Missed opportunity to call it "Racebook"
Don't forget MeinSpace
Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#32Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#33Is there any credible evidence of anti-conservative bias in FB or Twitter behavior? Can anyone point me at it?
Just take a look at the 10 top-performing link posts on Facebook each day. It's almost universally right to far-right leaning content. Whoever is perpetrating this anti-conservative bias must be spectacularly bad at their job. On the other hand, conservative victimhood appears to be a winning message in this political cycle.
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#34[flagged]
> Evil as the Left might be... Demonizing those you disagree with might make you feel good, and may even have short-term gains, but it’s a long-term loser: At each stage — win or lose — your side fragments and each side turns on the other, demonizing each other. Wins reach a natural maxima. Losses build on each other and accelerate the downward trend. Ultimately, the divisiveness of that approach is self-defeating. Y…
[flagged]
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody who cares about free speech is moving there. Free speech isn't restricted to the right is it? It's a fundamental human right.
What about Parler makes it better than FB with respect to free speech?
Why not try it, you'll see by yourself, you don't have to believe me.
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#36Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#37Is there any credible evidence of anti-conservative bias in FB or Twitter behavior? Can anyone point me at it?
It depends on what you consider anti-conservative. I've had a few friends mention that any links to something regarding "Benfords Law" (some forensic tool used for flagging potential fraud) gets an immediate "disputed" label. My guess is that algorithmic checks are flagging posts and conservatives are interpreting that as censorship.
Asserting that Benford's Law can be used to identify election fraud is a disputed, or just downright misleading, claim. Academic research has shown Benford's Law is not applicable to election tallies. (Also so does common sense when you think about it.)
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on what you consider anti-conservative. I've had a few friends mention that any links to something regarding "Benfords Law" (some forensic tool used for flagging potential fraud) gets an immediate "disputed" label. My guess is that algorithmic checks are flagging posts and conservatives are interpreting that as censorship.
Asserting that Benford's Law can be used to identify election fraud is a disputed, or just downright misleading, claim. Academic research has shown Benford's Law is not applicable to election tallies. (Also so does common sense when you think about it.)
No one said identify fraud, I said flag potential fraud.
There are some people who think it's a useful heuristic for uncovering potential oddities. Academics may not think so, but perhaps people who are professional analysts do.
Ultimately it comes down to who's side you want to take, and whether that's going to result in something akin to censorship.
Also, part of the reason I don't like commenting on any remotely political HN posts is that you get downvotes for saying perfectly reasonable things.
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#39Is there any credible evidence of anti-conservative bias in FB or Twitter behavior? Can anyone point me at it?
It depends on what you consider anti-conservative. I've had a few friends mention that any links to something regarding "Benfords Law" (some forensic tool used for flagging potential fraud) gets an immediate "disputed" label. My guess is that algorithmic checks are flagging posts and conservatives are interpreting that as censorship.
Sad to see downvotes here but the Benford's law thing is absolutely one of the weakest claims of fraud finding. It sounds good initially (tool for finding some kinds of fraud used to find other kinds of fraud) but it is almost entirely flawed with how it is used in this context. It truly is the best current example of statistics lying.
If you've seen the handy little graph of the first digit statistics that each candidate got in big cities, I dug into this a bit but the basic summary is precinct sizes aren't random at all and that messes up the entire premise of that analysis. I made a quick repo that altered the initial repo to show things like how just getting 70% of the vote would screw up benfords law in most counties [0].
Re: Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at FB, Twitter
#40> It is not yet clear that Parler is set to become the online home for the political right, but its leaders envision it as a free-speech-focused alternative to the giants of Silicon Valley I think it's important in these conversations to be clear, that might be what they claim to envision, it's demonstrably not what they actually envision. For example, Devin Nunes' Cow has already been banned. It didn't take long for…
To be fair, Parler views itself as a town square, certainly more free speech than Twitter, but less free than Gab and 8Kun. Having minimal standards on free expression is probably a good thing, lest they get kicked off all the app stores. When I tried Parler there were plenty of accounts that exist solely to troll Trump and his supporters, none of which were banned. Perhaps that Cow account was banned for reasons oth…
Yes we could go looking for complex theories about why Devin Nunes' Cow got banned, or we could just look at the fact that Parler is courting prominent republicans like... Devin Nunes.