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Comment by uncoder0 | Hacker News Reader

>"Obviously all of the insidious planning and hatred that presumably occurred on Parler is abhorrent. I think I can hate all of those things without believing that the site should be censored."

I have yet to see any evidence that the capitol protest was planned primarily on Parler. I have seen plenty of evidence that it was planned primarily on Facebook (that has since been deleted/hidden by Facebook). You'd think if the goal was to punish or curtail such events Facebook would be getting at least similar treatment as Parler.

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Difference being that Facebook moderates content. This was the Apple complaint against Parler. Parler has publicly touted itself as the 4chan/8chan of social media apps. It is more that the culture of Parler is being rejected by the App Store gate keepers and not so much the vehicle enabling it.

Parler absolutely moderated content - many went on and posted something left leaning and had their content quickly removed. It was moderated by ideology instead of by any attempt at "decency" though.

I haven't heard this. Can you point to examples of this?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/parler-safe-space-fo...

> Still, there is a set of community guidelines and a user agreement, which prohibits deliberately obscene usernames, pornography, and threats to kill others. Meaning even Parler’s free speech absolutists have some vague rules for what they deem as too offensive. “When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED,” wrote Matze during a consequential exchange on his site, shattering the hopes of conservatives and libertarians everywhere who dream of a social media site with a completely laissez-faire ToS.

TechDirt ran an article on it: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

There are plenty of individuals claiming they were banned for posting left content or disagreeing with right wing content. Hard to know how much is trolling or not, but I think that's kind of the point. If it is the home of free speech, who is Parler to determine their intent?

it’s standard practice for many certain political forums, If you don’t espouse the same beliefs, you will get banned.

Their counter argument is that if you bring up conservative view points, the liberal echo chambers ban you. So they should be able to do it in their free speech spaces.

This also unfortunately hides the fact that hate speech, dog whistles, saying that COVID is a hoax, pushing for falsehoods and getting upset about not being able to do so, is why you get banned.

> This also unfortunately hides the fact that hate speech, dog whistles, saying that COVID is a hoax, pushing for falsehoods and getting upset about not being able to do so, is why you get banned.

I fail to see how this any different from any other social media site??

Again, NOTHING that Parler did is any different from any other social media platform that is a total cess pool of what you just described. The difference is, the speech was predominantly conservative in nature. Which leads me to believe the decisions to remove the app were purely a political decision - which is an incredibly dangerous precedent to start.

Which is why it was started.

Because all of the people who defended Twitter from suppressing conservative voices told them if they don't like it, they can start their own network.

Which is exactly what they did.

Now THOSE people who told them to start their own network so they could do as they please, are up in arms because they didn't moderate their content enough for their liking?

Seriously, that's asinine.

That's a fair point. As a self dubbed 'free-speech' platform I'd assume they'd shy away from the excessive moderation seen on Facebook.

Did you look? Here's the first result in a search [1]

[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/06/trump-riot-twi...

The article linked does mention Parler, but focuses more heavily on YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter and Redit.

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