Parler, 'The Free-Speech App,' Found Out Just How Awful Social Media Is
The terrible thing about social networks is that other people use them, too. It's especially a problem for prominent conservative personalities, who are routinely publicly flogged by mainstream social networks for such innocent acts as harassing people and saluting Nazis. Wait, no, they're actually politely warned and occasionally banned.
Whatever the case, it's been clear for a long time that conservatives need their own social network where freedom of speech still means something. First, there was Gab, which predictably fell out of favor soon after its 2016 debut because the only people who used it were a handful of creeps. It's now mostly notable for its involvement in a 2018 hate crime. The latest one is Parler, championed by Senator Ted Cruz as a "platform gets what free speech is all about" and wouldn't censor its users.
Spoiler: They immediately started censoring users. It turns out that if you let people say whatever they want, they'll mostly expel dicks and poop, if this list of rules (all of them implicitly followed by an unspoken "Come on, guys") is anything to go by.
It was doomed from the start by its sluggish verification process, allowing trolls to sign up under the names of prominent figures and then letting their troll flags fly.
But you can't just expect people not to adopt usernames like (the frankly tame) CumDumpster if you're going to let them adopt usernames like CumDumpster. They're the frog, and we're a bunch of filthy-minded scorpions -- it's just humanity's nature.
The funny thing is that many of the things Parler has forbidden its users to do -- "unrelated comments like 'Fuck you'," obscene usernames -- aren't punishable offenses on Twitter. I personally follow one of my senators just to tell him to fuck off every time he tweets, as is my civic duty. In their effort to create a safe-space-free-space, they've just created the safest of spaces where they can shout racist dog-whistles into the void, which turns out to be an unpleasant echo.
Go ahead and spam Manna with Dumb and Dumber scenes on Twitter.
Top image: Unsplash/Jacob Townsend