Parler

Quora Answer : Does the creator of the app Parler believe in his app to be a free to speech platform and does not data mine like other data mining platforms?

Jan 12

The people with the money behind Parler are the Mercers. (Same people who funded Cambridge Analytica and sponsored Breitbart news and Steve Bannon etc.)

So undoubtedly Parler is their attempt at a plan B for when Twitter and Facebook etc. are finally shamed into kicking the far and further right off their servers. That's probably their priority. Not making a lot of money.

OTOH, alleged leaders of the far-right seem happy to exploit their followers. Look how Donald Trump has been taking every opportunity he can get to try to scam money off his naive supporters.

So I wouldn't put it past Parler to ALSO be trying to monetize its users by data-mining them. But as the Mercers have a tonne of money, that's probably not their main goal. Also, given the success of Sleeping Giants etc. Parler might find it harder to make a lot of money by selling advertisers access to a bunch of angry right-wingers. Brands who want to be seen as "respectable" won't go near it. And the economy of companies who are happy to be associated with it, while not trivial, is probably not huge enough to make use of the fine-grained segmentation tools that companies like Facebook are offering.

It will be interesting to see how Parler does. It's important for Facebook to have competition (and lose its dominant position in social networking etc.)

Right now, everyone should understand that Facebook is going to clamp down hard on far-right propaganda.

It should go without saying that I have no love for the far-right or Donald Trump, and am happy to see them go, BUT ... let's be honest. Facebook is going to purge the far-right now because a) Trump is gone so FB no longer has to make nice with his administration. And b) it wants to make sure that it's in tightly with the Biden government at a time when there are calls to break FB up.

Zuckerberg didn't just see the attack on the Capitol, have a crisis of conscience and think "enough is enough". He is doing what he can to defend his monopoly by getting in with the new administration. Similarly with Amazon, Twitter, Google and everyone else.

I welcome these companies taking a stand against a right-wing populism which has always been inclined towards violence and is increasingly angry enough to use it.

But these platforms shouldn't have this amount of power. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to kick bad people off their platforms. (They should.) But because they shouldn't be in the position of "de facto" gate-keepers to the public conversation in the first place.

Hopefully a lot of people are going to realize that now.