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On June 16, American conservative debater Dan Bongino issued a statement, “his biggest fight to date.” Dan Bongino, who became one of the most widespread debaters on American social media during the election year, said he had purchased a share on the social media platform Parler. According to Bongino, Parler was “the best social media option on the market right now.”
Bongino statement This summer, he sent waves on American social media. And now, a couple of months later, the prediction has partially come true. After it became clear that US President Donald Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election, his supporters flocked to Parler, who stated that they quickly doubled their number of users to nearly 10 million, according to the Washington Post. .
The two-year-old platform, accessible via a mobile app or through your browser, has quickly become a hangout for those who continue to spread unsubstantiated allegations and conspiracy theories that voter fraud is behind Joe Biden’s election victory. In the moments after the election, Parler has been at the top of the list of most downloaded apps on the Apple and Google app stores, respectively, according to technology site Techcrunch.
Clear signs of Parler’s growing popularity could be seen as early as May. That’s when Twitter started marking President Donald Trump’s posts as misleading or false. And now, six months later, it is clear that the platform has become the latest in the line of social media for users who say they want to create an online free zone.
Everyone who creates an account on Parler will receive a welcome message from Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign.
Photo: screenshot.
Basically, development is about on opposition to other tech companies, which are criticized for moderating their platforms too harshly. The criticism comes mainly from conservative and radical right-wing circles. For this reason, in recent years, especially after Trump’s election in 2016, several sites or platforms have been launched with the aim of serving as a place of conversation for those who consider themselves to be censored on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. and Youtube.
– Parler has become a clear counter-movement for those who believe that the main social media platforms are part of an “elite” that supports the Democrats. The whole concept of Parler is about being able to choose a filtered reality. Let the user in an even clearer way create their filter bubbles, says Sebastian Bay, disinformation researcher at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, FOI.
Opposition to established social media may also, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci recently wrote in DN, be seen as the next step in an ongoing American “culture war.” Those who previously targeted the established media now also include tech companies established in their enemy groups. Tufekci writes that “social media platforms will have to share the role of enemy with ‘fake news'” when conservative forces want to refine Trumpism as a political force.
Sebastian Bay agrees that this has created a clearer surface for the conflict in America:
– We’ve seen it in the last year, where Trump has taken the lead in directing anger at platforms and their regulation. Basically, it would be nice if we had a real political discussion about what kind of internet we should have and what rules should apply. It has long been a lawless country for platforms, as there have been no democratically decided rules.
Among the new alternative platforms Besides Parler, there have also been sites and apps like Gab, Voat, Mewe, Bitchute, Minds, and Locals. Throughout, the services have been launched with promises to consider integrity and freedom of expression more than other social networks. They have not always explicitly targeted users with radical right-wing views, although this has often been hinted at.
Investments have often not been a lasting success story. Often, instead, there has been a temporary influx of users, many of whom after a while have mostly re-posted to “normal” social networks that have a much greater reach.
An example is the Reddit copy Voat, which was founded in 2014. The platform became more popular when early proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and then so-called incels were banned from the Reddit site in 2016 and 2017, respectively. to attract a wider audience.
In the book “Post-digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US”, published in 2018, researchers Joan Donovan, Becca Lewis and Brian Friedberg describe the rise of this movement of ” alternative technology “. It is seen in part as a result of the Unite the Right white power rally that took place in Charlottesville, USA in 2017, when a 32-year-old woman died and more than 30 people were injured.
Events in Charlottesville it was followed by strong pressure on companies like Facebook and Twitter to better counter the spread of right-wing extremist propaganda. This in itself sparked greater demand for new platforms targeting followers of these types of collectives, the book’s authors write.
The Gab platform, which is very similar in design to Twitter, was given a prominent role in the “alternative technology” movement at an early stage through its founder Andrew Torba, who founded the now-defunct Alt technology alliance. The alliance’s purpose was to bring together “brave engineers, product managers, investors and others who are tired of the status quo in the technology industry.”
