The rising popularity of alternative social media app Parler is raising concerns over the spread of misinformation and potential for radicalizing users on a platform that\u2019s taken a hands-off approach to regulating content.<\/p>\n
The app has been boosted by conservatives, surging since Election Day, as Republicans amp up allegations of anti-conservative bias from social media giants Twitter and Facebook, which have clamped down on pro-Trump election misinformation.<\/p>\n
Experts warn that a total lack of content moderation could prove harmful beyond creating political echo chambers and further spreading conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnytime you take a laissez faire approach to moderation \u2014 you say, \u2018anything goes\u2019 right up until actual threats of real world violence \u2014 that creates a huge space for some really problematic things to happen,\u201d said Bret Schafer, a fellow focusing on disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2018, Parler describes itself as \u201ccommitted to free speech\u201d and boasts that it \u201cdoes not censor content based on politics or ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company has criticized Facebook and Twitter over their approaches to moderating content, with Parler\u2019s rhetoric largely echoing that of Republican lawmakers who have accused social media giants of silencing conservative voices and points of view.<\/p>\n
While Facebook and Twitter said in the lead-up to the election that they would label content that prematurely declares victory, Parler\u00a0released a memo<\/a>\u00a0detailing plans to \u201chost unfiltered content during the 2020 election season.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCan we now move everybody from Twitter to Parler?\u201d Fox News host\u00a0Sean Hannity<\/a>\u00a0said on air<\/a>\u00a0earlier this week. \u201cCan we just make the shift together? Just say, \u2018goodbye, Twitter. See ya at Jack [Dorsey]. Nice try.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The rising popularity of alternative social...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29165,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29164\/revisions\/29165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}