I'm trying out Parler. While I absolutely hated having to add a phone number to sign up, a positive side effect is that I have not run into any obvious troll or bot accounts. So far, it's keeping everyone honest.
This will probably also turn out much better than Gab due to the presence of high-profile politicians.
I hope so, too. I'm not really interested in 'social' these days, but joined Gab early on out of curiosity to check it out. That didn't last long.
While not everyone was bad, there existed enough racist and hateful content shown to me to make me feel sick.
The first link a friend shared with me to Parler was to a post by what looked like a qanon troll bot. Or who knows, maybe it was just a genuine believer. Either way, its unlikely that this network will elevate any conversations.
I like seeing the competition. Maybe that's the answer for the social media bias. But I fear that any private platform will eventually get corrupted. I would strongly prefer an open-source standard to beat out the big tech monopolies.
I don't know about that. This is fairly obviously an attempt at doing an end-run around Trump's tweets being labelled fake or doctored (if they are) and to have a Trump friendly medium to reach the voters ahead of the elections so they get to control the message. Trump's brand of politics has relatively little to do with the conservatives as we've come to know them through the ages, it's more of a takeover of a political party by an outsider than anything else. Many people who call themselves conservatives are loath to be associated with Trump and his cabal. Though of course they likely don't mind ramming through some supreme court justices that will vote along their preferences.
He got 60 million votes in the last election, and nearly all will do so again. They may loathe him but they loathe him less than any liberal opponent. He sees that as support and acts accordingly.
It may not be "conservatism" in some outdated sense of the term, but people who use that label vote for him in droves. Linking the two is not unfair.
Not at all. Trump's actual governing has been conservative. Not that there haven't been some awful bits, but it extends beyond judges to cabinet appointees, military posture (no new wars), stances on open borders, and miscellaneous stuff, like federal hiring based on skills, not degrees.
He's governed more conservatively than the last two Republican presidents.
Favoring a certain style of government doesn't mean you have to be a fan of every politician advocating for that style of government. It's like a quote from one of the main characters on The Newsroom.
>First off, I'm a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barrometric pressure, and not gay marriage.
I've seen that series as well, and what it fails to portray is that for all intents and purposes, the social conservatives define the Republican party. To be a social liberal and still vote Republican is to be manipulated.
The Republican party hasn't been about responsible small government in decades.
Domestically in the US? I would generally say yes. It's hard to argue that Trump hasn't entirely co-opted what's left of the Republican party and conservatives for the most part. How much of that is self-serving is hard to say. I wouldn't be surprised that 5-10 years down the line you have a lot of people on the GOP side who change their tune on Trump once he no longer has power because as it currently stands, going against Trump on the right side of the aisle is generally political suicide.
Currently loyalty is rewarded above all else in the Trump era of the conservationism, and so if you want to stay in the game, you generally tow the line.
Personally I find it pretty gross. but in a lot of ways it's also laid bare the extreme level of cronyism in politics. When someone who was harshly and openly critical (rightly so, even) of you before you held power is now your public mouthpiece and saying the exact opposite of what they said before that was the case it's hard not see that in action.
I find it hugely depressing that the GOP has become the party of Trump, not just because I think Trump is terrible, but because it's just served to increase the divide between the population in general.
Pro-Trump voices seem to have taken over the discussion in most "conservative" spaces on the internet that I've found, so I don't think the implied equivalence here is a bad generalization to make in the context.
Since they're so poorly behaved, they have to seek out alternative spaces that will tolerate their misbehavior. r/T_D didn't get quarantined on Reddit because Reddit has it out for Trump supporters—it got quarantined because it's a hate-filled shithole where bizarre and paranoid ignorance, racism, misogyny, and rampant glorification of hypothetical violence against their political enemies form the baseline for discussion.
Conservatives are running the hardest hitting anti-Trump ads this election year (see The Lincoln Project). Conservatives are split into 3 groups: Trumpers, those hoping the Republican party will just return to its roots after Trump, and those advocating for a new conservative movement because the Republican party is beyond saving.
Well that is great ... give nutjobs like Alex Jones their own echo chamber to rant and rave about Bill Gates, Soros 5G , Corona and the evil of vaccines.
It'll be very interesting to see if a social media network exclusively of political content will be viable. Twitter may have a lot of politics on it, but that's not its raison d'etre.
I have to laugh at the article though:
>“With Devin Nunes came a whole pack of haters,” said Matze. He said that parody accounts are fine and even welcome, but Parler draws a line when it comes to spammers. “You can’t spam people’s comment sections with unrelated content,” he said.