But even Gab quickly ran into major problems, especially after it emerged that Robert Gregory Bowers, who murdered eleven people in an anti-Semitic rally in Pittsburgh 2018 hours before the mass shooting, posted information about his plans on the platform.
After the act of violence, Gab was banned from various paid services, as well as from his previous web hotel. The presence of blatant anti-Semitism on the platform, and the fact that the company itself has on several occasions disseminated anti-Semitic content, has seen Gab increasingly being described as a haven for right-wing extremists rather than a Twitter with less content moderation.
Parler has not had the same problem. The company’s CEO, John Matze, describes the app with words like “neutral” and “with a focus on user rights” and distances himself from far-right conspiracy theories like QAnon. Unlike, for example, Twitter, the flow is not algorithmically controlled, but all posts are presented chronologically and users can choose whether to filter controversial content.
– Parler tries, a bit ironically, to promote itself as more secure than other platforms. Among other things, they say they are tougher on cures and non-human behavior than other social networks. In many ways, it is very similar to other social networks, except when you push for freedom of opinion to be maintained more strongly, says Sebastian Bay.
It’s no secret that Parler is primarily aimed at people on the right. An early proponent was the influential conservative Candance Owens. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the funders of the site is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father Robert previously funded the right-wing populist news site Breitbart, the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, and not least the presidential election campaign. of Donald Trump.
The accounts that a user is recommended to follow when starting an account on Parler are also dominated by right-wing organizations, such as Christian satire site The Babylon Bee and think tank PragerU. But the British tabloid Daily Mail also has an account on the platform.
Above all, Parler has succeeded in what sites like Gab and Mewe have failed: to get conservative influencers to start using the platform. For those who follow American politics, all of Parler’s top profiles are well known: Senator Ted Cruz and Fox News anchors Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have started Parler accounts and are actively posting.
“Uncensored and unfiltered,” Sean Hannity wrote. this week on Twitter and linked to a clip when he and fellow host Laura Ingraham urge viewers to switch to Parler.
So Parler is not alone attracted people excluded from other sites, such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who also has an account at Parler. In almost all cases, however, these profiles continue to be published on Twitter and Facebook as usual, despite the fact that, for example, the presenter Maria Bartiromo in connection with the creation of her Parler account stated that she would leave Twitter.
According to Sebastian Bay, it will also be difficult for Parler to attract a critical mass of users. Continuing to exist on the major platforms Facebook and Twitter will continue to be important in the future, says Bay.
– They have great competitive advantages and blocking effects. What today corresponds to the phone book is on these platforms. It’s easy to say you should move, but without a presence there, it’s very difficult for you to reach a lot of people, says Sebastian Bay.
So far, no major Swedish political influencers have moved to Parler and no specialized alternative technology platforms have been created in Sweden. Instead, the Russian social media site VK has come to function as a gathering site for Swedish right-wing extremists who have been banned, for example, from Facebook, which Aftonbladet reported on as early as 2017.
The stated premise for Parler and other alternative sites or platforms is that Facebook and Twitter would restrict or “censor” conservative views in various ways. However, the question is whether that description is really correct: it is precisely the right-wing opinions that continue to gain the most circulation on, for example, Facebook.
New York Times reporter Kevin Roose created the Twitter account in July “Top 10 of Facebook”, which publishes every day a list of the accounts that published the ten publications that received the most comments, reactions and shares on Facebook in the last 24 hours. The list is often made up almost exclusively of conservative American debaters, including Dan Bongino.
https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/1329461600944857089
When DN finished similar reviews For social media in Sweden, the result has been the same: the engagement of the right-edge pages is significantly higher than that of the left-edge pages.
The question is also whether Parler, who has so far only attracted users from the right, can retain users who have flocked to the platform recently.
“If there is no one to fight and there are no journalists or media to react to, how long will it last?” Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the New York Times last week.
Read more: QAnon: the conspiracy theory that took hold in the US political elite.
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