Just build your own platform, but wait, not like that! Liberal media and commentators condemn conservatives for abandoning censorious Big Tech platforms for Parler.
Conservatives launched an exodus to free speech platform Parler after Twitter’s latest wave of censorship during the Fall 2020 election. Now the liberal media are doing everything they can to condemn Parler and its new community amid its meteoric rise. The Atlantic lamented that Parler hosts a “frenzied” level of “conspiracy-mongering” amid a contested election. Yahoo News slammed the new social media platform. In a headline the outlet alleged that Parler is “bringing together mainstream conservatives, anti-Semites and white supremacists.”
Yahoo News, however, explained why liberals truly fear Parler. Unlike other platforms, mainstream conservatives appear to have given Parler their blessing:
“Parler, in contrast, gained a reputation for catering to mainstream conservatives thanks to a handful of high-profile early adopters like Brad Parscale, Candace Owens and Sen. Mike Lee. As a result, in 2020 when Twitter began labeling misleading Trump tweets about possible fraud in absentee and mail-in voting, politicians like Ted Cruz embraced Parler as the next bastion for conservative speech.”
While Parler is thus far not as large as the censorious Big Tech establishment platforms, its rise to popularity has accelerated as censorship has grown worse on other platforms. Parler “was the most downloaded app on both Android and Apple devices,” The Wall Street Journal reported Nov. 15.
Yahoo News
Yahoo News described Parler as the ultimate radicalization nightmare scenario for the conservative movement. Yahoo News accused Parler of “bringing together mainstream conservatives, anti-Semites and white supremacists as the social media platform attracts millions of Trump supporters.”
Extremism expert and Middlebury Institute Research Lead, Alex Newhouse panicked that Parler “has become a haven for far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists who are now interacting with the mainstream conservatives flocking to the platform.”
The Atlantic
The Atlantic lamented that Parler has become a platform where “conspiracy-mongering has grown only more frenzied as Trump makes state-by-state fraud allegations.” Amid a contested election, The Atlantic expressed its disgust that users can voice their concerns over “rumors of CIA supercomputers with secret programs to change votes, allegations of massive numbers of dead people voting, claims of backdated ballots, and assorted other speculations that users attempt to coalesce into a grand unified theory of election theft.”
The Washington Post
The Washington Post mocked conservatives for using Parler while still relying on anti-conservative Big Tech platforms to reach their audiences in a Nov. 23 piece. The Post quoted Data & Society researcher Robyn Caplan’s concerns that “people are putting themselves back into these private spaces, making them more circular in their logic and strengthening that internal division.”
The New York Times
New York Times columnist Andrew Sorkin hosted a Nov. 17 discussion at The New York Times’ virtual DealBook Summit, which included a discussion with Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates and others that touched on issues related to vaccine confidence.
“So you’re not taking a mainstream thing that's part of how a family stays in touch, and is used for a variety of things. You’re literally going over to, ‘Hey, what’s the craziest thing that anybodies saying?’” Gates said in the interview. “If you want Holocaust denial, hey Parler’s going to be great for you.”
CNN
UNC Chapel Hill Political ads lead researcher Bridget Barrett seemed disgusted by the fact conservatives have any safe-haven online to share their ideas. She joined CNN in an interview Nov. 15 and suggested that Parler would enable “the spread of hate, of false information” and allow for “terrorists, both foreign and domestic to recruit or plan.”
Barrett also warned that Parler could cause “harms” to “our democracy” itself because “people are going to believe that an election was unfair or illegitimate.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your local representative and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form and help us hold Big Tech accountable