Well, firstly, it's well documented that Devin Nunes has sued parody accounts, and seccondly, making editorial decisions about which comments are suitably related is the editorial control that right wing partisans are falsly claiming is a red line abot twitter.
Given that we know Parler is offering a bounty for users, how much did they pay CNBC for the puff piece?
In describing the site as a bastion of free speech, the Parler CEO says “If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.”
But, according to the article, "the app doesn’t allow terrorist organizations or support for terrorism, the sharing of false rumors, violent language (what the site describes as 'fighting words') toward others, blackmail or pornography."
Last I was in NYC, "fighting words" were most certainly allowed, as was pornography, as was the sharing of false rumors (most of the time). Seems like he's just drawing a different arbitrary line and trying to claim he's a purist for free speech.
Those are cases where the supreme court has found restrictions on speech to be justifiable, in case you thought it was just a grab bag of random stuff.
Well, seeing that Supreme Court decisions on what is legal to censor has absolutely no bearing on what a private corporation can do. The right to free speech only applies to what the government can and can’t do.
> The complaint against Chaplinsky stated that he shouted: "You are a God-damned racketeer" and "a damned Fascist". Chaplinsky admitted that he said the words charged in the complaint, with the exception of the name of the deity.
It wouldn't surprise me if public sentiment in the US in 1940 was that such terms were not constitutionally protected, but First Amendment jurisprudence has changed a lot since then - see e.g. https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha... and https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim... for some background. Is this site actually taking the position that calling someone "a damned Fascist" is a) not constitutionally protected, as we understand the constitution today b) worth banning?
Re pornography, it is very much legal and constitutionally protected in the US. Obscenity (which "appeals to the prurient interest ... depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct ... and ... lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value") isn't constitutionally protected, but this site bans pornography, obscenity, and non-obscene indecency.
> It wouldn't surprise me if public sentiment in the US in 1940 was that such terms were not constitutionally protected, ...
Hell, the debate over George Carlin's "seven dirty words" [0] didn't happen until three decades later (a real "gentleman" would never speak such atrocious words!). I can't even imagine how much was verboten in the '40s.
You have to be careful: given a rallying cry of free speech and no censorship, the main appeal of the platform is going to be attracting those holding unpopular opinions.
This happened with the mass exodus from Reddit to Voat of r/the_donald and similar, and I absolutely can see it happening here. Voat became host to a ton of toxic communities.
And because of that, it's going to push more orthodox people people away from the site towards Twitter in a self-reinforcing loop.
The plan for the site to get a broad range of opinions (in this case, the bounty of $20k for a prominent liberal) seems doomed as a result.
Still - hopefully the founders have learned from Voat and have plans in action to stop it before it gets too stuck in the cycle. The bounty is an interesting idea, though I don't think it'll be strong enough to break the perverse social dynamics involved. More competition with Twitter is a good thing.
The terms of service PDF is really clear on what and what is not allowed.
Particularly interesting were links to the US Entity list of defined terriorist organizations. Downloadable in a text file (and it's large).
Since it's not pseudo-anonymous like Voat, and is also being endorsed pretty much by politicians, I think it won't fall into the same traps. I think it's going to become a de facto pipeline to politicians though.
The Terms of Service sound like the vision of a social media network after a Section 230 crackdown.
I think free speech should be qualified as speech that you wouldn't get called out on in a setting with super open minded people who always give you the benefit of the doubt.
Impersonating others seems like it's probably always done in bad faith.
I'm surprised that a "Free Speech" network would demand that its users indemnify it against liability arising from their speech. Here's Parler's ToS:
> You agree to defend and indemnify Parler [...] 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) arising from or relating to your access to and use of the Services. Parler will have the right to conduct its own defense, at your expense, in any action or proceeding covered by this
indemnity.
Twitter has no similar clause, because 47 USC § 230 provides computer services with a pretty good shield against liability of this kind. I'm not sure why Parler would include such a clause.
Why are people still trying to build businesses on the idea that people need a new way to talk to each other?
It feels like these solutions cater to the lazy or the distract-able. All of these businesses start looking so shiny and inevitably are masticated, then digested, and then reach the final state associated with excretion.
“If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.”
Even if his claim were true, he's going to hit the same problem Twitter did: profitability. Twitter doesn't censor because its CEO is some kind of bleeding-heart softie, it censors because advertisers won't engage with it unless it meets a certain reputational standard.
