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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a conservative but I support free speech. I installed it but the recommended people were Fox News pundits and politicians I didn’t care about. I like the idea of enabling users to hide speech they don’t like rather than a Speech Czar that determines what we are allowed to hear. But it will take some time for something like this to get a critical mass of users to make it work.

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Plenty of people on Reddit and TikTok are getting banned on Parler for posting liberal ideas [1].

It's not free speech. It's one-sided.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec...

Edit: this post is getting downvoted like crazy. People have strong opinions about this.

Do you have any evidence of this? From the article that seems like it violates their entire purpose for existing.

Updated my post with a link. I'll find more.

Wow that’s dumb if true, why even bother!?

Indeed, indeed. If it's not about the principled and unflinching protection of free speech, then what is it about?

I've said it about twitter and I'll say it about parler. Freedom of association is also a first amendment right. Speech is being exercised by the owners of a platform when they edit/curate/annotate posts, and association is being exercised when they ban/shadowban users.

It's all about justifications for being egotistical assholes and believing feelings are enough justification for policy. You can't reason with people who dismiss facts, empathy and consequences. You can reach the middle ground on issues that affect livelihoods of people and try to map where this may be improved.

> "Pretty much all of my leftist friends joined Parler to screw with MAGA folks, and every last one of them was banned in less than 24 hours because conservatives truly love free speech," one user recently wrote on Twitter.

It sounds like they were banned for being antagonistic assholes, not for being liberals.

It doesn't matter what they were banned for, it's still hypocritical for a platform apparently based around "free speech" to ban people for speech they don't agree with.

Spam and flood is not speech it's noise preventing people from having actual conversations.

I don't think it's hypocritical at all. The U.S. is based around free speech and we ban all of types speech for good reasons.

It obvious that "we want to allow someone to say anything they could say on twitter+(spout conspiracy theories and implicit/explicit racist shit)" is both freer than twitter, and not as free as previous+harass people.

I really don't think allowing right wing nuts to voice their opinion but not letting users harass each other makes a hypocrite?

I mean...that's kind of the reason a lot of these people got banned from Twitter/etc, too, being antagonistic assholes, not for being conservative. So kind of ironic if they and the platform are saying Parler is better because "free speech".

Upthread everyone is arguing that everything except imminent incitement to violence is free speech. Aren't mere insults free speech? Do you not like it when it's aimed at you?

"free speech" is just being used as a dog whistle for far right ideas in this case. These people are not behaving in good faith, don't bother engaging with them as if they were.

That's the point of "free speech" - I don't care how far right / left / in outer space your ideas are. You can say them, and I won't absorb the message if I don't care. It's the old saying about TV - if you don't like what's on, just change the channel.

That ends when you start inciting violence and promoting actions that can end other people's lives.

As it should. It's one thing to claim space lizards are controlling Facebook, it's another to start saying you want to shoot up busses full of Facebook workers.

Unconvincing? Replace "Facebook" with "Democrats" and you get worryingly close to Parler.

But there is another problem. These sites don't just happen. If they were bottom-up spontaneous forums - someone starting with phpBB and taking it from there - they'd be tolerable. (And likely less extreme.)

They aren't. These are deliberate attempts to farm and concentrate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of sentiments so they can be used as political leverage for certain interests.

They're not free speech at all - they're farmed speech.

That is the problem. The people who farm them are knowingly and maliciously using them to spread lies and enflame violent sentiment so they can profit from both, financially and politically.

No free speech is about only saying things I agree with!

parler is neither a free speech platform by design or a far right one, it's purely an attempt to create the fox version of twitter. their tos are highly dubious.

>dog whistle

to be reductive, yes far right and even fascist ideas would fall under the umbrella of free speech as would... literally everything else.

The fact that it's funded by the Mercers should give everyone pause for concern. They're rolling their own platform to do what Cambridge Analytica did without having to answer to anyone.

C/A as sinister manipulators has to be the most preposterous conspiracy theory to come out of the last 4 years -and that includes Qanon. They were a marketing company also known for the scoundrely manipulations of the.... LL Bean catalog. Maybe they sold some people flannel shirts. Terrible.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/huckster-hack-uk-govt-rep...

This is what I was curious about, though I'd like to see what they actually posted and whether they got banned for the speech or for harassing people or other behavior like that.

/r/TheDonald was notorious for brigading other subreddits, manipulating votes and other TOS violations then crying censorship when they got banned.

/r/parlerwatch is a bit of a mess, mostly examples of extreme right wing posts, but I believe there are a few examples of people getting banned.

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