Parler Attracts Conservatives in Midst of Twitter Censorship

Paris Procopis lives in Milwaukee and is a contributing author to the Wisconsin Conservative Digest. Procopis is one of the 4 million active users on Parler.

Procopis made a Parler account because he was sick and tired of the censorship he believed was happening on sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

“They shouldn’t be allowed to censor – plain and simple,” said Procopis.

Procopis believes that these sites are deliberately censoring any right-leaning news outlets just because it goes against what the presumably left-leaning developers think.

“To control what people think, you have to control what they say,” said Procopis. 

Parler prides itself on being a censorship-free place for individuals to discuss ideas. However, as of right now, the site is dominated by right-leaning profiles, resulting in an echo chamber effect.

A lack of censorship can lead to deadly consequences, like in 2017 when Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar attacked the villages of the Rohingya and forced them to leave for Bangladesh.

The UN determined that Facebook had hastened this due to the platform it gave Buddhist nationalists.

“It was used to convey public messages but we know that the ultra-nationalist Buddhists have their own Facebooks and are really inciting a lot of violence and a lot of hatred against the Rohingya or other ethnic minorities,” said U.N Myanmar investigator Yanghee Lee in a statement. 

Now, as Twitter has taken to marking posts from elected officials as misleading, there is a partisan divide on whether they agree with this practice.

Seventy-one percent of Republicans disagree with this practice and 73% of Democrats agree with this practice, according to a poll done by Pew Research Center.

“I thought that was a big deal in May,” said Marc Tasman, a professor at UW-Milwaukee. “When Twitter quit saying it was newsworthy because it was the president saying it and they were like no it has the potential to hurt people.”

Tasman is currently teaching a course on Internet Culture at UW-Milwaukee.

“Part of Twitter’s rationale was that statements were unsubstantiated and basically false,” Tasman said.

Tasman said it was remarkable that Twitter and other social media sites distance themselves from being the publisher, that it is, in fact, the user who is the publisher and the site that gives them the platform to publish.

With that in mind, publishing a false statement that damages the character of someone is libel and is a punishable offense.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch believes that President Trump should face a libel suit because of his tweets about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

“By rights, President Donald Trump should face a massive libel judgment for repeatedly alleging MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered an office employee — a calculated, baseless lie. But while Trump’s Twitter sewage certainly meets the legal standards of libel, his position as president likely makes him untouchable by any such suit.” said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board. 

“Twitter still has every right to enforce its own standards of online behavior, and it should not matter how much Trump threatens and complains.”

However, Tasman still thinks that Twitter has overreached.

“I see lots of stuff getting taken down, even parodies of Trump’s tweets,” said Tasman. “Takedown first, ask questions later.”

Tasman believes that the people who felt silenced or got their feelings hurt by the actions Twitter has taken went to Parler, where they can say anything. 

“The way the first amendment works is that you can say whatever you want because there are consequences,” said Tasman. “So when you go into the public square and say ‘my arse is green and the sky is red,’ people would challenge you and say ‘put your pants back on, and no, the sky is blue, stop telling people the sky is red.’”

Tasman further believes that due to social media having anonymity we no longer have those mechanisms to prevent misinformation from spreading. 

“We don’t even know it’s people saying these things, if they’re bots or if it’s one person with multiple accounts,” said Tasman. “That kind of unchecked speech under the guise of free speech has the potential to be hurtful. I think it’s an erroneous conflation of the constitutional right to free speech and the broader ideology that Trumpism has promoted which is, you can’t tell me what to do, I’ll do whatever I want.”

Now, Parler has gotten more attention from news outlets covering this sudden influx of users. It’s clear that the right is tired of being fact-checked on social media and is instead moving to a platform where they can say whatever they want, unchecked.