It’s worth noting that the first thing Parler did was start censoring anyone unsupportive of their form of conservatism. They’re not offering freer speech, they’re offering a safe space. Maybe that’s a seller, maybe it’s not, but it’s an important distinction. This is really just /r/conservative taken to its logical conclusion.
I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics.
Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy.
But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies.
I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy theories on the same platform as your cousin's family photos, or nobel winners, has a legitimacy-building effect on the outrage content. Maybe on its own platform it will look more like what it actually is. Nobody mistakes the tabloids in the checkout aisle for a legitimate newspaper.
I was banned from r/conservative in a discussion about trump handling the coronavirus seriously. I posted a timeline of quotes from him "only 15 cases soon to be none etc" indicating he had not taken it seriously early. Banned after that.
Which is fine, I feel that people should be free to form any clubs/groups they want.
This may be the best we can get. Different places banning different things. But they need to be honest so people know what they're getting into. Twitter is a progressive space.
I'm curious if Gab bans support of antifa. They couldn't claim it's about indirectly inciting violence, because they come close to the line when it comes to Nazi opinions. They do ban porn, which is fine with me. There's plenty of porn and it doesn't benefit from a network effect the same way. And I'm glad every place bans spam.
When "free speech" is the primary selling point of a social media website, it tends to only attract people who feel slighted by the platform they're migrating from. Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move.
I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
I'm getting a lot of value out of Mastodon. I found a medium sized instance who's moderator I trust, and whose culture matches matches what I want out of a social media website. Not having posts algorithmically shoved into your face helps a lot, because it is clear where posts on you home timeline are coming from and thus easier to customise your experience by blocking people.
The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.
I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.
For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
Big Tech and Big Media really overplayed their hand this time, IMO. Millions and millions of people are now skeptical and looking for an alternative, even from Fox News. It might not be to Parler, or to the next site after that, but fragmentation will continue to happen. Facebook and media at large only have power if they have viewers, which is a far less stable resource than iron, or oil, or other corporate mainstays.
A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
2020, or more likely 2016 will perhaps be seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the US Republic, when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Calling a vague group of entities 'Big X' isn't as useful as people think. It's not like there is a strong definition, or that everyone identifies the same with it. It's also not helpful to personify a vague group of even more groups (of business entities) and then assume they all had some concerted 'hand to play'.
It's possible that there is some emergent behaviour in markets with large companies and it might even seem like it's a single 'person', but it's not and it makes discussing specifics really hard. Perhaps it's an american thing, but it seems really odd looking from the outside in.
The problem is- that they never invested in growing healthy engagement instead of enragement. Instigating a tribal warfare climate to push adds is just to easy of a business model.
Then the goat was chosen to moderate the cabbage and here we are. If the predictions hold, the ironic end will be, some CEOs blown up by a terrorism wave they helped to create.
Thus ended the lesson and the revolution can now eat its kids
I have to agree that big tech really messed this one up. Their attempt at regulating speech on their platforms (entirely their own right to do however they want) has resulted in both sides being pissed. I had commented on this a while ago that it was like War Games - the only way to win this game was not to play at all. The second they started being the arbitrator of speech they were guaranteed to piss people off. Then they tried to adjust and pissed another group off.
And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The smartest move now is to fire all their public relations and government affairs folks. They handled this about as poorly as they could.
We are censored every day. A newspaper editor censors their writers, your boss censors your reports, your friends censor your bar room bullshit by calling you out on it, your spouse tells you you will not argue with your brother in law again. But this is all implicit censoring - adhering to social norms through social signals (a raised eye brow, being told to buy your round and shut up)
The thing is computers do not do any implicit censoring - and so we are expecting FAANG to step up. But we need firstly a set of agreed rules, then the ability to automatically understand the rules before we even get to due process.
The issue is firstly one of scale - HN kinda sorta works because it had clear rules from the start, abs had a lot of moderation, from early users and mods.
Multiply by 1000x the volume and suddenly dang's keyboard explodes.
Facebook is trying to produce moderation at scale with thousands of human moderators, but they probably will never "succeed" - because success is not defined well enough.
Let me restate that. There are thousands of groups on FAANG - each one has its own evolving rules on what is and is not acceptable. But facebook can only really deal with one set of rules. It will try and manage the lowest common denominator - no child porn, no murder, but it slowly heads towards "define free speech"
The main indicator here is that both sides of every political debate think FAANG is censoring them.
This is how the internet is supposed to work. Encounters damage, routes around it. Censorship is damage, and people are routing around it.
As someone who never engaged with FB/Twitter from the beginning because I thought they were terrible ideas (all the rules, risks, and challenges of elite-level competition with none of the benefits), I was very glad to read this because this kind of divergence is precisely what creates growth. The platforms were becoming a ceiling on growth, and their policies have created the critical mass to start new ones. This will be a great time to be in tech.