I dunno; I'm tempted to turn on Fox News to analyze which companies advertise on there. I suspect advertisers' squeamishness only runs skin deep and they really don't want to give up ad reach to 40+% of the country.
[EDIT] Interesting. According to this link (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/these-are-fox-news-lea...), very prominent national brands advertise on Fox News, including Verizon, who recently garnered mention for boycotting Facebook ads. Kind of reinforces my hypothesis.
I think I see where this is going: Twitter will be the new CNN and Parler will be the new Fox News, and both will be insufferable politicized dumpster fires just like the old media companies they're replacing.
Likely in relation to "One Nation, indivisible, under God" (emphasis mine, quoted from the pledge of allegiance.) A nation so divided it needs two of every company seems brittle and fragile.
Apart from the clear US-centric worldview of acceptable and unacceptable speech (e.g., using the US list of foreign terrorist organizations - for instance, many countries would not consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization), I don't understand the "fighting words" portion. It references a US Supreme Court case, Terminiello v. Chicago, in which the speaker was ruled to have not been a "clear and present danger" or have used "fighting words" - so it's not clear what "fighting words" are. The term was defined in an earlier case, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, where it was ruled that calling someone "a damned fascist" was not protected by the First Amendment - is that the point of view that Parler takes?
Meanwhile, in US jurisprudence, the "clear and present danger" test was replaced by the "imminent lawless action" one in 1969 (Brandenburg v. Ohio), which specifically constitutionally guarantees quite a bit more free speech, including non-imminent advocacy of breaking laws. Does Parler follow the "clear and present danger" standard or the "imminent lawless action" one?
Also, the network bans "pornography," "obscenity," and "indecency" (which goes farther than the FCC, which permits "indecent" content on TV or the radio between 10 pm and 6 am, and doesn't regulate them in print etc.) and adds the suggestion, "Make sure everyone in your photos has clothes." Are shirtless men acceptable? Shirtless women (permitted in public in at least six US states)? Are medical diagrams acceptable? (Content is merely indecent and not obscene if it has "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value".)
Isn't that curious. There's nothing objectionable or off topic about this story, yet it's flagged.
I suspect this is liberals trying to ensure nobody finds out about forums they can't censor. The first thing censors always censor is news about uncensored alternatives.
Perhaps there could be a new internet standard which allows every website in existence to run parallel political left/right instances. Segment ourselves into two entirely separate realities since we clearly aren't able to get along together.
And this is how it should work Instead of whining about “regulating tech” every time they do something you don’t like, create your own platform where like minded individuals are free to congregate.
It’s surprising that so many conservative groups who are the first to want deregulation and the free market when it suits them wanted government interference when big tech was being mean to them.
It's not "being mean" it's being unable to participate in discussions when you don't tow the line. This is true on Twitter and Reddit, even HN. You are also not supposed to even bring up the issue as that will be down regulated even more heavily.
The problem needs to be solved one way or another because things are spiralling out of control. The solution isn't "conservatives should just stop not saying what I want them to say" as that will never happen.
Just as systemic racism can occur in institutions, systemic bias can occur in the technology sector. Once momentum builds in a political direction, there becomes a cost associated with going against that grain. Over time it has built up to a breaking point where dissent from that bias effectively removes people from being able to participate.
I think it's not intellectually honest to believe systemic issues in one instance require intervention, but not in the other.
Really? HN is a forum of technical people. The technology behind creating a forum is not rocket science. Getting a colocated server is not rocket science.
There are enough conservative outlets that should both be willing to fund the development and for a marketing outlet.
Hell, I am the furthest thing from a conservative but if conservatives are really so inept that they can’t create their own forums, give me the money. I’ll figure it out. I’m not going to do your marketing for you. But if an atheist can make it big selling bible apps,I’ll take their money to create a forum.
Oh and BTW, I think I probably know a little more about “systemic racism” than you do. You can’t imagine the looks we got when we first started searching for homes and getting one built in the neighborhoods where “we don’t belong” or the number of times that consultants came in to talk to the dev lead and started talking to one of my reports and walked right past me.
Parler doesn't solve any of the alleged problems with centralized tech platforms. It just erects another centralized service with yet another promissory note to be nice and stuff.
They are simply cynically using the fears/persecution complexes of conservatives (many of whom have huge audiences on the social networks they claim are oppressing them) as a ploy to seed their network with a large pool of users.
If the people migrating really cared about tech censorship, they'd launch a Mastadon node.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadThis will probably also turn out much better than Gab due to the presence of high-profile politicians.
We'll see how long Parler remains "unbiased".
There is a healthy ecosystem of software being designed to conform with these specifications.
