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> On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any eviden

> On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?

eximius 6y ago
1. Probably. Take a look at some of the Parker dumps before it was shut down. Calls for death squads weren't couched in metaphor. 2. Even if not, Twitter, as much as I loathe it, also has many non-hateful users. Parler was a haven for alt-right extremism.
- dionidium 6y ago
  Anybody who has ever talked about housing on Twitter or Facebook knows that pictures of Mao and guillotines frequently accompany calls to kill all landlords (just to take one example I'm familiar with). Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dageshi 6y ago
    In the case of Parler, it turned out that yes, the calls to violence were real and not jokes. You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
  - xref 6y ago
    Replace “landlords” with “black people” and ask the same questions. Report the posts.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.? The problem isn't just that they had more, though logic would suggest they did; after all, their user base are refugees from other platforms that pushed them out for extremist language, advocating for violence, conspiracy theories, etc. It's that Parler refused to remove it. So even if the rate of introduction of this content was the same on Parler (which I don't buy for a second, see argument above), the total concentration and visibility of it is higher because it's not taken down.
- idunno246 6y ago
  i imagine twitter has more in absolute terms, just due to the relative size of the two sites. I think the major difference is worse than just refusing to remove it, Parler advertised itself as the place where you can say things that most sites would moderate away, it actively encouraged it, so as a percentage it was much larger
da_big_ghey 6y ago
It's hard to quantify, but I can provide an example of a specific post that likely wouldn't have stayed up on twitter: "Everyone said Pence sold out!!! Time to enter the capitol. Go patriots. Echo and enter the building dont let them vote. Put pressure. We are riding in!!! Echo big" 66 comments, 301 echoes (i.e. retweets), 375 upvotes (i.e. likes) There's a torrent of Parler posts that is being analyzed, so there may be better conclusions published soon: https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-partial.torrent https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-pa... That said, I still don't support taking down a site because there's no moderation. These people won't go away; I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.
- bun_at_work 6y ago
  > I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason. It seems as though there is in inverse relationship between ease of use and centralization (obviously). As communication becomes decentralized, the ability to accrue a large audience becomes more difficult. This supports the rise of ideas that can gain widespread support on their merit, as opposed to gaining widespread support via having a mass audience to start with. To illustrate: on one side, we have a centralized extreme: Twitter (or Reddit, or Facebook). On the other side we have a decentralized extreme: spoken word. Which is easier to radicalize a country with? If extremists move to decentralized or p2p alternatives to social media, they will shrink in the long run, letting the fringe ideas remain on the fringe. If all social media went the way of decentralization, we would see far less extremism in general, simply because most people wouldn't go looking for it and it's pretty hard to spread extremist ideas in a one-on-one conversation.
  - MrMan 6y ago
    Yes the big problem is mom and pop becoming infected with this hate so now what was radical a couple if years ago is now literally mainstream.
- Moodles 6y ago
  Right. So a somewhat rough analysis would be: sample a range of "average" tweets on both platform and somehow aggregate an average "hate" value. What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about storming the capitol isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for exmaple, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but moderated in Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets.
evgen 6y ago
Others have mentioned it, but there is a multi-TB dump of parler posts and videos out there if you feel like digging. In addition to the widely recognized fact that hate speech and outright calls to political violence were tolerated on Parler we have evidence that what little moderation did exist on the platform was dedicated towards suppressing dissenting opinions and reinforcing the Trump viewpoint. As an absolute number Parler probably had fewer objectionable messages, but they were a much larger percentage of the whole and unlike on Twitter there was no moderation that was preventing them from being distributed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
BitwiseFool 6y ago
I believe that once any social media site gets big enough people with radical and violent views show up. It's unavoidable. Some of them are just trolls and troublemakers. The real question becomes how they deal with those people. Parler already had a moderation policy in-place, but to be fair they are a growing company that experienced an absolute surge of new users. Twitter is a fully mature company with much more moderation in place. Even still, you can find a ton of calls for violence on Twitter by blue checkmark people and nothing ever seems to come from that. Just because radical things are posted on your website doesn't mean all the discourse on the site is bad and your site should be deplatformed. We already apply that standard to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others. As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  > Parler already had a moderation policy in-place A policy that was FAR more relaxed than any of their competitors, which was by design and part of their marketing pitch: come here to say those things you're not allowed to say elsewhere. Parler's position is: unless the language is strictly illegal according to the letter of the law that's designed limit government censorship of speech, then it's allowed. By that