De-platforming Is a Fix, But Only a Short-Term One

But death on the internet is short lived. About a week after being taken down, Parler registered its domain with Epik, a company known for hosting far-right content, and announced, “We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome all of you back soon.” It is possible that Parler will follow in the footsteps of the far-right social network Gab and host its own servers at an undisclosed data center. This lifeline is more expensive and more difficult to set up and maintain. 

The internet has many entry points for the moderation of content. Marks notes that anything providing for the movement of bits could theoretically become a selective barrier: With varying degrees of precision, a cloud provider, wifi router maker, ISP, or owner of a copper fiber wire can determine what passes across some portion of the internet, whether through literal technical intervention, or use of its broader leverage to compel an application provider, who relies upon it to function, to take action. “But the deeper into the infrastructure one goes — further removed from specific instances of communication between people and the specific apps they’re using to make it — the rarer and more significant a deplatforming becomes.”

AWS is a company residing deep inside the internet infrastructure.

In its opposition to Parler’s application for a temporary restraining order on the basis of breach of contract and antitrust claims, AWS noted that it reported to Parler “dozens of examples of content that encouraged violence,” including “calls to hang public officials, kill Black and Jewish people, and shoot police officers in the head.” Crucially, on Parler, hatred did not lurk on the fringes and calls to violence weren’t isolated voices lost in a sea of content. Instead, it was common to come across posts and comments calling for violence or civil war. And this “dozens” figure cited by AWS is only a fraction of a fraction of the content that incited violence. 

Marks notes that relative to Twitter, the comments were far more extreme.

Thus, when it comes to political purpose, Parler served two main roles for those on the right: It was a community, a safe space to express and consume disinformation and radical viewpoints, and it allowed a forum to collect and re-interpret mainstream messages. To hear a dog whistle, you need a dog’s ear, after all. Parler is not the first network to have served these functions. It won’t be the last, either. In fact, even without the internet, Parler can be replaced.

Marks adds that “Without Parler or Twitter, disinformation and hatred — coded or overt — will continue to be broadcast,” adding:

And without Parler or Twitter, disinformation and hatred — coded or overt — from radical elites will continue to be noted and interpreted. As recently as this summer, QAnon Facebook groups had millions of members. When these groups were shut down, many moved to Parler, a platform that consisted of adults who consensually joined it, presumably to have discussions like the ones they were having and to consume content like what they were seeing. With Parler gone and Twitter and Facebook cracking down on conspiracy theories, millions have downloaded the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram, which allows for groups of up to 200,000 people. This doesn’t absolve Parler of responsibility, nor does it mean any action taken is helpless. But conspiracy theorists won’t disappear; they’ll migrate.

He concludes:

In the wake of this, the question arises: What is there to be done? Already, Big Tech has answered that question in its own way, with Apple, Google, and AWS taking aggressive measures to disable the platform. The moves they made were probably the right ones, at least in the short term, but problems remain. Millions of Americans believe the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, a problem for which there is no technical solution. At a certain point, the question about what to do with Parler is only part of the broader one about how society should cope with the fact that segments of the population are living in different realities. And that’s a far trickier problem — one that, when the dust settles, and platforms are unable to reasonably cite the imminent threat of violence, we will have to solve.