Parler, the "free speech" alternative to Twitter, breaks out the ban-hammer

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/29/parler-the-free-speech-al.html

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Wouldn’t they be more accurately named Paler? Or Pallor?

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What is “insober counsel?” a google search, using quotes, only returned this boingboing story.

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The lawyer was drunk when writing the agreement.

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Like everything, it’s deliberately vague and deniable, so that when called out on this shit, the response is a smirking shrug.

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I’ll take my schadenfreude where I can get it these days, thank you, and this hits the spot.

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In lawyerspeak: briefly unsober.

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It sounds like lefties are being mass-banned, but even right-wingers are getting hit with suspensions and post deletions if they talk critically about Parler at all, ironically. (Apparently their TOS amounts to, “We’ll ban you for whatever reason, if we feel like it” and that’s making some users nervous.)

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Great! Hopefully the awful, awful people like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul can go off to their own little conservative reservations where they can be awful to each other and leave the rest of us alone.
Based on the massive failure of Voat, I’m not holding out any hope though.

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Can someone explain that hero image to me?

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Freeze peach, I think.

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It is a circular paradox. When I googled it the only hit I got was your posting.

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Oh. Oh, god. That isn’t even a good dad joke.

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Oh, yeah, the social media choice of fascists must be a paragon of free speech.

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Negligently overserved.

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Parler’s Terms of Service are just the sort of thing a budding facist should appreciate

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My guess is that it will become a white supremacist, neo nazi cesspool like GAB or Voat, and then becoming a political liability to any congresscritter who got involved with it.

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im confused. if it’s free, how do they make any money. and if they’re just giving it away, isn’t that socialism?

or, do you mean it’s free from consequence? where people can post hateful things anonymously and never suffer the repercussions of attaching their real name to things? or where gab’s owners can avoid the responsibility of hosting content by mass shooters other violent white extremists?

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I know I’ve said this before, but this is why I think systems like mastodon are doomed, too.

As mastodon grows, it faces challenges from idealism and exactly these sorts of issues - the difference is, you can literally carve out huge swaths of mastodon from itself and run “independent” networks. But eventually, one of these nodes will be “too big to sever” from inertia and whatever their moderation ideals are will become the defacto ideals of the larger network (because otherwise you lose out on traffic most people want).

While some folks will be fine with this fact, believing they’ll just switch to a mastodon node with terms they like, they also miss the bigger consequence - that “whole” internet communities like facebook and twitter will never happen in that era. They are concluding that large-scale social media cannot exist peacefully. And I think that’s absolutely true. But this very fact speaks to why these “alternative” social media networks can’t get off the ground, either - it’s FOMO, social media edition - where do you go to ensure you get the information you want, without fear of missing out on someone who didn’t follow?

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