Parler 'free speech' app tops charts in wake of Trump defeat
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
They'll either fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess, like 4chan and its newer alternatives, or...
They'll grow big and end up having to deal with "trust and safety" issues when the majority of users on the mainstream end of the spectrum demand protection from those users who would otherwise be on 4chan/etc. This is pretty much what Twitter and Facebook are going through now, but shifted more towards the right, in the case of Parler/Gab.
We can already see hints of this in the fact that their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it, reducing their reach, and Twitter (attempt) to deal with by banning it, increasing their reach as they provide a "safe space".
Parler has the same issues as Twitter, it's just shifted to the right of the political spectrum. They can either deal with those issues and move closer to Twitter, or not and be irrelevant in the long term.
It would fail on those terms as well due to irrelevance: When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offence. If they're not listening, where's the fun?
The "echo chamber" aspect takes all the fun out of the performative cruelty.
I may think much of what the other side says is reprehensible but I can generally tell when the speaker is trolling vs just speaking their mind.
They are frequently newspaper columnists, authors, and TV pundits who benefit directly or indirectly from have a large number of followers (whether they following in agreement or follow out of outrage, it matters not).
Sadly this is true of the left as well as the right; they are all selling something.
These Professionals need large mainstream audiences, which is why they love twitter and twitter loves them, but they are a different animal to the tribalists who want to satisfy their need to mix with like minded people.
Until the fringe sites enable the former as well as the latter it's not immediately obvious how they remain viable.
citation for the "both-sides"-ism very much needed.
The news business depends on division to thrive. Division and anger drives clicks and eyeballs. Oh, and let’s not forget the billions of dollars in political advertising that goes into the pockets of corporate news organizations and social media companies — the very same entities that are fomenting the division that necessitates the advertising in the first place. It’s a rage cycle.
As a starting point I would recommend reading Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc and subscribing to Glenn Greenwald’s substack. They’re two of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity over the past five years, and their ideas are worth listening to.
Straw man, not what I said. "they all have agendas therefor they're as bad as each other" is dangerous, dismissive and wrong.
> subscribing to Glenn Greenwald’s substack. They’re two of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity
Thanks, now I see where you're coming from and I know that I can safely ignore your opinions.
As to the idea that Greenwald is one "of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity", https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...
It really doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.
Newly elected U.S House rep telling ppl that voted against him to cry more.
https://i.redd.it/uv97gw1bb5x51.jpg
Trump Jr. in front of Trump asking the crowd to make the liberals cry.
It almost always devolves into "jokes" about getting state approval to shoot immigrants, refugees, minorities in open ranges, or providing "helicopter rides" - a reference to dropping people from helicopters.
This is what currently unifies the right wing of US politics.
I use various social media sites for various purposes. For example, this one is tech-heavy, with an academic feel.
Facebook is the family album.
Twitter is for engaging 'the other', for all genuine exchange us rare.
LinkedIn is strictly professional.
Parler is more for coordination amongst the echo chamber.
The only losers here are those who feel some quasi-divine urge to control others and shape opinion.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the other". "The other" is an actual concept signifying people who are somehow excluded from society. Rarely do people get banned for going after "the other". Most of these people get banned for going after mainstream journalists and politicians. Many don't get banned for going after anyone at all. And many get shadow banned without any notice or explanation.
Secondly, I don't think people on the right consider what people like Milo (for instance) do to be performative cruelty. They see it as exposing hypocrisy. They see it as exercising their god-given right to free speech.
(entertaining little detail in there of one of the "anti-immigration" activists getting banned from Australia by their, er, immigration control)
The first recognizable, critical-mass online social media(broadcast, topic driven, message posting) came from BBS operators, mailing lists, Usenet and proprietary variants.
The moderated ones gradually disappeared as users migrated; the unmoderated ones drowned in noise over time. Pieces of it still survive as relics.
The next generation was website driven: home pages, forums and weblogging. Again, a similar pattern: moderated places disappeared, unmoderated ones drowned. But, this time the scale was larger, with different dynamics. Self-publishing was getting easier: at first there were web rings, later a "blogosphere" emerged. Forums were more varied.
But again, some relics were left over.
And from there, social media platforms started emerging, aggregating the space. And each one in turn has followed this life cycle, on slower or faster timelines. Moderating keeps the signal alive, but after a few years people tire of the status quo and look for the next thing, somewhere with fewer gatekeepers, perhaps, or more structure, or stronger or weaker identity models. The signal decays in amplitude rather than drowning in noise.