I see it as the opposite: this may be how a technical network is supposed to work, but it's not how a society is supposed to work.
The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs.
It's a psychological power almost equivalent to a nuclear reaction: beliefs and ideas that might have naturally died out pre-internet are instead amplified and spread, and dug deeper into peoples' minds.
This is a critical time to be in tech, but not for the growth: for the need to design solutions to that problem. Censorship is a primitive attempt at stopping this psychological nuclear reaction; people are finding ways around it. We need a bigger, better solution to the reaction, lest society destroy itself through unfettered tribalism.
OOC are you a Parler user/have you visited the site? If this is a victory for free speech, it's certainly a Pyrrhic one. Twitter and facebook comments seem like the pinnacle of civil discourse next to the stuff I found on Parler just by creating an account and following all the recommended content in the onboarding process.
No, it’s awful and will ultimately justify creating the same government power over cyberspace that it exerts over airwaves. It a painful example of how the miracle of technology doesn’t mean tech companies can govern.
It’s hard stuff, on the one hand, if 1999 era tech was all we had, I’d likely be sick or dead as remote work wouldn’t have been possible for me. On the other, with 1999 era tech, we wouldn’t have a reality show host president fueling a pandemic to get more attention in media.
Right wing lunatics (and other fringe types) weren’t powerful in 1990 because they couldn’t broadcast their filth. They got traction because the rules were loosened for radio and angry white man radio became a thing.
You have the state of shitshow today because any lunatic can broadcast anything and gather a following.
I mostly agree. However, it'll be interesting to see how well new competitors can fair in an industry like social media where the product (i.e. us) is already near monopolized on a few large platforms.
Personally, I like Parler's interface, and don't mind that it's kind of a conservative bent, but I've heard from other conservatives that the interface isn't as good as Twitters. And it's smaller audience is already keeping some big-names away from it, even people who would theoretically really like the platform, like Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams. They've both created accounts there, but have both signaled that it's just too small of a platform and is a waste of their time to post there, so they stick with Twitter.
I’m starting to think that this could actually be good news for left-leaning people. It’s entirely possible that separated from the people they usually fight against, and isolated in their own platform, conservative voices, people who have made careers out of rhetorical conflict, will begin to fight among themselves. and this can only benefit the left.
It’s also very possible that Parler will only go uncensored for so long. At some point, if they get big enough, it could easily become apparent that they’re losing ad revenue by hosting certain opinions, resulting in similar changes to those of Twitter and Facebook
> It’s entirely possible that separated from the people they usually fight against, and isolated in their own platform, conservative voices, people who have made careers out of rhetorical conflict, will begin to fight among themselves.
The same is true for the left, isn't it? this will just increase the social bubbles we live in. Now instead of different recommendations and content shown in an app, you've got a different app.
I doubt that. As someone who uses a lot of these mostly-conservative sites, I'm not seeing a ton of infighting. If anything, it's been the opposite. I'm seeing it unite a bunch of different factions that used to fight.
And to be clear, Parler isn't uncensored. They still censor things. They're a business trying to attract an audience to make money, so they have to censor something just to protect the brand. Like posting a photo of literal shit. (I'm not kidding, the CEO explicitly said they'd ban posts like that) They're just a lot lighter on political censorship, since the big market demand created by Twitter has been for a platform that allows more political expression.
You're thinking in an us-vs-them mentality. Really, we should be working towards a community where people can respect differing opinions, and not just a bunch of isolated sites full of extremists on either side.
I tried to create a throwaway account and comment on a Reddit thread yesterday. It was denied due to lack of karma.
A few weeks ago I tried to create a throwaway on Reddit to create a new post but the post was immediately removed due to lack of karma.
Twitter now requires I provide a cell phone number to create an account. It throws up on me by suspending my account if a new account is unused for a few days. Requires I prove I’m not a bot to unsuspend it.
Facebook basically requires that I provide a birth certificate to sign up.
If you want to spread misinformation you basically need to be on an alternative platform but it’s also helpful for people like me who don’t want to give up my privacy to a social media company.
The Reddit and Twitter controls, at least, are attempts to stem the tide of bots and spam. They’re trying to keep the quality of discussion higher on their platform, and I appreciate that as a user. I think the controls are reasonable.
Facebook is creepy as fuck though. Recently I was logging on from a new location, and haven’t given them my phone number for 2FA. The only option they provided was for me to send in photos of my DRIVER’S LICENSE - are you kidding me?
I've deleted my Facebook account early last year. Then some service I wanted to experiment released with only Facebook login support. Facebook won't let me re-enable my account regardless of what I do or information I send. Creating a new account is also impossible since the number was assigned to that account. I've basically gave up because this is worse than a bank KYC and Facebook itself isn't worth it.
