One time in college, I spent lunch trying to convince my roommate that 9/11 wasn’t an inside job. If I’m remembering this correctly, he literally listened to one Joe Rogan podcast with Alex Jones and got into a weird social media rabbit hole after that. He was telling me that I had to admit there was a possibility the whole thing was a conspiracy, while also treating me like I was a sheep for not agreeing with him. To this day, I’m really not sure why he thought listening to one podcast and maybe reading a few Reddit posts made him smarter than every scientist in the world.
Anyway, the reason why I bring this up is that social media is how 1 in 5 Americans get their news. What they see on Facebook and Twitter shape how they see the world. That means it’s important to think about how these platforms regulate or don’t regulate the content people see. So today, we’re going to talk about a social media platform that had an alternative approach to regulating content and failed really badly.
What is Parler?
There’s a lot of incredibly stupid content on social media, but most of these posts aren’t removed unless someone reports them and it’s found that they actually went against the site’s Terms of Service. Often, a human moderator has to make a judgment call on whether a post is bad enough to get taken down and even get the poster suspended or banned.
A lot of the time, these judgment calls are tricky and require some degree of subjectivity. Somebody who tweets something like “One week in quarantine and I already want to kill my roommate” might be an actual insane person making violent threats or just a normal dude venting. It’s up to the moderator to try to figure it out.
For a long time, Republicans have hated the big social media companies for a simple reason: The majority of employees at companies like Facebook and Twitter are highly-educated and live in Silicon Valley, which means they’re usually liberal. That means when moderators are making judgment calls that relate to politics, they’re more likely to be biased against conservatives.
So conservatives decided that instead of posting on liberal social media platforms, they’d create their own site: Parler. It was supposed to be a free-speech alternative to platforms like Twitter that would allow users to post anything that was allowed by the First Amendment.
The platform took off after several big-name conservatives like Ted Cruz starting using it. Now, it’s estimated that Parler has around 4 million monthly active users. That’s pretty small when you compare it with Twitter’s 330 million monthly active users and Facebook’s 2.2 billion monthly active users. But still, it’s a pretty sizable number of people.
But in the past couple of weeks, something happened to Parler that put its entire future at risk.
Big Tech bans Parler
This month, Parler got banned from both the App Store and Google Play. Amazon’s AWS, which hosts most of the Internet, stopped allowing Parler to use its services.
Why did all these companies feel the need to stop doing business with Parler? Much of the violence that took place on Capitol Hill on January 6th seemed to have been planned out on the platform. One of Trump’s lawyers, Lin Wood, even used Parler to call for Vice President Pence to be brought in front of a firing squad and executed (He later tried to claim that this was just a metaphor). Big Tech said that Parler wasn’t taking the right steps to curb this violent content.
As you probably would expect, conservatives absolutely hated this move and said that it was Big Tech working together to suppress free speech. Here’s a comment I found under a random YouTube video.
Alright, let’s ignore the awful grammar and the random Caps Lock. We got to ask ourselves a couple of questions: Is this YouTube Boomer actually right? Is Big Tech banning Parler a sign that we’re moving towards an authoritarian society with Mark Zuckerberg controlling the media?
Why Big Tech suspending Parler is totally valid
While Parler claimed to be a free-speech platform, it actually censored users just like Twitter did. There were plenty of users who got banned from Parler, most of whom seemed to be left-wingers who showed up specifically to make fun of conservatives. The dudes on Parler were trying so hard to fight the system that they became the very thing they hated the most: snowflakes in a safe space.
The fact that Parler was willing to ban people shows that it wasn’t really a “free speech” platform. The company had a content moderation strategy: It was just really shitty. So Big Tech banning it until it could come up with something better is completely valid. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook even said that Parler was just temporarily suspended from the App Store until it could show that it could properly moderate posts.
We should also keep in mind that Big Tech had a perfectly legitimate complaint here. Again, Lin Wood’s comment about Mike Pence was a clear incitement to violence, which is the type of speech that isn’t protected by the First Amendment. It’s especially clear that it caused real damage when you have videos of rioters who were literally chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. The free market means that businesses are free to associate with whoever they want, and in this case, it’s pretty clear Parler could have taken more action.
Can the free market save the world from Mark Zuckerberg?
Look, I’m going to try to compromise with the YouTube commenters here. Mark Zuckerberg pretty much has unaccountable power over what billions of people see every day, and it’s totally valid to be worried about that. It’s also totally valid to try to build alternative companies to try to break the monopoly Big Tech has on the public discourse.
Of course, if you’re going to build a “free market” solution, you have to make sure it’s actually a good product. Parler was not a good product. Before it was kicked off AWS, some hackers downloaded almost every post that was ever posted on the platform. This wasn’t some insanely technical hack that took a lot of skill to accomplish. It only happened because Parler didn’t take basic steps to protect user security.
The problem here seems to be that most of the people who joined Parler were mostly motivated by hatred of Big Tech liberals. That by itself isn’t enough to create a successful social platform. A famous article from Harvard Business Review said that in order to get customers to switch, new products have to be 9x better than what’s already on the market.
I’m not saying there can’t be an alternative social media platform for conservatives, but it’s got to be based on something more than just pure resentment. Every successful social media network of the past few years allowed people to connect in new and interesting ways. TikTok made it easy to sit back and let an algorithm show you funny videos from people all around the world. Snapchat made it easy to send disappearing posts to your friends. Because you couldn’t do the same thing before these two platforms existed, you could say that they were both 9x better than the competition. On the other hand, Parler was just a shittier version of Twitter.
What can we learn from Parler?
Whether you’re on the right or the left, nobody should be comfortable with the amount of power that Mark Zuckerberg has over the public discourse. While it’s true that the First Amendment is meant to apply to the government and not private businesses, we’re living in a new era. There used to be thousands of newspapers with different views all over the country, but most are dying. Now, it’s just a few platforms that shape people’s perceptions.
As a society, we need to figure out a solution to this problem. Maybe it’ll come from government regulation. Maybe it’ll come from alternatives emerging on the free market. But it probably won’t come from Parler.
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