Where the crazy racist live...

I tried Parler, the social media app where hate speech thrives

Bryan C. Parker

While the Bay Area hosts juggernauts Facebook and Twitter, neighboring Nevada is home to social media upstart Parler, headquartered in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas. Fear and loathing are apt descriptors for the site, where the rancor of the far-right thrives. Beneath the thin guise of the app’s self-proclaimed emphasis on “free speech” lies the ability to say not just a hypothetical “anything,” but specifically to share racist slurs and violent threats toward political opponents. On Parler, Nazi imagery flourishes, death threats abound, and conspiracy theories reign.

Following Twitter and Facebook’s recent efforts to label false and misleading posts, users flocked to Parler, which has occupied a top 10 spot on both the Android and Apple app stores in recent weeks. Parler users bemoan big tech, but the app’s funding comes at least in part from Rebekah Mercer, daughter of Robert Mercer, a billionaire with a history of data-mining. While the decrease in conspiracy theory posts on traditional social media due to this splintering means a more refreshing scroll for many of us, what’s happening inside that growing bubble of angry social media users over on Parler? I wanted to find out.

To sign up for an account, you need an email and a phone number. Parler promises not to sell your data but makes no guarantees as to how they will use that data themselves. I register a disposable email but hedge on forking over my number for a service in which I have no long-term interest. The app won’t accept a Google Voice number, so I snag a real-life number from an app called Burner for $1.99 and I’m up and running. I choose a nondescript username suited to lurking.

Similar in structure to Twitter, Parler is a microblogging site where users follow others to receive a curated feed of posts. It doesn’t require mutual adding like a platform such as Facebook, but users can make their feed private. As on Reddit, Parler offers the option to vote posts up or down.

On the app’s first splash screen, I’m prompted to “Personalize your Parler Experience,” with a list of promoted accounts. One hundred percent of the users are right-leaning political figures — mainstream politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (an early adopter of the platform) and pundits like Fox News host Sean Hannity and documentary filmmaker/conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza. I select a few of the less fringe options to start getting a sense of the content across the app.

I’m immersed in an onslaught of posts decrying the result of the 2020 election, Joe Biden, Democrats and liberals in general. “Another sign we won this presidential election: Republicans have picked up 12 House seats,” wrote Dinesh D’Souza. Another user posted, “At this moment there’s a censorship and psychic war going on against our values, rights, freedom and ethics … patriots voices are all being silenced. Act now, call your State Representatives, and demand action against election fraud.” A more caustic post uses slurs like “f—got” and “soy boy” directed at a photo of someone celebrating Joe Biden’s win in Washington, D.C. In this alternative reality, the majority consensus firmly believes Donald Trump will be declared the winner of the 2020 election any day now.

Profile bios and comments boast about being “Twitter banned,” a badge of honor on Parler. The crowd is pissed at Fox News for naming Biden president-elect, leading one user to write, “Fox News is dead.” You won’t find links to the New York Times or CNN. Any rant accompanied by a source is often Newsmax, or even more fringe sites I’ve never heard of, like TheRightScoop.com.

It takes just 15 minutes to come across blatant antisemitism — a proxy of the Nazi flag, with the swastika tweaked slightly to display “45,” in reference to President Trump. The caption: “Are you NATIONALISTS or are you COMMUNISTS? RISE PEOPLE RISE. Defeat the democratic fraud!” Generally likening a leader to Nazis would be a clear rebuke, but here the comparison is clearly praise. Another person who has stylized their username to look like the Nazi SS symbol posts a photo of a living room covered in swastikas. Parler seems to expect such bad behavior. A “violations” section is easily accessible in the side menu. Users have 20 points, as one might on a driver’s license in some states, and violations result in point reductions until your account is suspended.

To force the app to deliver a more palatable stream of content, I type in #cutedogs, which yields a measly 28 posts. I fawn over a few adorable pups who distract me briefly from abject existential panic. For context, #wwg1wga (the abbreviation for Q-Anon’s slogan “Where We Go One We Go All”) has 355,223 posts. Typing in #seahawks (my NFL allegiance) returns only 118 posts but does lead to an account that appears to be a reasonably well-coordinated blog called Sportsnaut covering major American sports. However, the interactions are incredibly minimal.