1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
I think a lot of people in these comments are missing the core dilemma a lot of these tech companies are dealing with. How do you deal with rampant misinformation that might be harmful to society as a whole? I think moving to putting disclaimers on posts instead of deleting them might be the right move but it’s honestly just a hard problem.
My Twitter is great. I follow AI, VR, Philosophy, Zen, Mindfulness, Twertzog, etc... all high quality. Same with Facebook. I'm very happy with my feed. I follow vintage photography, various art focused groups, philosophy groups, hacker and tech groups and I've unfollowed friends who post toxic shit. I enjoy looking at Twitter and Facebook in the morning. Twitter and Facebook AI's are constantly surprising me with cool stuff they surface for me, even ads. Twitter and Facebook don't have to suck.
For those unaware of the connection, Robert Mercer was also a key investor behind Cambridge Analytica, the data firm which played a large role in the hyper targeted Facebook ads during the 2016 election.
If I recall correctly, he was also one of the very few rich people to back Trump in 2016, when everyone had written Trump off. Which also caused some drama at Rentech.
I thought the alternative to twitter would be maston[0]. It's 'uncensored' federated twitter clone that anyone can create a node and create a social community of their choosing.
Not sure how "Parler" is going to be better than twitter with a central point of failure. More political fodder I guess.
Meh, so what. There's been tons of platforms in the past that rise up because of disagreements over moderation policy (voat anyone). Maybe they will succede maybe they won't. Not sure what the fuss is about.
Censorship largely comes from a desire to appease advertisers. So long as users aren't paying anything to support a platform, censorship pressure will be an issue.
Bigotry and hate speech should not have a platform. I’ve been reading a lot of comments here and it seems like most of them aren’t even critical or touch on the point of NOT allowing certain kind of speech or false information sharing. In Germany nazi related sympathizing, propaganda is banned from social media. But some how it’s ok in USA? I honestly fail to understand how little criticism there is of unfettered free speech, as if it’s universally a good thing. Same with guns, given overwhelming evidence to the contrary yet still USA sticks to these strange “rights”.
I tried Parler, and everyone is missing the point. Parler doesn't censor content because replies aren't linked to "Parleys" by default. All replies must be "approved" by the author. You can troll, but nobody will ever see it except OP. It absolutely solves the abuse problem that Twitter has, but it also limits discussion. The appeal of Twitter is that you get to see what everyone thinks. Parler is for sycophants only.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hntossaccount12|5 years ago|reply
Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy.
But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies.
I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy theories on the same platform as your cousin's family photos, or nobel winners, has a legitimacy-building effect on the outrage content. Maybe on its own platform it will look more like what it actually is. Nobody mistakes the tabloids in the checkout aisle for a legitimate newspaper.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|5 years ago|reply
Which is fine, I feel that people should be free to form any clubs/groups they want.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacemanmatt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smbullet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zarkov99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BuzzwordBingo|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
Was it "I disagree with Trump's approach to foreign policy..."
or was it thousands of spam messages?
[+] [-] orblivion|5 years ago|reply
I'm curious if Gab bans support of antifa. They couldn't claim it's about indirectly inciting violence, because they come close to the line when it comes to Nazi opinions. They do ban porn, which is fine with me. There's plenty of porn and it doesn't benefit from a network effect the same way. And I'm glad every place bans spam.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
I doubt the first thing that Parler did was censor anyone, they probably first sent out advertisements to tell people of their existence.
[+] [-] least|5 years ago|reply
I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
[+] [-] polytely|5 years ago|reply
The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.
I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.
For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
[+] [-] thelastname|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceilingcorner|5 years ago|reply
A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
[+] [-] grey-area|5 years ago|reply
The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
[+] [-] oneplane|5 years ago|reply
It's possible that there is some emergent behaviour in markets with large companies and it might even seem like it's a single 'person', but it's not and it makes discussing specifics really hard. Perhaps it's an american thing, but it seems really odd looking from the outside in.
[+] [-] PicassoCTs|5 years ago|reply
Then the goat was chosen to moderate the cabbage and here we are. If the predictions hold, the ironic end will be, some CEOs blown up by a terrorism wave they helped to create. Thus ended the lesson and the revolution can now eat its kids
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The smartest move now is to fire all their public relations and government affairs folks. They handled this about as poorly as they could.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
The thing is computers do not do any implicit censoring - and so we are expecting FAANG to step up. But we need firstly a set of agreed rules, then the ability to automatically understand the rules before we even get to due process.
The issue is firstly one of scale - HN kinda sorta works because it had clear rules from the start, abs had a lot of moderation, from early users and mods.
Multiply by 1000x the volume and suddenly dang's keyboard explodes.