What tends to be overlooked in social networking and virtual worlds discussions is that there's always a quality-of-service tradeoff dynamic to them. If you engineer the rules to improve one area you may lose some others. This is true even when looking at search systems: they retrieve correlated info that often has an intentionally wrong meaning.
4chan and similar communities typically comply with local laws[1], which means no incitation to violence/terrorism (and if you spent some time there vs. only reading articles about it, you'd see this is enforced).
I'm not entirely convinced by this, since there are a lot of local laws and I don't believe 4chan keeps a big database of which posts are visible in which jurisdictions? Do they have an equivalent of Twitter's is_nazi flag? ( https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/tweet-withhel... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a )
> 1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law.
By local laws, I meant US laws for 4chan, and wherever other location the alternative boards may be hosted.
I don,t think gab will grow to the size of reddit, rather reddit will be picked apart into a billion pieces like a dinosaur after the astetoid.
Successful cases in point:
Discord: Closed bubbles, users in absolute control of entry and moderation. Still going strong.
8chan: Open bubbles, users in absolute control of moderation. You also had conservative alt-right and LGBTQ communities, cleanly separated, mostly just ignoring each other. Only got killed by "black-swan" events and the subsequent pressure from press attention.
Tumblr: Organic user-powered curation via likes and reposts (vs Twitter/FB style "AI" algorithms having their way), you had LGBTQ, neo nazi, porn/conservative communities existing in parallel with effective but organic and moving boundaries. Only got killed by external pressure from advertisers.
Inciting terrorism or acts of violence are typically crimes. If Parler's position is to disallow criminal activity in its TOS, that's one hell of a limiting principle, especially compared to Twitter.
In my (right-wing) experience, Twitter became a toxic place after the "trust and safety" moderation was adopted. Before that, when it was "the free speech wing of the free speech party," users with ill intent could not attempt to get others deplatformed. Today, we still have harassment on Twitter, but with the added threat of user mobs brigading those who have the wrong opinions.
The one point I think is important is that the "blue checkmarks" indeed demand protection from the unwashed masses, and that is why the rules are so selectively enforced and biased. Journalists and public figures are typically of one political persuasion (in the US at least), and sometimes perceived alternative ideas as "violence" or just wrongthink no matter what.
Parler had to avoid being beholden to its highest-value users in this way. If Twitter were not so intolerant, I might use it more. But these days, it feels like you need to walk on eggshells to avoid a shadowban.
Also, there will be trolls that will push the envelop of what non censored can be.
This “demanding protection” is one of the root problems with online discourse today. I refuse to concede that words on a screen will ever be something anyone “needs protection” from (short of actual doxxing, stalking and IRL harassment).
Have people forgotten “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?” A block/ignore button should be sufficient. We don’t need platforms editorializing or censoring content.
People seek out content that makes them angry (ragebait) and then blame the platforms for disseminating it.
Walk away from the screen. Close your eyes. [0]
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bull...
I think in this election Twitter definitely, but also Facebook have taken sides. There are a lot of normal, decent right wing people out there, despite the rhetoric of the left, who also wouldn’t mind a social media platform.
There is no unlimited immigration. Even European Free Movement has limits, albeit rarely relevant or enforced.
This contributes to a ratchet of delusion where the laws are made more and more onerous on immigrants while people complain that it's "unlimited".
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2019/10/19/t...
The article quotes some of his tweets on the topic.
Given their failure to ban glinner for far worse stuff I suspect there's something else going on.
Every ban should be accompanied with at least one sentence of explanation, a quote from the relevant law or ToS, and the text or image (with a nice red circle if required) in question. If the content was illegal then a summary instead.
It should be a choice to view it, as public as the posting itself, and subject to comments also.
As best I can tell, Facebook bans are done by monkeys hitting buttons randomly to get through their queue as quickly as possible. I don't think Twitter is much better.
This drives people to paranoia.
The problem for Parler is that many of their target market (the right) are in fact in one of these groups. Women, ethnic minorities, the rich, the poor, veterans, the less abled, conservative voters, libertarian voters, the list goes on and more examples will arrive.
Building a platform on being a safe space for division and exclusion can't succeed because that same force will make it an unsafe space for all but the small niche that win the territory.
We've already seen hints of women on the conservative right having a problem with misogyny from others in the community...
I know parler is pulling in some pretty big names to give it some legitimacy, but it's probably going to succumb to the same problem where only the most aggressive and angry users survive, while the more moderate users gravitate back to places like facebook and twitter
This works both ways; if someone does that it's likely to harm their "mainstream" legitimacy eventually.
