In Georgia, some Trump supporters turn to Speak, a platform for a parallel universe

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These social media platforms are always inundated with misinformation and hate – and many Big Tech critics on the left say the platforms are still not doing enough about it – but for Trump supporters, the actions Big is taking Tech to slow the spread of disinformation is tantamount to censorship. And some have started looking for alternative homes online.

“I can write anything on Facebook and it’s pulled, checked,” Kim Ashworth, a Trump supporter I met at a “Stop the Steal” event, told me to protest the outcome. election in Atlanta two weeks ago. “Everything about elections, Donald Trump, they take it.”

Two of Facebook’s fact-checkers who spoke to CNN said they were exposing misinformation on both sides, but at the moment there is just more misinformation on the right.
“Stop the Steal,” a movement that baselessly claims the election was stolen, is itself based on disinformation online and is being pushed by known peddlers of conspiracy theories, including former Trump aides Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.

Kari Tingley, who was also at the protest in Atlanta, told me that Twitter put a restriction on her account after sharing a post saying the masks were not effective in fighting the spread of Covid-19. This claim is false, but she believes it.

Twitter has most likely taken action against his account because it has rules against dangerous Covid-19 disinformation.

Both women told me that they are now using Parler – a platform that advertises itself as a “free speech social network”.
In the days following the election, Parler topped the charts of Apple and Android app stores, and the platform became a center of Trump-backed conspiracy theories, casting doubt on the election of the president-elect. Biden. Some of the hottest topics on the platform this week include #TrumpWon, #VoterFraud and #NeverQuit.

But while many Trump supporters I’ve spoken to have taken to alternative social media platforms, almost none of them have completely given up on services like Facebook and Twitter.

Some say they don’t want to cede space to the “other side,” some want to be able to see what the other side is saying and chat with them. And some know that, despite an increase in the popularity of apps like Talk, it could turn off and die – they don’t want to waste time networking on an alternate app that might fail. (There’s the technical side, too. Like any new service, Parler’s design isn’t as slick, and its load time isn’t as fast as Facebook.)

But the idea of ​​people trying other platforms because they think their conversations are being stifled on Facebook and Twitter could help explain Big Tech’s historical reluctance to crack down on disinformation.

Facebook and Twitter were slow to fight disinformation on their platforms, and only really did so after the general outcry following the 2016 election. Facebook and Twitter executives were dragged to Congress for explain how their platforms were used by people here and in Russia to promote division and spread lies. Secret Russian troll group posted bogus social media pages seen by millions of Americans and all of this apparently went undetected by tech giants

Ahead of the 2020 election, both companies created new policies, tweaked some algorithms, and added new features, such as how companies can report misinformation to users.

But it creates its own set of challenges and irritations against users who believe or are told by the President and other leading conservatives to believe in disinformation.

Now, every fact-check on Facebook and every tag on Twitter sets a new standard by which these companies will be judged.

In a recent Senate hearing, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked why Twitter flagged some Trump tweets as disinformation, but not a tweet from the Iranian Supreme Leader who defended the denial of the Holocaust.

It is a logical and fair question. And that means why these companies are desperate to become, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “arbiter of truth.” They see it as a slippery slope.

But Parler, and the people who join him, could also find themselves on a slippery slope.

Accounts with swastikas as profile photos and disgusting racist posts aren’t hard to find on Talk.

8Chan (now 8Kun) is an online messaging forum that also boasts of a bastion of free speech. In 2019, suspects in three mass shootings were linked to the platform.
Ben decker, Memetica CEO and online radicalization expert, says platforms that allow unbridled freedom of expression can become hubs of unbridled hatred.



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