New Republic
Jacob Silverman
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/jacob-silverman>/November 10, 2020
Postelection Misinformation and Massacre Threats on Conservatives’
Favorite New Social Media App
Ted Cruz and Dinesh D’Souza have huge followings on Parler, a
right-wing Twitter clone that has exploded in popularity since the
election.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
If you want to understand the state of social media, take a look at a
Twitter account called@FacebooksTop10
<https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10>. Maintained by/New York
Times/journalist Kevin Roose, the account tweets a daily list of the
top-performing posts on Facebook. Using data from Crowdtangle, a
Facebook-owned analytics firm, each day’s list is almost invariably
filled with the names of conservative personalities and media networks:
Ben Shapiro, Kayleigh McEnany, Steven Crowder, Fox News, Franklin
Graham, Breitbart, and so on. The list is an antidote
toconservatives’unfounded claim that their content is “shadowbanned” or
intentionally suppressed by large social networks. (It is also a
reminder that Facebook’s American user baseskews conservative
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-the-social-media-home-of-the-right>.)
In recent months, one name has dominated Roose’s list: Dan Bongino, a
former secret service agent and thrice-failed congressional candidate
who has ascended the digital commentariat to become one of the most
popular political personalities in the country. His podcast regularly
tops the charts, and he has 6.6 million followers between Twitter and
Facebook. Having leveraged his way to fame on Silicon Valley’s
monopolist products, he now, like many conservatives, claims he is being
targeted by them for ideological censorship. (He has claimed his
Facebook account may soon be taken down.) Not coincidentally, he’s
alsobecome <https://www.outkick.com/dan-bongino-rumble/>aninvestor
<https://www.protocol.com/parler-right-wing-app>in alternative social
networks, including a video site called Rumble and a Twitter clone known
as Parler, both of which emphasize their commitment to free speech,
minimal content moderation, and independence from Big Tech.
You may have heard of the latter company already, for one of two
reasons: Over the weekend, Parler became the most downloaded app in the
country, a position it was still holding as of Tuesday morning. It’s
also the app in which Lang Holland, the police chief of Marshall,
Arkansas, on Fridaycalled
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/arkansas-police-resigns-parler.html?referrer=masthead>for
his fellow users to join him in traveling to Washington, D.C., to “fight
our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated
in this coup? We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist B.L.M.
and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!” Holland added,
“Death to all Marxist Democrats. Take no prisoners leave no survivors!!”
He has since resigned.
Founded in 2018 and surging since this summer, when it at one point
gaineda million users
<https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/john-matze-parler-ceo-founder-twitter>in
a week, Parler has been adopted by practically every media personality
and politician of note on the right, including some you might have
forgotten. (Milo Yiannopoulos, banned from Twitter and polite society
for his pedophilia apologetics, uses Parler to promote his paid video
appearances on the service Cameo.) Some of them are racking up huge
follower counts: 1.8 million for Bongino, 2.9 million for Ted Cruz, 1.3
million for Dinesh D’Souza. Posting many times per day (often by simply
syndicating their tweets), they attract thousands of “echos,” the site’s
equivalent of a retweet, “upvotes,” and comments.
Promising a boisterous public square, Parler’s appeal is based on a
myth: that conservatives are uniquely targeted for “censorship” by major
tech platforms and that some freer digital pasture needs to be
cultivated. That such censorship can only be done by governments, and
not by corporations implementing terms of service agreements, never
enters into the discussion; the point is rather to emphasize the
supposed liberal intolerance that has long been a key part of the
conservative movement’s victim narrative. The truth is otherwise:
Several revealing articles, including by/The Wall Street Journal/
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-mark-zuckerberg-learned-politics-11602853200>and/The
Washington Post/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/01/facebook-election-misinformation/>/,/have
reported that Facebook often goes out of its way to please conservative
celebrity users—holding off-the-record meetings with pundits like Ben
Shapiro, withholding warnings for influential conservatives who post
disinformation, arranging dinner between Mark Zuckerberg and President
Trump. The notion, then, that Facebook plans to ban someone like Bongino
seems improbable. He is, after all, one of the most powerful draws on a
site that values engagement above all else.