I browse some of the popular hashtags, and a majority of the posts are obvious spam — all the same format of a bikini-clad woman promising nudes if you click a link. At first, I thought the scroll was stuck in a reloading loop, but the same few accounts had just posted hundreds of times, clogging up the feed. The spam is surprising, since Parler boasts about cutting down on bots through verification options. A user can get verified by scanning their driver’s license and passport and making a live video of their face, which sounds like an email-from-a-wealthy-prince-level scam. Did I mention the app has ties to Cambridge Analytica?

These substantial problems of the app overshadow its more fundamental issues. The design is clunky and cluttered. It doesn’t display media well, and can lag noticeably loading posts or when posting. You have to click to expand conversations to read any comments, which emphasizes initial posts rather than fostering discourse, seemingly at odds with the app’s entire mission of free speech. The up and down voting ensures that divergent ideologies are buried, while sanctioned opinions rise to the top. In essence, Parler just doesn’t work for people trying to be normal people on the platform. You’re there for the right-wing rhetoric or else there’s really no reason to be there. I mean, Parler’s equivalent retweet function is called … wait for it … an “echo.”

I can’t see Parler as anything other than an echo chamber, and it appears that the app leans into rather than conceals that fact, from the overtly right-wing user recommendations to their “echoes.” This approach is confusing. Usually, social media’s interest lies chiefly in what a user likes and wants, and it serves more of that to them. But Parler wants to sell users something from the onset, via a one-directional, top-down method. For comparison, I made a new Twitter account, where I was first asked for interests like sports, music, news, arts, as well as a plethora of subcategories, rather than straight to right-wing content creators. The suggested users for me were also much more diverse, including Travis Scott, Elon Musk, Ariana Grande, Joe Biden, and President Trump’s @POTUS account. Parler seems to lack the diversity to entice or maintain an assortment of users.

Now I knew what was happening on Parler, but I didn’t fully understand what was happening on Parler. Why would someone knowingly shut themselves in an echo chamber? Dr. Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, a digital media expert and professor at the University of North Texas, sees a trend toward “digital spaces that are intentionally more enclaved.” Vickery believes that such spaces “cater to particular interests, demographics, ideologies and values,” but she takes issue with the concept that more free speech exists there.

“Algorithmic objectivity doesn’t exist,” she explains, indicating that by nature an algorithm’s entire function is to take some things and leave others behind. This function comes embedded with bias, and not necessarily political bias. Vickery says, “Just the process of leveling and sorting data so that it can give you what you want is already subjective.” A veteran educator, she likens a social media platform to a classroom, saying, “If I have one really talkative student, I might need to limit how much that student can speak so that there are opportunities for other students to speak.” In other words, unlimited access to speech may ultimately stifle free speech.

Vickery also makes an important point about these newly created spaces and the rhetoric found there. Even if a site’s terms of use prohibit hate speech (which Parler's do not appear to), “this is regulated on these platforms through people reporting it,” which becomes more challenging “as you move into more insular spaces.” Even users not wholly comfortable with some of the app’s extreme rhetoric may let it slide because they aren’t bothered enough to flag it. Americans who feel outcast might feel more accepted on Parler, but it also prevents them from seeing alternative viewpoints and furthers an even more skewed worldview.

Research psychologist Dr. Susan Broyles Sookram says, “The siloing of social media seems to create stronger in- and out-group effects politically.” When a viewpoint becomes associated with an identity, and it gets challenged, it “activates a huge sense of cognitive dissonance,” says Sookram. When someone presents a spin that allows that challenging perspective to be rejected, Sookram says, “that gives them an out where the brain is literally flooded with pleasurable chemicals.” That feeling nearly equates to an addiction, which bodes poorly for bridging divides and finding common political ground as alternative social media apps gain users.

Though the name Parler is borrowed from the French word meaning “speak,” I didn’t find much speaking across the app. Among all the shouting, denigrating, spamming and self-promoting, a question of how to foster free speech still looms painfully large.