When it comes to social media, there’s finally a new game in town.
Today, Queenie Wong at CNET is looking at an emerging rival platform for Twitter called Parler that reportedly overtook Jack Dorsey’s project, as well as Reddit, to become the top iPhone news app last week.
Wong’s reporting on Parler shows that it was created largely to deal with what its founders call a lack of transparency in social media as a whole.
It also offers a viable alternative for folks who have been kicked off of Twitter.
“Twitter permanently booted Laura Loomer in 2018 for violating the site’s rules against hateful conduct,” Wong writes. “But that didn’t stop the right-wing provocateur from finding an alternative platform. That year, Loomer joined … Parler, where she now has more than 574,000 followers. Loomer, who’s also barred from Facebook and its photo service Instagram, describes herself in all capital letters as the ‘most banned woman in the world’ on her Parler profile.”
So, Loomer, plus a bunch more people, got in their virtual boats and piloted themselves to freer waters.
That Venn diagram includes more than a few conservatives who are starting to generally worry that the big two, Facebook and Twitter, are not amenable to their kinds of political speech.
For example, although the makers of Parler claim the platform is intended to be non-partisan, it looks like Parler has benefited from the Rand Paul bump.
Other conservatives have also taken to the Parler waves to multicast with they don’t feel comfortable putting on Twitter – or alternately, what Twitter doesn’t feel comfortable with them putting on Twitter.
At Parler, users have to be 13 years old, and various kinds of content rules do apply – this isn’t another 4chan.
What it is, though, is an alternative to the monolithic reach of Twitter and Facebook, which is curious and, to many, unfortunate, in the digital age. Free speech advocates may ask why we don’t have a dozen platforms for social media instead of mainly just two.
With that in mind, does Parler point to a future fracturing of Facebook and Twitter’s virtual monopoly on popular social media?
We’ll see…