How Bongino became so popular on Facebook is an unsettled mystery. He’s
told/The New York Times/
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/technology/dan-bongino-has-no-idea-why-facebook-loves-him.html>that
he barely looks at analytics and has no idea why his material is so
popular. In any case, now he’s sprinkling his viral magic over Parler,
whose servers have been overwhelmed in the last week, causing the app to
crash repeatedly. Whether Parler can solve its technical issues—the app
itself is slow, buggy, and a little clunky in its design—will go a long
way to determine whether it can scale up and become something other than
the next Gab (a little-used Twitter alternative with a strong
ideological bent, whose user base could be politely characterized as
bigoted and violent).
With some rules regarding pornography, gore, and illegal material,
Parler is a tamer culture than Gab. But Parler is disturbing in its own
way, particularly as Republican voters and politicians refuse to
acknowledge the results of the presidential election. Parler’s
Trump-obsessed user base lives in its own epistemic bubble, where every
unfounded accusation of voter fraud, every claim of Democratic perfidy,
and every fantastical Trump boast is axiomatically true. Forsaking most
mainstream news outlets, the app offers links to obscure, fly-by-night
news sites orcultish propagandists like/T//he//Epoch Times/
<https://newrepublic.com/article/155076/obscure-newspaper-fueling-far-right-europe>/./With
no fact-checking and minimal algorithmic curation, Parler ostensibly
empowers users to decide for themselves what to believe, and its user
base has decided that Joe Biden stole the presidential election and that
they have all been wronged.
In short, what Parler lacks is any truth quotient at all. You can scroll
for hours and barely confront anything approaching a verifiable fact. It
is a cauldron into which conservative personalities like Mark Levin,
Sheriff David Clarke, and the QAnon-supporting Congresswoman-elect
Marjorie Taylor Greene can pour a bitter stream of rhetoric about a
stolen election, a hoax virus, and the many ways they have been betrayed
by their political enemies. After just a day with Parler, I came away
stunned and depressed and grateful for its occasional outages, when I
would return to Twitter—a flawed, addictive platform that at least
aspires, however ham-fistedly, to create a consensus reality based on
truth. What I learned from my brief time on Parler, though, is that this
consensus reality is gossamer-thin, a hallucination we agree to share.
Plug yourself into another feed, another timeline, and your view of the
world may become as warped as those on Parler.
Themillions of people flocking to Parler
<https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54873800>in recent weeks have come
as they are. Years of lies and disinformation by right-wing politicians
and personalities have predisposed these users to believe that Twitter
and Facebook censor conservatives and that nothing the Democrats or the
establishment media says is true. Parler is their safe space from all
that. And those politicians and personalities are meeting them there.
Some, like Senator Cruz, see an opportunity to target the Republican
Party’s Trumpian base. Others, like D’Souza, see an opportunity to grow
another social media tentacle with which togrift that base
<https://newrepublic.com/article/148645/dinesh-dsouza-grifter-chief>.
And there’s Bongino, whose investments are paying off. While his hot app
rakes in users in the wake of the election, he’s still posting away on
the platform that so oppresses him—reaping the benefits of the latter to
promote the former. “It’s happening,” hewrote
<https://www.facebook.com/dan.bongino/posts/3718306248262109>on Facebook
on Tuesday. “The social media revolution is going down, right now,
before your eyes. My company, Parler (the free speech alternative to
Twitter), blew past Twitter and the tech tyrants in the App Store and is
currently the most downloaded app in the world.” As of Tuesday morning,
the post had 74,000 likes.
Jacob Silverman is the author of/Terms of Service: Social Media and the
Price of Constant Connection/.
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