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I never looked to closely at the spectacle, but I seem to recall that the previous player in the "conservative Twitter" landscape, Parler, was making the same claims about being an "unrestricted marketplace of ideas" but was actually requiring all new accounts to post in a restricted mode until some power users had confirmed their conservative zeal.

Given who is at the helm of this new company, I suspect the same shenanigans to be going on, and worse. I'd use a VPN at the very least if I was going to attempt any kind of infiltration.

> I'd use a VPN at the very least if I was going to attempt any kind of infiltration.

Infiltration? Perhaps it's this kind rhetoric that makes them feel they need to review new accounts to make sure they're not just people looking to stir the pot.

... or people just looking to be the voice of reason against harmful conspiracy theories and blatant propaganda.
The convenient and typical response of the moral busybody. Naturally, they're just "the voice of reason" against "harmful conspiracy theories" and "blatant propaganda".

The moral busybody having polar opposite political views doesn't factor in at all, right.?

There is objective truth. There is also real harm. There are people now dead and burred as a direct result of misinformation campaigns on social media.
Imagine someone wanted to open a new service for let’s say video hosting and is doing so for political reasons (e.g. the creators feel that YouTube is banning/“deboosting” anyone posting Islamic content). The operators would be well served to manually verify new accounts when starting that service to keep things such as anti-Islamic material, child sexual abuse material, other illegal content, etc. off the service until they have a scalable and automatic moderation solution which has been battle-tested. I think most people would agree that simply putting up a new service like that with no guardrails will go badly. Therefore, please keep in mind that Parler was a new entry into the social media scene and lacked the opportunity to develop robust community content/sentiment controls over the course of a decade such as Facebook and twitter. The generally stated purpose of Parler was to provide a safe space for individuals who were banned from Twitter or Facebook for what Parler operators would consider political reasons. Parler certainly does not want (in the long term) individuals removed due to highly incivil or illegal behavior (from Parler’s perspective). Requiring a manual verification before the account begins algorithmic “boosting” is reasonable in this situation, at least to me, until Parler can develop better automatic/scaling moderation tools.
That's not what they were doing. They were filtering out normal Liberal ideas.
>Posts will be 777 characters long

That's... weirdly specific. Is this supposed to be some kind of dog-whistle to QAnon and Biblical conspiracy types?