[tehjoker]

I'm not totally sure what to think, but aren't many violent acts planned on Facebook and Twitter? Wasn't the insurrection at the capitol? Yet, the big boys aren't paying the price, it's the competitor that suddenly got popular that wasn't able to be influenced by politicos.

[brandmeyer]

> it's the competitor that suddenly got popular.

You're omitting a key detail. This competitor was getting popular specifically because of their promise not to remove such violent content, while Facebook and Twitter were steadily ramping up efforts to remove it from their platforms.

[michaelmcdonald]

The difference: FB is alerted to those posts, they (eventually) take them down / close the communities. Parler was straight up telling AWS to piss off.

[tehjoker]

Yea this is valid, I'm just terrified of the tech companies having this kind of power to just censor people and shut down competitors at will. They were kind of justified this time, but given corona, all our communications are flowing through these guys. They're not neutral, nor accountable, and they are very powerful.

They also just demonstrated the ability to collaborate to destroy a company they didn't like without some kind of legal order forcing them to.

[jcranmer]

Twitter definitely made moves to crack down on this stuff (after all, that's why Parler thinks it was poised to gain a lot of traffic). Parler complains about the "Hang Mike Pence" hashtag, but omits the fact that Twitter in fact did kill the hashtag.

Parler's sin was basically to attempt no moderation whatsoever, and even after it was clear that several individuals intended to make good on their threats (see the invasion of the Capitol), did not seem to be willing to make any serious attempts to moderate content. See ¶6 of https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664... for some discussion.

(Note that the executive's name in that declaration is redacted because (s)he is legitimately concerned for violence should their name be made available to the public.)

[newacct583]

> but aren't many violent acts planned on Facebook and Twitter?

Shouldn't anyone who plans a violent act on Facebook or Twitter (or Reddit, or HN, or wherever) be banned?

Note that both of those sites are ALSO in the process of desperately cleaning up their violent sub-communities. There's a somewhat humorous running gag right now of conservative thought leaders suddenly complaining that their follower counts are going down.

And as far as Parler specifically: it didn't "suddently get popular" in a vacuum. Parler absolutely was functioning as a kind of "ban evasion mechanism for Twitter". People who got tossed from Twitter (generally, yes, for violent rhetoric) would find a home there, and bring there followers. There was very little organic growth, it was effectively all cannibalized from Twitter.