Anyone remember menshn?
Scaling is hard, and brings out authoritarianism.
But since continuity of benevolence cannot be guaranteed, we seek more stable alternatives for anything long-term.
It's a risky business model for attracting investors though.
I'm convinced that no centralized platform is able to provide true free speech and even if it does, people should not be denied of the benefits of moderation/curation so I do think distributed/federated platforms are the way to go, even if they have issues scaling up. True, in the end, they may just end up being bubbles and echo chambers, but you ultimately get to choose which ones to engage in, instead of leaving that choice to someone else and their fickle mood to appease shareholders.
To construct a space that can handle both is probably impossible. Tough hard arguing has it's merit and value, but often it can turn into a contest who is the most stubborn, most convinced and least principled actor in the discussion. This kind of "war with words" scares away a whole other world of speech that could never happen in it's wake.
I am not saying that we should go without one or another, but saying a space for free speech is one where you can say controversial in a rough voice is not necessarily an indicator for the value of the conversations that take place. Think about HN: how would the conversations on here work without the restraint everybody shows by staying on topic?
There are many games people play in conversation. Nothing about preventing "tough arguing" actually gives way for "principled actor[s] in the discussion."
In fact, "tough arguing" is probably the MOST-desirable game, because it's the least disingenuous. The value of conversations can go negative when someone is using socially-acceptable bullying or just plain lying and manipulating. And the people using those tactics will leverage the norms of polite conversation to outright avoid/dodge being called out.
Signal is centralized and provides true free speech. End to end encryption means they don't know what you're saying, so they have no way to know what to block. That is comparing apples to oranges though, I assume you meant a Facebook or Twitter type of social network.
I returned back to look at Twitter again after blocking it for months and it is just as bad as Parler, but with more lunatics and rabid bots everywhere.
There are still very crazy users on Twitter especially those who fancy taking down 'The oppressive capitalist system™' if that suits you more.
All I can say to those who enjoy this is, let's see if you're willing to pay for it all soon. [0]
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21317266/twitter-subscript...
I mean, if my only two choices are a fairer form of capitalism or the resurgence of neo-Nazism, I guess I'll pick the former.
If the only two choices are the abolition of captialism or the resurgence of neo-Nazism, I'd still pick the former.
I'm being facetious, but to be fair to Twitter, there's a lot of "sub-cultures" within it. All extremes appear to be well represented. Parler appears to be 4chan with a nicer user interface.
Surprising insights arise from pondering the philosophy of show and tell-specifically how listening is involved in order to “earn” your turn to speak.
Do you ever look at what you've written and ask yourself: "Would somebody else understand this"? Could you say it again, but using enough words this time?
When platforms ban assholes and other platforms arise in the guise of decreasing censorship, said assholes flock to new platforms and infest them a la Ruqqus (though I believe the developer/founders have positive intent)
We need more clever ways of finding the assholes. I mentioned show and tell in my comment above. When you think about how show and tell works, you must earn your right to show and that works fairly well, even when you scale the idea. Does that make more sense?
But Twitter and every other thing that has grown big has 1) started small 2) was not initially created to be big and 3) was attractive to use.
EDIT can't reply to below cause I've used up all my commenting credits for now: My word selection (au fait) relates probably to cultural context. This is a phrase that people around me use frequently. Sorry not trying to be obscurantist or anything. I just have a life outside the Internet where people talk in non-Internet ways.
I'd love to see a good anthropological survey of how Twitter became popular enough that by the time of the Arab Spring it was the default "public communications" app.
As someone very curious about language usage, why wouldn’t you just write the word “familiar” there.
I’m genuine curious as to your motivations. Is it brevity? Am I missing additional context this provides?
I’m a big defender of intelligence agencies but people like John Brennan are widely hated within the Intelligence Community. The political operatives masquerading as intelligence officials are leading CNN — which is disturbing.
Reality has been conflated. We’re all living in a conspiracy theory.
... I mean, they don't. The largest media network by most metrics (at least in the sense that people normally mean by media; Comcast and Liberty Global would be bigger, but are mostly comms companies, really) is News Corporation and its affiliates. This owns Fox and the Sun and various other right-wing gutter press, along with some more respectable, but certainly right-leaning, organs like the Times and WSJ.
Other top tens include Sinclair Broadcasting Co (hardly left-leaning), and the Daily Mail and its affiliates.
