We're on Parler, at @VolokhC

Parler, a Twitter rival, has been in the news recently. We joined in August, and now have a bit over 7,500 followers there. (By comparison, we have a bit over 21,000 Twitter followers.) If you'd like to subscribe to us there, we're at @VolokhC, the same handle we use for Twitter.

If you have suggestions for other places we can distribute our material, that would be great, too; all we need is a mechanism to automatically turn our RSS feed into posts. Parler does that directly, and we do it for Twitter and Facebook via dlvr.it.

Comments

[lwhalen]

I believe federated systems are social media's future. Consider joining a Mastodon instance or running one yourself, and dual-uploading any videos to Youtube (for that sweet sweet search revenue) and Peertube:

https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=what%20is%20mastodon

[Rat on a train]

You aren't on WeChat?

[MonkeyKing1776]

I personally like gab.com. LBRY is also an interesting YouTube alternative.

[jdgalt1]

I second gab.com. It does not block people as the others do (but an individual member can block anyone he wants).

[jdgalt1]

I should add: as far as the RSS-to-auto-post feature, Gab does not have it built in, but there is a member, @commandlinekid, who has written hundreds of 'bots that do the same thing for various blogs. If you ask him he'll create one for you. In fact, I may do that anyway, whether or not you become active on Gab.

I don't know if this practice is considered a copyright violation, but I believe technically it only involves linking to a blogger's words and not actually copying them. Maybe I'm wrong.

[AtR]

Parler's terms of service are not particularly impressive from a privacy perspective. I think that mewe.com is a better model.

[Eugene Volokh]

I checked into MeWe, but they don't have a feature to automatically post items based on an RSS feed.

[EscherEnigma]

Aren't they the ones that had so many right-wingers on it, that the company offered a "bounty" to any "liberal" with sufficient followers to use the site?

While Blackman may fit in over there, I think the rest of you just aren't red enough for their liking.

[Eugene Volokh]

EscherEnigma: Well, as I noted, several thousand of their users did subscribe to our feed, so those users like us well enough. And as you noted, Parler would have liked to have more liberal writers using it (though of course they'd only have paid money to writers who had lots of readers).

Now I'm sure there are many people on Parler who think we're not conservative enough -- just as there are many people on Twitter who think we're not liberal enough (or not whatever else enough), and many people on Reason who think we're not libertarian enough. Fortunately for them and for us, nothing is forcing them to read our posts ....

And more broadly, we don't just want to reach readers who already agree with us on most things. To be sure, those are people who are probably most likely to subscribe, but we'd be glad to reach out beyond them -- whether it's to people who are more conservative than us, more liberal than us, more libertarian than us, more moderate than us, or anything else. So we're happy to be on Parler as well as on Twitter, and we'd be glad to be in lots of other places as well.

[Max!]

Is Parler filled with extremists? What I've seen with, for example, Reddit alternatives is they attract the most extreme of users (e.g. overt racists, neo-Nazis, etc.). Not that I'd agree the right way to attack racism is to censor speech, but the curse of starting alternative platforms is you get a lot of ridiculously extreme, almost bad faith actors with the occasional good faith voice who's views happened to be censored by the mainstream platforms,

[Eugene Volokh]

Max!: I have no idea what Parler is filled with, since I see my very small corner of Parler -- basically, the comments to our posts. I don't recall a single neo-Nazi comment or overtly racist comment in that lot, though maybe I missed some.

In any event, it doesn't matter to me so much what percentage of Parler users fit what category -- so long as we can reach some more people there. Indeed, if some neo-Nazis start reading us (there or on Twitter or at Reason or wherever else), and then figure out that we're Jews, maybe the occasional one might change his views. Not to say that most neo-Nazis will change their views because of that; but perhaps some might.

Now it's true that if the real value of the Parler feed was the conversations among readers, then the presence of a lot of neo-Nazis or punch-a-Nazis or whoever else might poison the conversation might be bad. But my sense is that, while the comments here at Reason are quite valuable for many commenters (and for me), the comments either on Twitter or on Parler aren't as much. (Among other things, there are many fewer on our posts in either place.) The real value of our Twitter and Parler feeds, I think, is for people who want to read our stuff -- and they don't care how many of their fellow readers are Bad People.

[Max!]

Thanks for the response.

[jdgalt1]

I see quite a few people like that on Gab, but I assume they are merely teenagers trolling, and they're easy enough to block. I suspect that a lot of them are not real Nazis or racists but just want to smear the platform. I doubt they're being paid, or there would be more of them.

[Doug Huffman]

All social networks are inundated with trollish nonsense, including the new alternatives. When I want to read the Volokh Conspiracy then I am not going to wade through twitter-like comments for a bit of sense.

I believe that the social (‘justice’) networks have led US into these political straits.

[Rat on a train]

Any community large enough to be useful will attract trolls.

[LessinSF]

Anyone who joins Parler is an idiot, not because of their politics, but because em is giving them their social security number (why Parler wants it only raises questions) with absolutely no promise of privacy, responsibility or encryption - read their TOS. I am sorry to see you promote it, Professor.

[Eugene Volokh]

I don't recall having had to give them my SSN; I looked up their policies, and they say this is only required for people who want "to join [their] influencer network":

If you choose to join our influencer network, we may ask for information that can be used to verify your identity, such as a copy of your government-issued photo identification, and information that can be used to facilitate the redemption of virtual items or payments, such as your Social Security number (SSN) or your tax identification number. We delete your
government-issued photo identification information when it is no longer necessary to verify your identity.

Does that misstate matters?