definition, if I call for someone's death, unless I have the means and the opportunity and mention a specific time, then it doesn't count and the post stays up. Clearly Amazon, Google, and Apple have policies that are more strict than US law. And that makes sense: US law is shaped by the constitution, which is meant to restrict the government's ability to limit speech. And we should absolutely want the rules regarding government censorship to be as narrow as possible. But private services are free to operate by different rules. For example, if I walk into a McDonalds and start swearing at all the customers, I'll get kicked out even if I'm not breaking the letter of the law. So, did they have a moderation policy? Yes, technically. But did that policy allow extremist and violent language to persist on their site at a level above and beyond what's seen on any competing platform outside of, say, 8chan? Absolutely. > As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler. And Facebook would pull that content down if they found it. Parler won't. That's what got them pulled from AWS, and the Google and Apple app stores.
JohnBooty 6y ago
It perfectly valid for you to dismiss my account as anecdotal because admittedly that's all it is. But man, wow. I joined Parler several months ago and that's literally all my default feed was -- various flavors of right wing rage. Not all was violent or racist. Some were verified celebrities and right wing politicians; those tended to be rather mild. But typing various slurs or words like "shoot" or "hang" into the search box returned some eye-watering results. The difference between it and Twitter was not subtle.
Applejinx 6y ago
This is another question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that you're not knowingly asking that as a political/debating tactic to suggest your proposition is reasonable, knowing full well that the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech? I think it's very interesting that you lead off citing good faith in a situation where, in my experience, you're about to demonstrate literal bad faith. It's like you wish to take off the table the interpretation that you are intentionally lying for the sake of argument.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cheeseomlit 6y ago
  God forbid anyone wants to discuss anything "that the larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech". Anyone that expresses such a desire is guilty of hate speech and must be silenced.
- agloeregrets 6y ago
  > that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech? Let me fix that: > that multiple countries and international organizations categorize as hate speech? A casual reminder that when most think these open air rules are intended to stifle conversation it is generally for very clear legal and moral reasons. If you believe this is used by them to control people then you should also believe that a replacement should view this speech as antithetical to the existence of the free speech social company. It's one thing to ban talk about the platform you are talking on. It's not the same thing to ban intolerant behavior. It all leads back to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
  - sickofparadox 6y ago
    I've seen this argument so many times, and it always strikes me that those who cite it often have either not read, or completely miss the point Karl Popper was trying to make. He goes so far as to even say: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." I am quite sick of the usage of the paradox of tolerance being used as an attack against a free, pluralistic society.
reddog 6y ago
Good question. Normally I would try to figure this out for myself by logging on to Parler and taking a look. But Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have decided that I can't be trusted to do that -- I could become a Nazi or Qanon nutter and try to violently overthrow the government. I really dodged a bullet. Thank God for our tech overlords and their new Ministry of Truth. I can now sleep easy knowing that they are busy scouring the rest of the internet and it's marketplace of ideas for more doubleplusbadthink from which to shield me.
chmod600 6y ago
The relevant question is about Twitter/FB at a similar development stage. Now, they have all kinds of moderation algorithms and employees, so it's not really a fair comparison.
throwaway19937 6y ago
The following link contains a racial slur in the text of a screenshot - you probably don't want to open it at work. https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is_the_type_of_free_speech_parler_accepts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... is a concrete example of speech that would be banned from Twitter and Facebook. I think it's telling that there are 25k up votes.
- Moodles 6y ago
  You have provided an exmaple (I assume, I didn't click the link because I have a productivity blocker which I obviously need to update for Hacker News, lol) of a bad thing on one platform, but not another. But ok, are there vice versa examples? What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about e.g. storming the Capitol being banned on Twitter but not Parler isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for example, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but censored on Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets. That's the kind of evidence I would like to see.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  Twitter, Youtube, Facebook all get hundreds of comments of similar nature every hour. They tend to be pretty good about removing them promptly. If I start a new social media service, what are the objective measures I can use to ensure I'm moderating well and quickly enough? How should we allow this to interact with scale? If a new startup goes from 10 to 10,000 users overnight, and 0.5% of users post offensive comments that first day, how long does that startup have to remove them all before they are designated as "bad"? Also, how should we view overmoderation within this context? I think most people would find it injust and orwellian to ban a black sociology professor for posting an academic analysis of the use of the n-word through history, but I fear society is going to overcorrect.