The other piece is likely the motivation to be a journalist, as well as the college experience. Journalism programs tend to have lots of students and staff that want to be seen as "fighting for the little guy", which tends to line up more directly in a liberal context. You can see this pretty clearly by looking at the news stories that have won Pulitzers in the past.
I see no evidence of this at all. Most people who are educated at a University level seem to be just as misinformed as those that aren't about political issues.
The difference I find is that those that are University educated have a particular hubris about their political views whereas those that aren't typically don't.
Also poor (logical) reasoning doesn't dissapear because someone is university educated. They are typically better at defending their bad reasoning.
Personally, I don't believe this. In fact, I don't believe "the media" is a useful phrase at all. It's like pigeonholing Trump supporters. It can make you feel superior or smart, but it's not actually informative. I think the Republican Party has chosen the tactic of discrediting media sources after Fox News showed it could work. No news organization is perfect, and it's best to consume a balanced diet, but avoiding all "mainstream media" just leaves us with dregs.
I didn't say they were. However there is a particular line of thinking that follows. It goes something like this:
1) Group A are university educated.
2) They typically vote for X
3) Group B aren't unviersity educated.
4) They typically vote for Y.
5) X must be better than Y because Group A are better educated then Group B.
I think the line of reasoning is very dangerous. As it allows you to dismiss the other side as "dumb" even if some of their concerns are legitmate.
> And, because those with four year degrees tend to lean left in the US, it makes sense the companies they lead and staff will do the same. Venn diagrams, and all that.
But why does having a four year degree make you lean left? That was what I was commenting on. I don't think it is simply having a higher level of education.
> Personally, I don't believe this. In fact, I don't believe "the media" is a useful phrase at all. It's like pigeonholing Trump supporters. It can make you feel superior or smart, but it's not actually informative.
I think you are conflating having a healthy skepticism of what you are told by journalists, politicians or large corporations to those that go completely off the deep end.
The news media at the beginning of COVID said it was a nothing burger. I knew it wasn't. Why was that? Because I was on a discord that had a twitter feed from Falun Gong reporter in China that was reporting on the virus, I then cross checked that with stuff from other sites and news groups on my own account and I was fairly certain this maybe serious. I was proven right much to the chargrin of my coworkers.
I was right this time. Maybe I will be wrong in the future. However it is better than blindly believing what you are being told.
> I think the Republican Party has chosen the tactic of discrediting media sources after Fox News showed it could work.
That maybe the case. However they (the MSM) exacerbated the sitation themselves.
It wasn't uncommon for mainstream media outlets contradict their position on a particular issue after Donald Trump (it was Boris Johnson here) was for (or against) something. If Trump/Boris liked it (almost didn't matter what it was) it was automatically bad. It was petty and pointless. If there is legitimate criticism I am quite happy to hear it. But it was quite obvious they were just taking the contrarian view.
The other thing they have done is selectively edit or quote what people have said. Both the left and the right do this so both sides are guilty of doing this.
There is an infamous quote of Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London and an important member of the Labour party) from several years back in the UK where they quoted him as saying "Terrorism is part and parcel of living in a city" which would be outrageous if he said it. The context was totally removed. IIRC correctly he said (obviously I am paraphrasing) "We have to be vigilant about Terrorism. It is part and parcel of being in a big city". But you would only know that by going out of your way to find the original clip.
Both MSM and independant media (that were more right leaning) left out the complete context of the quote.
So these parties either knowingly took the quote out of context, or they didn't bother to find the original clip (which IIRC I found on after a few minutes of using the search function on youtube). Either way I cannot trust these new outlets because at best they are lazy or at worst they are lying.
In short they discredit themselves.
> No news organization is perfect, and it's best to consume a balanced diet, but avoiding all "mainstream media" just leaves us with dregs.
I spend a lot of time listening to various news outlets and those that criticise them (mostly independant people). I think you can split the news media into two segments "mainstream news media" and "independant media". Fox News, BBC, ABC, Sky News etc are part of the mainstream. There are other outlets that are independant or are just guys doing analysis on the news.
Both groups are full of bad actors as far as I can tell and will play to the cognitive bias of their audience. I will freely admit I've been duped a few times (from both MSM and independant media). So now I am extremely skeptical of anything I am told and I make sure I check everything out.
However there are those that will go through an issue in a logical and point out the inconsistencies and list their sources. These people in my opinion are great. If I feel something is off, I can always check it myself.
