parent organization, the Poynter Institute). https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/310849-who-will-check-facebooks-fact-checkers https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/310849-who-will...
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  Admittedly, I'm not familiar with Parler. >even though there is no evidence for these allegations of systemic anti-conservative bias. All there is evidence of is them removing misinformation. Like banning the NYPost after they fabricated a ridiculous story how Hunter Biden flew across the country to give his laptop to a computer repair guy who 'found' all this data. As MSNBC says, NYPost is a conspiracy theory peddling tabloid. Though I do agree Twitter hasn't done enough to remove the hate and misinformation. Sure, Twitter did ban lots of people who were defending that racist maga hat kid. The Native American man he was taunting explained what happened very well. His explanation that the boys surrounded him and threatened him is so typical of MAGA people. I also agree that anyone who threatened to kill the maga hit kid shouldn't be punished. Banning the people who called Jussie Smollet a hoax, after he was attacked by Trump voters. That was justice. I also agree with all the transphobes who have been banned. They should never be allowed to use the wrong pronoun, or use a deadname, or for that matter just say things like women have 2 X chromesomes. All these abusive people have no place on Twitter.
• 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  so...... the pink elephant in the room. how does this handle moderation, respond to reports and takes action? who decides? how long? how is this better than existing structures or even mastodon instances?