Facebook is trying to produce moderation at scale with thousands of human moderators, but they probably will never "succeed" - because success is not defined well enough.
Let me restate that. There are thousands of groups on FAANG - each one has its own evolving rules on what is and is not acceptable. But facebook can only really deal with one set of rules. It will try and manage the lowest common denominator - no child porn, no murder, but it slowly heads towards "define free speech"
The main indicator here is that both sides of every political debate think FAANG is censoring them.
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
As someone who never engaged with FB/Twitter from the beginning because I thought they were terrible ideas (all the rules, risks, and challenges of elite-level competition with none of the benefits), I was very glad to read this because this kind of divergence is precisely what creates growth. The platforms were becoming a ceiling on growth, and their policies have created the critical mass to start new ones. This will be a great time to be in tech.
[+] [-] calinet6|5 years ago|reply
The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs.
It's a psychological power almost equivalent to a nuclear reaction: beliefs and ideas that might have naturally died out pre-internet are instead amplified and spread, and dug deeper into peoples' minds.
This is a critical time to be in tech, but not for the growth: for the need to design solutions to that problem. Censorship is a primitive attempt at stopping this psychological nuclear reaction; people are finding ways around it. We need a bigger, better solution to the reaction, lest society destroy itself through unfettered tribalism.
[+] [-] sfkdjf9j3j|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
It’s hard stuff, on the one hand, if 1999 era tech was all we had, I’d likely be sick or dead as remote work wouldn’t have been possible for me. On the other, with 1999 era tech, we wouldn’t have a reality show host president fueling a pandemic to get more attention in media.
Right wing lunatics (and other fringe types) weren’t powerful in 1990 because they couldn’t broadcast their filth. They got traction because the rules were loosened for radio and angry white man radio became a thing.
You have the state of shitshow today because any lunatic can broadcast anything and gather a following.
[+] [-] SmokeyHamster|5 years ago|reply
Personally, I like Parler's interface, and don't mind that it's kind of a conservative bent, but I've heard from other conservatives that the interface isn't as good as Twitters. And it's smaller audience is already keeping some big-names away from it, even people who would theoretically really like the platform, like Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams. They've both created accounts there, but have both signaled that it's just too small of a platform and is a waste of their time to post there, so they stick with Twitter.
[+] [-] permo-w|5 years ago|reply
It’s also very possible that Parler will only go uncensored for so long. At some point, if they get big enough, it could easily become apparent that they’re losing ad revenue by hosting certain opinions, resulting in similar changes to those of Twitter and Facebook
[+] [-] kace91|5 years ago|reply
The same is true for the left, isn't it? this will just increase the social bubbles we live in. Now instead of different recommendations and content shown in an app, you've got a different app.
[+] [-] SmokeyHamster|5 years ago|reply
And to be clear, Parler isn't uncensored. They still censor things. They're a business trying to attract an audience to make money, so they have to censor something just to protect the brand. Like posting a photo of literal shit. (I'm not kidding, the CEO explicitly said they'd ban posts like that) They're just a lot lighter on political censorship, since the big market demand created by Twitter has been for a platform that allows more political expression.
[+] [-] swebs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khendron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gogopuppygogo|5 years ago|reply
A few weeks ago I tried to create a throwaway on Reddit to create a new post but the post was immediately removed due to lack of karma.
Twitter now requires I provide a cell phone number to create an account. It throws up on me by suspending my account if a new account is unused for a few days. Requires I prove I’m not a bot to unsuspend it.
Facebook basically requires that I provide a birth certificate to sign up.
If you want to spread misinformation you basically need to be on an alternative platform but it’s also helpful for people like me who don’t want to give up my privacy to a social media company.
[+] [-] yashap|5 years ago|reply
Facebook is creepy as fuck though. Recently I was logging on from a new location, and haven’t given them my phone number for 2FA. The only option they provided was for me to send in photos of my DRIVER’S LICENSE - are you kidding me?
[+] [-] ulzeraj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anjel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyw|5 years ago|reply
2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
[+] [-] frasermince|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okareaman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yabones|5 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...
[+] [-] freddie_mercury|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpdev_63|5 years ago|reply
Not sure how "Parler" is going to be better than twitter with a central point of failure. More political fodder I guess.
[0]:https://mastodon.social/about
[+] [-] bawolff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmasimida|5 years ago|reply
One reason of censorship becomes so prevailing is because of advertising. The advertisers ultimately defines what is 'toxic' and what not.
If Parler can stick to its current path and manage to survive, it would pretty significant to the internet ecosystem.
[+] [-] kxrm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franczesko|5 years ago|reply
"The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended".
[+] [-] victorbstan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapht|5 years ago|reply
As a European, I just stopped and wonder in what world America lives.
[+] [-] arkanciscan|5 years ago|reply