A lot of mainstream media outlets appear to repeat a similar narrative (irrespective whether this is true). This from what I can tell is because they simply just copy one another articles, another part of this is that many of the new companies are owned by the same corporations. I speak to a Belgian friend and from what he tells me their news media just copy and paste articles from English speaking news outlets and translate articles into Flemish.
It not about that being "perfect". I don't expect that. I don't even expect them to be unbiased. The problem is that they appear to promote a particular narrative.
So it isn't about a balance diet of MSM and other stuff. You need to actively check everything (especially if it too one sided) and find the original sources. You cannot trust anyone.
Biden/Harris are center-right candidates, which probably contributed to them winning the election, and definitely contributed to them winning the primaries.
(also you'd need to disentangle "left" and "liberal"!)
They also, until recently, had a zero-tolerance policy on nudity and eroticism, only compromising by forcing users who want to post NSFW content out of view entirely. This includes content related to LGBTQ+ people and sexual health.
Parler is not a "free speech" website. Parler is a safe space for right wing extremists who got tired of getting banned from traditional social media sites for posting hate, and who prefer an environment that is as hostile to minority groups as they are.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a deliberate bot effort to register fluff accounts yesterday, to make this PR piece possible.
I'd love this to be true. A fast moving populace that can uptake tech quickly.
But I've never heard of numbers like these.
Where does this number come from?
Where are the campaigns pushing this being run?
I simply don't believe it without more of an explanation. Did BBC fact check this?
Parler's growth is happening directly due to the impact of the election, and Twitter adding disclaimers to claims of ballot interference. It won't continue at this rate, because besides political kinship, there is nothing there for users to do. Nobody enjoys the political zones of Twitter, unless they're 'dunking' on the opposition. On Parler, there is no opposition.
Split into two separate social networks dramatically increases the echo chamber effect.
e.g. on reddit someone from /r/conservatives might still interact with /r/liberals because they both have an interest in /r/succulents
They may not be speaking about politics but they're still interacting. If you're on two different platforms even that minor overlap falls away & that allows for the two to drift further apart and harden in their views
Unfortunately you can no longer do that on HN even...
Sounds like someone needs to recalibrate their so called 'misinformation' detection systems. For the ministry of truth, they want you to believe 'their' facts. Not 'the' facts.
If the answers on that page are mistaken and it is relevant to a topic on HN then it seems logical (to me) that you could discuss it here (but unfounded political allegations should be off-topic in most HN chats in my opinion).
So there, we've spoken about it.
(I think the technical term for the distribution is scale-free but I could be wrong. The law follows reasonably intuitively from thinking about the fractional part of logarithms.)
>So there, we've spoken about it.
You seem to have given your opinion without wanting anyone else to give theirs. Why are you so against discussing it?
"The total numbers of votes per voting area in the MOI’s data vary from about 10^4 to 10^6, i.e. by two orders of magnitude (powers of 10). This suggests that Benford’s Law may be applicable"
The issue, as I understand it, is that the US districts that the "law" is being applied to are too small, uniform, and uniformly sized, and therefore the "law" doesn't apply.
Additionally, many of the graphs being shared have obvious biases (change of scale between one candidate and the other) which suggests bad faith of those making the graphs (see the skeptics.stackexchange link a sibling shared).
> Why are you so against discussing it?
I'm not especially against discussing it. I am against presenting it as a fait accompli that the election was rigged, when thirty seconds of Googling and critical thought show it to be a red herring.
I don't think that enough people are ready for the concept of federated social networking since they still tend to gravitate heavily towards centralized services like parler. they're more familiar.
Its like Twitter has ruined social media entirely
A retweet, share, and apparently an echo are all semantically close enough to be called identical functionality, save for perhaps upstream metadata associated with the source.
eg on Facebook I don’t know if, once you share a post, the total share count is displayed on the post itself. However on Twitter this share count is shown.
They’re all the same sheep with isomorphically identical data just dressed up in different pairs of clothes.
I'm not sure it will be, though.
Is it a conscious choice for them to actively do nothing?
MySpace died because it didn't innovate and refused to invest in the core platform. While Facebook was spiking in popularity, MySpace was still a slow ad-plastered mess. Twitter seems to be that sleepy giant who has stopped all progress.
Not a lot of new features (although let's not forget they increased tweet size) but personally I don't mind that. It'd be like complaining HN is not getting enough new features.
I'll stick with tweetdeck until they support a real offswitch.
Haha - I just use the block button like it’s going out of fashion. Cleans things up nicely.