Am I correct in thinking this is a designated safe space?
Since they ban 'non-conservative' accounts the claim to being more free speech than twitter or FB is hardly accurate.
A true free speech social media platform, which this is not, would be an interesting experiment. It would end badly but the entertainment value would be quite high until it implodes. Pity that they are not actually interested in free speech.
Besides, if they get a non-trivial amount of users, the stability they claim the platform has will not last.
> 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.
Demonizing those you disagree with might make you feel good, and may even have short-term gains, but it’s a long-term loser: At each stage — win or lose — your side fragments and each side turns on the other, demonizing each other. Wins reach a natural maxima. Losses build on each other and accelerate the downward trend.
Ultimately, the divisiveness of that approach is self-defeating. You can’t sustain a cohesive movement long enough to do anything of value.
The Left is cannibalising itself. The Right does not seem to have that problem.
The Right is conservative, it moves slowly. The Left finds something new every week to attack people on. I would say for anyone who supports the Right demonizing seems to work.
Although I'm not sure how this Fox News is too Left wing push will play out.
But a place without the Left might be quite nice. At some point we need to decide, it's been 100 years of human death and environmental destruction from the Left. Do we really want to still hang with them? The Right are not good people but they are the best we have.
I'd love Parler to work. But I'll repeat, the arts is with the Left, I don't want to lose that. Parler just won't work.
His tweets get hidden because they contain false claims about the election and thinly-veiled calls for violence, not because they present a conservative viewpoint. We're talking about Trump here, not George Will.
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].
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)
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.
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.
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.
"...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.
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.
Let me call the wahmbulance for all of the snowflake conservatives who think they deserve a platform... Parler, like all right-wing sites before it, is already on the fast path to becoming a nazi shithole. In a few months, when everyone who never really left FB and Twitter is back, I predict that we will add this site to the list of failed attempts by right-wing pseudo-intellectuals to try to thread the needle in the ever shrinking space between Republican talking points and National Socialist rhetoric. The problem with building a site for angry ignorant polemicists is that after a short while they will get bored with talking to themselves and while Fox News personalities can make a living selling herbal ED treatments and scam gold schemes there is not a lot of commercial upside for a place like Parler. Their userbase will peak within six months when the first Trump is indicted and will have dropped 75% by the time the first is convicted.
>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.
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.
41 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 90.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202011141400/parl...
Since they ban 'non-conservative' accounts the claim to being more free speech than twitter or FB is hardly accurate.
A true free speech social media platform, which this is not, would be an interesting experiment. It would end badly but the entertainment value would be quite high until it implodes. Pity that they are not actually interested in free speech.
Besides, if they get a non-trivial amount of users, the stability they claim the platform has will not last.
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.
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.
The Conservatives will not be able to make a sustainable platform.
The divisive politics is the addiction part, but the entertainment is what feeds you. Reddit without the memes is boring.
And until Libertarians can compete politically, it's all a two party system.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Demonizing those you disagree with might make you feel good, and may even have short-term gains, but it’s a long-term loser: At each stage — win or lose — your side fragments and each side turns on the other, demonizing each other. Wins reach a natural maxima. Losses build on each other and accelerate the downward trend.
Ultimately, the divisiveness of that approach is self-defeating. You can’t sustain a cohesive movement long enough to do anything of value.
The Right is conservative, it moves slowly. The Left finds something new every week to attack people on. I would say for anyone who supports the Right demonizing seems to work.
Although I'm not sure how this Fox News is too Left wing push will play out.
But a place without the Left might be quite nice. At some point we need to decide, it's been 100 years of human death and environmental destruction from the Left. Do we really want to still hang with them? The Right are not good people but they are the best we have.
I'd love Parler to work. But I'll repeat, the arts is with the Left, I don't want to lose that. Parler just won't work.
His lies are still there for anyone who wishes to read them, they are simply marked as the lies that they are.
My guess is that algorithmic checks are flagging posts and conservatives are interpreting that as censorship.
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.
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
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)
[1] https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
"Free speech for me, but not for thee"
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.
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.
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.
https://mobile.twitter.com/davetroy/status/13272539919364546...