Should we worry about Parler?
What happens in an echo chamber… spills out and affects us all.
Over the past week, major media outlets have covered the rapid growth of Parler, a Twitter alternative that markets itself as a First Amendment-oriented space where free speech can flourish. As journalists asked how to interpret Parler’s current popularity, Shannon McGregor and Bridget Barrett suggested two likely outcomes: in the long term, siloed social media sites tend to fail because interacting with media, non-political, and opposition accounts is part of what keeps users engaged—and if Parler becomes a platform defined by conservative political voices, it runs the risk of becoming an echo chamber and host to disinformation and increasingly radical or conspiratorial conversations.
Dr. McGregor spoke about these concerns with Good Morning America:
On CNN, Bridget Barrett underscored how readily those conversations can spill out of the echo chamber:
“You’ll also see online conspiracy theories that we worry about seen move offline, which we’ve already seen with Pizzagate and QAnon, recognizing that there are real-world harms that can come out of these places where hate develops.”
Ultimately, though, Dr. McGregor pointed out to Marketplace Tech that our main reason to worry has less to do with the app than what its current popularity says about the state of our political dialogue:
I don’t think it’s Parler that’s the problem, it’s our politics right now that’s the problem. And so in this moment, it’s being reflected by conservatives flocking to an app where there’s a promise of no moderation, because they feel like they’re being moderated in a biased way on other platforms. That’s just more reflective, I think, of our political moment than of some new frontier of zero-moderation social media in our future.
Coded Bias
Did you love The Social Dilemma? (Did you hate The Social Dilemma?)
Good news! Coded Bias is now available in wide digital release, and the New York Times called it “The most cleareyed of several recent documentaries about the perils of Big Tech.” Or as featured expert Joy Buolamwini puts it, “algorithmic justice—making sure there's oversight in the age of automation—is one of the largest civil rights concerns we have.”
In her appearance, Zeynep Tufekci added:
“The thing I actually fear is not that we're going to go down this totalitarian 1984 model but that we're going to go down this quiet model where we are surveilled and socially controlled and individually nudged, measured, and classified in a way that we don't see, to move us along paths desired by power. It's not what AI will do to us on its own, it's what the powerful do to us with AI.”
The documentary explores the human costs of algorithmic decision-making, from China’s social credit system to Houston public schools’ teacher evaluations, to Londoners subjected to facial recognition by police.
Recent publications and appearances
U.S. Election Analysis 2020: Media, Voters and the Campaign brought together short post-election reflections from 91 scholars, including:
Kamala Harris, Bobby Jindal, and the construction of Indian American identity in political campaigns by Madhavi Reddi
Media and social media platforms finally begin to embrace their roles as democratic gatekeepers by Daniel Kreiss
Social media moderation of political talk by Shannon McGregor
Daniel Kreiss discussed censorship and content moderation with WNCT’s What the Politics? podcast
Dr. McGregor also discussed Parler with the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and the BBC.
Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, their commentary on Parler brought pushback: both Shannon McGregor and Bridget Barrett were targeted by Newsbusters this week.
Coming soon
With the Citizens and Technology Lab and Civic Signals, we’re co-hosting a research summit on the public sphere. Join us!
Bookmarked: we missed this UCSB event on anti-blackness and technology, but are eager to watch the video.