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by newacct583 1987 days ago
Parler had a moderation process. It verifiably failed to actually prevent violent rhetoric (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution days before the crowd took the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!").

In this interview (audio, but there's a transcript) Matze details some of it, and basically explains that violent-but-popular content is going to be left up because of "free speech": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
2 comments
itsoktocry 1987 days ago
>It verifiably failed to actually prevent violent rhetoric

How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.

And if that's the baseline, Facebook and Twitter have far more objectionable content yet-to-be-removed.

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newacct583 1987 days ago
> How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.

Look around you. Right here on HN, we discuss politics. We're doing it right now. Yet... no violence. And the reason is moderation. The moderators remove violent commenters and the community shuns them. Clearly HN/dang have been able to "prevent violent rhetoric". It works.

And Facebook and Twitter are doing OK right now. Both were very late to the game, but are engaged in a heroic effort right now to clean up their communities. In fact it was something of a left-Twitter running gag over the past week to giggle at conservatives complaining about their follower count suddenly dropping.

But Parler did no such thing. So outside forces had to apply the moderation.

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wrycoder 1987 days ago
Parler had deleted several of Wood's posts, and a number of users had used the "report" function to raise the flag to Parler management. I think he was close to being banned.
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newacct583 1987 days ago
That particular post was still up when the site went down, I believe. I mean, sure, it's possible they would have gotten better. But this wasn't an abstract issue, we'd just had an attack on congress and there was (and remains) serious worry that something similar or worse would happen at the inauguration. Certainly the rhetoric on the site had not significantly moderated in the few days between the capitol riot and their ban.
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