As mainstream social media companies belatedly start rolling out efforts to limit the spread of disinformation on their platforms, alternatives are popping up, offering up social media spaces with supposedly unlimited freedom of speech.
Parler is one of the newest. A Twitter knock-off that’s exploded in popularity recently as a haven for Trumpworld election denial, open racism, Q-Anon-sense, and other conspiracy theories. It’s where once-popular altright figures like Milo Yiannopoulos fled to after Buzzfeed revealed his Nazi side, and where Laura Loomer went after Twitter kicked her off for her proud Islamaphobia.
As a result of its growing popularity, folks have begun taking a closer look at Parler, and it turns out its Terms of Service are just as restrictive as any other site. It’s hardly a bastion of free speech, even according to an opinion piece at the conservative Washington Examiner.
Perhaps more importantly, billionaire Rebekah Mercer is bankrolling the website, as a recent WSJ story reported. For some reason though, the story claims that unlike traditional social media, Parler “collects almost no data about its users,” which is weird because, as detailed in the Examiner, to unlock the sites’ full features users need to hand over their social security number. And to become a verified user and get the “real person” badge, you have to send them a photo ID, like a driver’s license. Seriously!
If that sounds like an extraordinarily unsafe and invasive collection of private data, you’re right! And if you’re worried about what Parler might do with that information, you’re smart! Again, the WSJ piece doesn’t mention this, but as a reminder, the Mercers were behind Cambridge Analytica, the Trump-backing operation that breached Facebook’s privacy rules to harvest the information of 50 million profiles for its voter database.
Knowing that one of the billionaire families bankrolling conservative propaganda is behind Parler, the complaints about the site being little more than an echo chamber of big, and wannabe big, right-wing names makes a lot more sense. For example, Arielle Pardes wrote about using the site for WIRED, finding the site’s set-up makes it easy enough to see Sean Hannity and other pseudo-celebrities posts, but apparently content from regular users was difficult to find, and received little to no actual engagement. On the other hand, certain accounts are hyper-visible, for example Team Trump is spamming basically every automatic introduction post, appearing to violate one of Parler’s only official rules on content: no spam.
Pardes, having received no response from Parler’s leadership as to why Team Trump’s 1.6 million identical comments urging users to sign up for their mailing list and texts, ventures to guess that “one theory as to why Team Trump spam gets a pass while other repeat offenders have not is that Parler prioritizes conservative speech rather than free speech. But the more likely explanation is that Parler is set up to amplify its influencers, rather than create a space for anyone to be heard.”
When one understands that the website is part of the Mercer’s propaganda network, and not a genuine attempt to grow a community where everyone’s voice can be heard, that set up makes perfect sense!
That also explains why, as Corbin Hair reported recently for E&E, experts are sounding the warning bells for its potential to spread climate denial. While it’s currently much more common to see posts about the election being stolen from Trump, climate deniers couldn’t possibly ask for more fertile territory to share their disinformation.
And sure enough, yesterday morning outgoing EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler Tweeted, “you can find me and @EPA on @Parler_app!”