From the News Vault
(July 20, 2020)
In recent weeks, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has been subject to critique across various social media platforms. A Trump campaign advert displaying Nazi symbology was removed from Facebook, the subreddit ‘r/The_Donald’ has been shut down, and Twitter recently attempted to moderate Trump’s tweets. Following this action from tech companies, various high-profile Republicans close to Donald Trump have promoted the social media platform ‘Parler’ as a less censored alternative to ‘mainstream’ social media. In the week following this spur of online promotion, the site reportedly saw a 246% increase in downloads, and towards the end of June it experienced the largest ever influx of new users in the app’s history.
Co-founded in August 2018 by John Matze and Jared Thomson, Parler describes itself as a “non-biased free speech driven entity” with a commitment to empowering users to “control their social experience” and “be responsible to engage with content as they see fit”. The essential features of the site closely resemble those of Twitter. Users establish their own profiles where they are encouraged to share “parlays” – akin to tweets – which can then be “echoed” – retweeted – and commented on by other users.
While many features of the site are not exactly novel, new users are ceremoniously welcomed to Parler in a flurry of automated posts, including one from a “Parler concierge”, encouraging them to celebrate their newfound technological “freedom”. However, upon creating an account, it becomes clear that this ‘freedom’ is yet to be embraced by both sides of the political spectrum.
Who’s on Parler?: Trump Supporters, Conspiracy Theorists and Proud Boys
New users on Parler are immediately provided with a list of suggested accounts to follow, all of which skew toward the political right, including Zero Hedge, a financial blog involved in the spread of conspiracies and misinformation, an account for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and Katie Hopkins, the British right-wing contrarian who was personally welcomed to the platform by CEO John Matze after being permanently suspended from Twitter in June 2020 for violating its hateful conduct policy. Following these initial suggestions, one’s feed is immediately dominated by content from right-leaning sources – immediately problematising the site’s commitment to ‘non-bias’.
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Source: The Global Network on Extremism and Technology