eximius 6y ago

1. Probably. Take a look at some of the Parker dumps before it was shut down. Calls for death squads weren't couched in metaphor. 2. Even if not, Twitter, as much as I loathe it, also has many non-hateful users. Parler was a haven for alt-right extremism.

dionidium 6y ago
Anybody who has ever talked about housing on Twitter or Facebook knows that pictures of Mao and guillotines frequently accompany calls to kill all landlords (just to take one example I'm familiar with). Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dageshi 6y ago
  In the case of Parler, it turned out that yes, the calls to violence were real and not jokes. You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
- xref 6y ago
  Replace “landlords” with “black people” and ask the same questions. Report the posts.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

CarelessExpert 6y ago

> This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.? The problem isn't just that they had more, though logic would suggest they did; after all, their user base are refugees from other platforms that pushed them out for extremist language, advocating for violence, conspiracy theories, etc. It's that Parler refused to remove it. So even if the rate of introduction of this content was the same on Parler (which I don't buy for a second, see argument above), the total concentration and visibility of it is higher because it's not taken down.

idunno246 6y ago
i imagine twitter has more in absolute terms, just due to the relative size of the two sites. I think the major difference is worse than just refusing to remove it, Parler advertised itself as the place where you can say things that most sites would moderate away, it actively encouraged it, so as a percentage it was much larger

da_big_ghey 6y ago

It's hard to quantify, but I can provide an example of a specific post that likely wouldn't have stayed up on twitter: "Everyone said Pence sold out!!! Time to enter the capitol. Go patriots. Echo and enter the building dont let them vote. Put pressure. We are riding in!!! Echo big" 66 comments, 301 echoes (i.e. retweets), 375 upvotes (i.e. likes) There's a torrent of Parler posts that is being analyzed, so there may be better conclusions published soon: https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-partial.torrent https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-pa... That said, I still don't support taking down a site because there's no moderation. These people won't go away; I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.

bun_at_work 6y ago
> I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason. It seems as though there is in inverse relationship between ease of use and centralization (obviously). As communication becomes decentralized, the ability to accrue a large audience becomes more difficult. This supports the rise of ideas that can gain widespread support on their merit, as opposed to gaining widespread support via having a mass audience to start with. To illustrate: on one side, we have a centralized extreme: Twitter (or Reddit, or Facebook). On the other side we have a decentralized extreme: spoken word. Which is easier to radicalize a country with? If extremists move to decentralized or p2p alternatives to social media, they will shrink in the long run, letting the fringe ideas remain on the fringe. If all social media went the way of decentralization, we would see far less extremism in general, simply because most people wouldn't go looking for it and it's pretty hard to spread extremist ideas in a one-on-one conversation.
- MrMan 6y ago
  Yes the big problem is mom and pop becoming infected with this hate so now what was radical a couple if years ago is now literally mainstream.
Moodles 6y ago
Right. So a somewhat rough analysis would be: sample a range of "average" tweets on both platform and somehow aggregate an average "hate" value. What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about storming the capitol isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for exmaple, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but moderated in Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets.

evgen 6y ago

Others have mentioned it, but there is a multi-TB dump of parler posts and videos out there if you feel like digging. In addition to the widely recognized fact that hate speech and outright calls to political violence were tolerated on Parler we have evidence that what little moderation did exist on the platform was dedicated towards suppressing dissenting opinions and reinforcing the Trump viewpoint. As an absolute number Parler probably had fewer objectionable messages, but they were a much larger percentage of the whole and unlike on Twitter there was no moderation that was preventing them from being distributed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

BitwiseFool 6y ago

I believe that once any social media site gets big enough people with radical and violent views show up. It's unavoidable. Some of them are just trolls and troublemakers. The real question becomes how they deal with those people. Parler already had a moderation policy in-place, but to be fair they are a growing company that experienced an absolute surge of new users. Twitter is a fully mature company with much more moderation in place. Even still, you can find a ton of calls for violence on Twitter by blue checkmark people and nothing ever seems to come from that. Just because radical things are posted on your website doesn't mean all the discourse on the site is bad and your site should be deplatformed. We already apply that standard to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others. As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.

