Mod note:
I removed a “Twitter/FB are just as bad” defence from this topic. I’ll link to what I wrote above about that:
There are very many conservative voices still on Facebook and Twitter. However, far less of them are engaging in Illegal speech (speech that is not protected and you can go to jail for) because the Twitters and Facebooks of the world have a moderation system to take this stuff down.
Parler could have implemented this, but instead they chose to allow Illegal speech to remain on their platform along with all these conservative voices. They were deplatformed because of this illegal speech, not because of the conservative voices on the platform.
This was not “political voices” that were “disagreed with” - this was calls for the execution of the Vice President of the United States by verified influencers on the platform that no action was taken against. This was the hashtag #6mwe (6 million wasn’t enough) trending on the platform with no actions taken to restrict it.
Monsterous bigots post everywhere. That’s not what’s at issue here. What’s at issue is what Parler would do (or not do) about it, and Boing Boing has posted more than enough stories about the heavy-handed levels of censorship FB/Twitter/Youtube employ that trying to make the argument that they are as willing to leave hate speech up as Parler was is a failure to research the source material at best, bad faith at worst.
Parler did this to themselves.