HN title: "Conservatives..."
Are conservatives regarded as indistinguishable from Trump fans these days?
It may not be "conservatism" in some outdated sense of the term, but people who use that label vote for him in droves. Linking the two is not unfair.
He's governed more conservatively than the last two Republican presidents.
In what meaningful way can they be distinguished?
>First off, I'm a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barrometric pressure, and not gay marriage.
The Republican party hasn't been about responsible small government in decades.
In the US, sometimes conservative is used as a synonym for Republican in the same way that liberal is used as a synonym for Democrat.
There is also a different political science meaning for the words conservative and liberal that don't map to the two major political parties.
Domestically in the US? I would generally say yes. It's hard to argue that Trump hasn't entirely co-opted what's left of the Republican party and conservatives for the most part. How much of that is self-serving is hard to say. I wouldn't be surprised that 5-10 years down the line you have a lot of people on the GOP side who change their tune on Trump once he no longer has power because as it currently stands, going against Trump on the right side of the aisle is generally political suicide.
Currently loyalty is rewarded above all else in the Trump era of the conservationism, and so if you want to stay in the game, you generally tow the line.
Personally I find it pretty gross. but in a lot of ways it's also laid bare the extreme level of cronyism in politics. When someone who was harshly and openly critical (rightly so, even) of you before you held power is now your public mouthpiece and saying the exact opposite of what they said before that was the case it's hard not see that in action.
I find it hugely depressing that the GOP has become the party of Trump, not just because I think Trump is terrible, but because it's just served to increase the divide between the population in general.
Since they're so poorly behaved, they have to seek out alternative spaces that will tolerate their misbehavior. r/T_D didn't get quarantined on Reddit because Reddit has it out for Trump supporters—it got quarantined because it's a hate-filled shithole where bizarre and paranoid ignorance, racism, misogyny, and rampant glorification of hypothetical violence against their political enemies form the baseline for discussion.
Yes
I have to laugh at the article though:
>“With Devin Nunes came a whole pack of haters,” said Matze. He said that parody accounts are fine and even welcome, but Parler draws a line when it comes to spammers. “You can’t spam people’s comment sections with unrelated content,” he said.
Well, firstly, it's well documented that Devin Nunes has sued parody accounts, and seccondly, making editorial decisions about which comments are suitably related is the editorial control that right wing partisans are falsly claiming is a red line abot twitter.
Given that we know Parler is offering a bounty for users, how much did they pay CNBC for the puff piece?
But, according to the article, "the app doesn’t allow terrorist organizations or support for terrorism, the sharing of false rumors, violent language (what the site describes as 'fighting words') toward others, blackmail or pornography."
Last I was in NYC, "fighting words" were most certainly allowed, as was pornography, as was the sharing of false rumors (most of the time). Seems like he's just drawing a different arbitrary line and trying to claim he's a purist for free speech.
it’s very specific legal terminology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words
> The complaint against Chaplinsky stated that he shouted: "You are a God-damned racketeer" and "a damned Fascist". Chaplinsky admitted that he said the words charged in the complaint, with the exception of the name of the deity.
It wouldn't surprise me if public sentiment in the US in 1940 was that such terms were not constitutionally protected, but First Amendment jurisprudence has changed a lot since then - see e.g. https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha... and https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim... for some background. Is this site actually taking the position that calling someone "a damned Fascist" is a) not constitutionally protected, as we understand the constitution today b) worth banning?
Re pornography, it is very much legal and constitutionally protected in the US. Obscenity (which "appeals to the prurient interest ... depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct ... and ... lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value") isn't constitutionally protected, but this site bans pornography, obscenity, and non-obscene indecency.
Hell, the debate over George Carlin's "seven dirty words" [0] didn't happen until three decades later (a real "gentleman" would never speak such atrocious words!). I can't even imagine how much was verboten in the '40s.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words
re: fighting words they’ve since narrowed the definition but it’s never been overturned
This happened with the mass exodus from Reddit to Voat of r/the_donald and similar, and I absolutely can see it happening here. Voat became host to a ton of toxic communities.
And because of that, it's going to push more orthodox people people away from the site towards Twitter in a self-reinforcing loop.
The plan for the site to get a broad range of opinions (in this case, the bounty of $20k for a prominent liberal) seems doomed as a result.
Still - hopefully the founders have learned from Voat and have plans in action to stop it before it gets too stuck in the cycle. The bounty is an interesting idea, though I don't think it'll be strong enough to break the perverse social dynamics involved. More competition with Twitter is a good thing.
