Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

When Twitter blocked the NY Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop for "hacked content" (and it wasn't factually disproven) and then was very petty and wouldn't unblock their account unless they deleted it, they lost whatever remaining trust they had left among right-wingers. Twitter has been slowly becoming more and more restrictive with many users cheering every ban of voices they disagreed with based on their ideology. Trump will probably be banned soon after he becomes a former president due to pressure from these same users and that could give Parler another influx of people.

I don't buy the argument that Parler needs celebrities and mainstream journalists to survive. Do Discord or Reddit have any? Yet they are doing fine. It will probably stay an echo-chamber and with fewer right-wingers, Twitter will become more of an echo-chamber. 8 days on the top of both app stores is a real momentum for Parler, let's see what they do with it.

When I saw Twitter's head of site integrity post this: "a phenomenally documented (and illustrated) study from @3r1nG about the ways that inauthentic social media accounts can be deployed to attempt to discredit an activist movement" and actually followed the link and saw that it was just a blog post about very obvious Antifa parody accounts and journalists falling for 4chan-like trolling, it became clear how bad is Twitter's company culture. They've been drifting around, not innovating, and their underperforming stock price reflects it well.

I've long held the opinion that Twitter and Facebook are just content in the medium, a bit like complaining about Sky, CNN or Fox on TV without looking at television itself and the impact it had on communication.

The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion".

Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way.

The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions.

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.

OP said:

> I've largely stopped using twitter due to the incessant politics, pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor

I'm not saying there aren't crazy takes in many corners of Twitter, but OP made a very far reaching claim here that I can't imagine holding water from my experience. The examples you bring up seem pretty fringe at best and not representative of common activity on Twitter.

To some extent the top voted post at the moment displays an inherent issue with a lot of people of these platforms. If the message is not pleasant to the reader, either they will engage with it in a reactionary way, or seek to further isolate themselves in information bubbles. (Notwithstanding abusive behaviour, which should not be tolerated)

The Electoral College and First-Past-The-Post distort the voters' interest in favour of a two-party system that encourages dogmatic thinking;

US voters want to express themselves but they lack information and critical thinking;

Not all information is good; Journalism is dying and the advertising business distorts people's perceptions for profit;

Taxes are needed but the lucid, rational discourse needed to make good public policy is absent;

It is hard to cultivate the citizenry in the above conditions; the political system is starved of courageous and intelligent politicians; panderers have a significant demographic to exploit.

tldr: US public discourse has attained a toxic equilibrium. But it is profitable for some.