Send Parler packing
Let’s say you run a saloon in the Old West.
And one night the boys are playing poker at the big table and Miss Linda, billed as the Siren of the Pecos, is singing “Jennie, the Flower of Kildare” on the lamplit stage. All of a sudden, an aged prospector pushes himself away from the bar and begins screaming that the Jews control the media and the Trilateral Commission has a secret plan to microchip all newborns.
Are you obliged to let him continue ranting, or can you frogmarch him through the batwing doors and into the dusty street?
In the digital sense, we should do the latter. Let this crank and any like-minded friends set up their own saloon if they can find enough backers to build it and liquor distributors comfortable with provisioning such a business, even after its patrons begin muttering darkly about their plans for the town tailor.
The frogmarched loon in this metaphor represents the thousands of former users of Parler, the social media site that was effectively scuttled a week ago after Amazon Web Services booted the self-professed free speech forum from its server farms — a direct result, the tech giant claimed, of Parler’s failure to police the myriad threats of violence (racial, sexual, political, what-have-you) that proliferated like kudzu on the site. Apple and Google scrubbed Parler’s app from their respective online shops for similar violations.
Now, I have no doubt that the coming week is going to be an eventful one — but not as eventful as the refugee Parlerpeople claim to be expecting on the sites to which they have fled. I do not, for example, think it likely that President Donald J. Trump will choose this week to bring “The Storm,” the day of judgment longed for by believers of the mutable set of conspiracy theories known as Qanon. I do not foresee the mass arrests of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence and others carried out by the U.S. Space Force.
The Qanon community is in the sort of crisis that afflicts religious movements that experience remarkable growth under a charismatic leader who is then yanked away, such as an elderly holy man who is supposed to be immortal but inconveniently dies. The movement might be able to move on by recontextualizing his immortality as a metaphorical as opposed to literal concept — which is fine, because religion is about faith, a belief in the numinous.
But politics, which runs on civic discourse, is supposed to be slightly more fact-based.
Here’s another metaphor: If the body politic was an actual corpus, the sort of anonymous hate speech and dangerous fictions that pass for the free
exchange of ideas on too many social media sites is cancer —a metastasis that, if left unchecked, will eventually shut down the functions necessary for survival. And the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol can be understood as the sort of X-ray your doctor never wants to share with you.
Many conservatives and even a few liberal voices are tut-tutting the demise of Parler as a sign that Big Tech’s power to constrain public speech is too great. Confronted with a mere sampler platter of the sort of rhetoric that abounded on the site before it was closed down — rape threats, calls for the lynching of Black and Jewish Americans, dreams of mass political violence of a scale that would make Timothy Mcveigh look like a piker — they will denounce them but note that, hey, free speech is messy. (Whether they would hold the same opinion if they or their family members were the targets of a threatened public burning is rarely asked.)
Of course, we’re not talking about free speech: No one is writing a law preventing these goofs from making ugly but otherwise legal claims. What Amazon is saying in the case of Parler, and Twitter and Facebook are doing in reference to their deplatforming of Trump, is that private companies are not obliged to provide an enormous megaphone for speech that violates its rules.
You can love the First Amendment and acknowledge that it isn’t a suicide pact. You can be concerned about the power wielded by Amazon, Google and Facebook and still hope to see conspiracists like Alex Jones sued into penury for what they’ve done to the families of the children who died in the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I write this as a journalist who for almost a decade had the responsibility of moderating comments on this newspaper’s Capitol Confidential blog — a duty that was rarely edifying and almost constantly soul-killing in the way it exposed the stupidity and ugliness of many of our commenters. (Also, their jokes were atrocious.)
Say what you will about the rise of Twitter, but it gave these people a new place to play. And for that I was grateful.