Particularly interesting were links to the US Entity list of defined terriorist organizations. Downloadable in a text file (and it's large).
Since it's not pseudo-anonymous like Voat, and is also being endorsed pretty much by politicians, I think it won't fall into the same traps. I think it's going to become a de facto pipeline to politicians though.
The Terms of Service sound like the vision of a social media network after a Section 230 crackdown.
According to this tweet, folks are getting banned for imitating politicians.
https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/127659055637488025...
Impersonating others seems like it's probably always done in bad faith.
Why is this bad? Freedom to impersonate other people is an issue orthogonal to free speech.
> You agree to defend and indemnify Parler [...] 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) arising from or relating to your access to and use of the Services. Parler will have the right to conduct its own defense, at your expense, in any action or proceeding covered by this indemnity.
Twitter has no similar clause, because 47 USC § 230 provides computer services with a pretty good shield against liability of this kind. I'm not sure why Parler would include such a clause.
It feels like these solutions cater to the lazy or the distract-able. All of these businesses start looking so shiny and inevitably are masticated, then digested, and then reach the final state associated with excretion.
Free services just fuck their users.
Even if his claim were true, he's going to hit the same problem Twitter did: profitability. Twitter doesn't censor because its CEO is some kind of bleeding-heart softie, it censors because advertisers won't engage with it unless it meets a certain reputational standard.
[EDIT] Interesting. According to this link (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/these-are-fox-news-lea...), very prominent national brands advertise on Fox News, including Verizon, who recently garnered mention for boycotting Facebook ads. Kind of reinforces my hypothesis.
Apart from the clear US-centric worldview of acceptable and unacceptable speech (e.g., using the US list of foreign terrorist organizations - for instance, many countries would not consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization), I don't understand the "fighting words" portion. It references a US Supreme Court case, Terminiello v. Chicago, in which the speaker was ruled to have not been a "clear and present danger" or have used "fighting words" - so it's not clear what "fighting words" are. The term was defined in an earlier case, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, where it was ruled that calling someone "a damned fascist" was not protected by the First Amendment - is that the point of view that Parler takes?
Meanwhile, in US jurisprudence, the "clear and present danger" test was replaced by the "imminent lawless action" one in 1969 (Brandenburg v. Ohio), which specifically constitutionally guarantees quite a bit more free speech, including non-imminent advocacy of breaking laws. Does Parler follow the "clear and present danger" standard or the "imminent lawless action" one?
Also, the network bans "pornography," "obscenity," and "indecency" (which goes farther than the FCC, which permits "indecent" content on TV or the radio between 10 pm and 6 am, and doesn't regulate them in print etc.) and adds the suggestion, "Make sure everyone in your photos has clothes." Are shirtless men acceptable? Shirtless women (permitted in public in at least six US states)? Are medical diagrams acceptable? (Content is merely indecent and not obscene if it has "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value".)
I signed up for Parler. It seems refreshingly welcoming to me. That might be problematic for those currently censoring existing spaces.
I suspect this is liberals trying to ensure nobody finds out about forums they can't censor. The first thing censors always censor is news about uncensored alternatives.
It’s surprising that so many conservative groups who are the first to want deregulation and the free market when it suits them wanted government interference when big tech was being mean to them.
The problem needs to be solved one way or another because things are spiralling out of control. The solution isn't "conservatives should just stop not saying what I want them to say" as that will never happen.
The open source community didn’t just complain about the closed source products that other vendors released. They created their own alternatives.
Why can’t conservatives come up with successful forums? Are there no conservative entrepreneurs with the technological wherewithal?
I think it's not intellectually honest to believe systemic issues in one instance require intervention, but not in the other.
There are enough conservative outlets that should both be willing to fund the development and for a marketing outlet.
Hell, I am the furthest thing from a conservative but if conservatives are really so inept that they can’t create their own forums, give me the money. I’ll figure it out. I’m not going to do your marketing for you. But if an atheist can make it big selling bible apps,I’ll take their money to create a forum.
Oh and BTW, I think I probably know a little more about “systemic racism” than you do. You can’t imagine the looks we got when we first started searching for homes and getting one built in the neighborhoods where “we don’t belong” or the number of times that consultants came in to talk to the dev lead and started talking to one of my reports and walked right past me.
They are simply cynically using the fears/persecution complexes of conservatives (many of whom have huge audiences on the social networks they claim are oppressing them) as a ploy to seed their network with a large pool of users.
If the people migrating really cared about tech censorship, they'd launch a Mastadon node.