Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter

wsj.com

There was a long thread on Twitter by entrepreneur/activist Dave Troy (currently a TedX organizer) that looks for patterns in the first several thousand accounts.

https://mobile.twitter.com/davetroy/status/13272539919364546...

Is there any credible evidence of anti-conservative bias in FB or Twitter behavior? Can anyone point me at it?

It depends on what you consider anti-conservative. I've had a few friends mention that any links to something regarding "Benfords Law" (some forensic tool used for flagging potential fraud) gets an immediate "disputed" label.

My guess is that algorithmic checks are flagging posts and conservatives are interpreting that as censorship.

Asserting that Benford's Law can be used to identify election fraud is a disputed, or just downright misleading, claim. Academic research has shown Benford's Law is not applicable to election tallies. (Also so does common sense when you think about it.)

No one said identify fraud, I said flag potential fraud.

There are some people who think it's a useful heuristic for uncovering potential oddities. Academics may not think so, but perhaps people who are professional analysts do.

Ultimately it comes down to who's side you want to take, and whether that's going to result in something akin to censorship.

Also, part of the reason I don't like commenting on any remotely political HN posts is that you get downvotes for saying perfectly reasonable things.

Sad to see downvotes here but the Benford's law thing is absolutely one of the weakest claims of fraud finding. It sounds good initially (tool for finding some kinds of fraud used to find other kinds of fraud) but it is almost entirely flawed with how it is used in this context. It truly is the best current example of statistics lying.

If you've seen the handy little graph of the first digit statistics that each candidate got in big cities, I dug into this a bit but the basic summary is precinct sizes aren't random at all and that messes up the entire premise of that analysis. I made a quick repo that altered the initial repo to show things like how just getting 70% of the vote would screw up benfords law in most counties [0].

[0] https://github.com/BeesAreCool/2020_benfords

At least for Facebook it’s actually the opposite. FB’s UX flow and design works better for conservative media.

From a political perspective, there are a billion stories about how FB leadership actively reaches out to conservative media to try and keep the platform friendly to them (including things like allowing the Daily Caller to be a “fact checker” on their platform). Many stories of “oh this feature to prevent trending of outright false shit would flag half of conservative media. Let’s not”

The naive reading is they are afraid of conservative backlash. But I’m personally a bit done with giving them the benefit of the doubt. I think they are actively courting conservatives (sacrificing only the tiniest slice of the far right on certain high profile bans)

Tim Pool discussed this a lot on YouTube. Also presented lots of evidence.

Tim Pool is not a reliable source of information.

I disagree. Also you can check his sources yourself.

Just take a look at the 10 top-performing link posts on Facebook each day. It's almost universally right to far-right leaning content. Whoever is perpetrating this anti-conservative bias must be spectacularly bad at their job. On the other hand, conservative victimhood appears to be a winning message in this political cycle.

[1] https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en

We've banned this (along with some other accounts) for using HN for political and ideological battle. That's against the rules, regardless of which politics you favor or disfavor. We're trying for a different sort of site. Also, please don't use multiple accounts to do this. That's also not cool and will eventually get your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Of course I have conservative (and pretty reasonable) friends who have made a declaration on FB that they're moving to Parler because they're concerned about "big tech's" controls on free speech.

I checked it out and I'm pretty sure a big issue will be that it's going to attract an audience and subsequent content that national brands aren't going to consider brand safe. So if they find a model, I can't imagine it's going to be advertising unless it's My Pillow guy and gold sellers. That probably isn't going to float the development of the platform.

I do think there's something to be said for censorship (regardless of whether it's a private platform) and the control of misinformation as well. My point is that I don't think it's sustainable unless they find a subscription model. But given the zeal of the (far) right, it doesn't seem outlandish.

Everybody who cares about free speech is moving there. Free speech isn't restricted to the right is it? It's a fundamental human right.

What about Parler makes it better than FB with respect to free speech?

They don't censor conservatives because of their opinions.

Do they censor anyone else?

They do censor left leaning people because of their opinions.

"Free speech for me, but not for thee"

Why not try it, you'll see by yourself, you don't have to believe me.

"...subsequent content that national brands aren't going to consider brand safe..."

Ever watch the commercials on Fox News? Plenty of national brands there. (For the record, I'm a liberal.) If there's enough momentum, the national brands aren't going lift so much as a finger to intervene.

> It is not yet clear that Parler is set to become the online home for the political right, but its leaders envision it as a free-speech-focused alternative to the giants of Silicon Valley

I think it's important in these conversations to be clear, that might be what they claim to envision, it's demonstrably not what they actually envision. For example, Devin Nunes' Cow has already been banned.

It didn't take long for the free speech pretext to be dropped.

It's also quite funny how neutral this article is about the business model of Parler.

To be fair, Parler views itself as a town square, certainly more free speech than Twitter, but less free than Gab and 8Kun. Having minimal standards on free expression is probably a good thing, lest they get kicked off all the app stores.

When I tried Parler there were plenty of accounts that exist solely to troll Trump and his supporters, none of which were banned. Perhaps that Cow account was banned for reasons other than its speech.

Yes we could go looking for complex theories about why Devin Nunes' Cow got banned, or we could just look at the fact that Parler is courting prominent republicans like... Devin Nunes.

Non-paywalled version here.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202011141400/parl...

Transparency is important for trust, this is a good step towards it.

"I predicted all of this, you know. All of it."

Deplatforming and the cry of "businesses can choose who they do business with" were always inevitably going to lead to the creation of platforms that cater to the deplatformed, even if only because it makes business sense to provide service to the underserved. And, if the cultural and political winds blow the wrong way, it's not impossible for them to eclipse the social media giants they splintered from.

The deplatformers footgunned themselves, all while patting each other on the back.

>The deplatformers footgunned themselves, all while patting each other on the back.

What? Did anyone say that being banned from a website was a laser gun that deleted people from the internet?. This has happened before and will happen again (see Gab for a very recent example)

The most probable outcome is Voat 2: Electric Boogaloo, or not even that considering that the website is stuck on it's logo for me.

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