CarelessExpert 6y ago
> Parler already had a moderation policy in-place A policy that was FAR more relaxed than any of their competitors, which was by design and part of their marketing pitch: come here to say those things you're not allowed to say elsewhere. Parler's position is: unless the language is strictly illegal according to the letter of the law that's designed limit government censorship of speech, then it's allowed. By that definition, if I call for someone's death, unless I have the means and the opportunity and mention a specific time, then it doesn't count and the post stays up. Clearly Amazon, Google, and Apple have policies that are more strict than US law. And that makes sense: US law is shaped by the constitution, which is meant to restrict the government's ability to limit speech. And we should absolutely want the rules regarding government censorship to be as narrow as possible. But private services are free to operate by different rules. For example, if I walk into a McDonalds and start swearing at all the customers, I'll get kicked out even if I'm not breaking the letter of the law. So, did they have a moderation policy? Yes, technically. But did that policy allow extremist and violent language to persist on their site at a level above and beyond what's seen on any competing platform outside of, say, 8chan? Absolutely. > As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler. And Facebook would pull that content down if they found it. Parler won't. That's what got them pulled from AWS, and the Google and Apple app stores.

JohnBooty 6y ago

It perfectly valid for you to dismiss my account as anecdotal because admittedly that's all it is. But man, wow. I joined Parler several months ago and that's literally all my default feed was -- various flavors of right wing rage. Not all was violent or racist. Some were verified celebrities and right wing politicians; those tended to be rather mild. But typing various slurs or words like "shoot" or "hang" into the search box returned some eye-watering results. The difference between it and Twitter was not subtle.

Applejinx 6y ago

This is another question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that you're not knowingly asking that as a political/debating tactic to suggest your proposition is reasonable, knowing full well that the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech? I think it's very interesting that you lead off citing good faith in a situation where, in my experience, you're about to demonstrate literal bad faith. It's like you wish to take off the table the interpretation that you are intentionally lying for the sake of argument.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cheeseomlit 6y ago
God forbid anyone wants to discuss anything "that the larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech". Anyone that expresses such a desire is guilty of hate speech and must be silenced.
agloeregrets 6y ago
> that larger social networks stifle, and categorize as hate speech? Let me fix that: > that multiple countries and international organizations categorize as hate speech? A casual reminder that when most think these open air rules are intended to stifle conversation it is generally for very clear legal and moral reasons. If you believe this is used by them to control people then you should also believe that a replacement should view this speech as antithetical to the existence of the free speech social company. It's one thing to ban talk about the platform you are talking on. It's not the same thing to ban intolerant behavior. It all leads back to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- sickofparadox 6y ago
  I've seen this argument so many times, and it always strikes me that those who cite it often have either not read, or completely miss the point Karl Popper was trying to make. He goes so far as to even say: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." I am quite sick of the usage of the paradox of tolerance being used as an attack against a free, pluralistic society.

reddog 6y ago

Good question. Normally I would try to figure this out for myself by logging on to Parler and taking a look. But Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have decided that I can't be trusted to do that -- I could become a Nazi or Qanon nutter and try to violently overthrow the government. I really dodged a bullet. Thank God for our tech overlords and their new Ministry of Truth. I can now sleep easy knowing that they are busy scouring the rest of the internet and it's marketplace of ideas for more doubleplusbadthink from which to shield me.

chmod600 6y ago

The relevant question is about Twitter/FB at a similar development stage. Now, they have all kinds of moderation algorithms and employees, so it's not really a fair comparison.

throwaway19937 6y ago

The following link contains a racial slur in the text of a screenshot - you probably don't want to open it at work. https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is_the_type_of_free_speech_parler_accepts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... is a concrete example of speech that would be banned from Twitter and Facebook. I think it's telling that there are 25k up votes.

Moodles 6y ago
You have provided an exmaple (I assume, I didn't click the link because I have a productivity blocker which I obviously need to update for Hacker News, lol) of a bad thing on one platform, but not another. But ok, are there vice versa examples? What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about e.g. storming the Capitol being banned on Twitter but not Parler isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for example, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but censored on Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets. That's the kind of evidence I would like to see.
cwkoss 6y ago
Twitter, Youtube, Facebook all get hundreds of comments of similar nature every hour. They tend to be pretty good about removing them promptly. If I start a new social media service, what are the objective measures I can use to ensure I'm moderating well and quickly enough? How should we allow this to interact with scale? If a new startup goes from 10 to 10,000 users overnight, and 0.5% of users post offensive comments that first day, how long does that startup have to remove them all before they are designated as "bad"? Also, how should we view overmoderation within this context? I think most people would find it injust and orwellian to ban a black sociology professor for posting an academic analysis of the use of the n-word through history, but I fear society is going to overcorrect.