Is Parler Right Biased?
Tags: Parler, Politics, Bias, Social Media, Technology

Is Parler Right Biased?

First, I’m going to disclose that I’m pretty biased here. I’m a former Facebook engineer (2 years on main FB News Feed iOS product) and I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade. I live in Silicon Valley and voted for Joe Biden.

That being said, I try to look at ground truth, and while I use Facebook, and vote Democrat — I have major public complaints and feedback about each, I think it is healthy to recognize what you prefer as well as what is going on. I do love to download any new mobile iOS app to see what they are about and to grab my user name while the product is still in beta whenever possible. So when I saw that some of my Republican family and friends were asking on Facebook for us to “switch” to Parler, a website and mobile App that, in it’s own meta:description (Google Summary) tag claims:

Parler is an unbiased social media focused on real user experiences and engagement. Free expression without violence and no censorship. Parler never shares your personal data.”

Then I thought, better grab my user name, and downloaded and installed the app. The very first screen?

Oooh, is this for picking my complementary hat?

Ignoring that adding a feature to theme your social media app before you have copy and paste is just bad development and sets the general quality bar for the product itself fairly low (we aren’t here for that) and while I may think having a default color theme choice be red is tacky, it’s just a subliminal sign of the super-liminal hints that come when it’s time to “Personalize your Parler Experience”:

*Assuming your person is a MAGA republican

In case you can’t tell what these individuals have in common. It’s Donald Trump. 2 of them are sitting US politicians, and the rest are pundits. All are vocal Trump cultists. If you choose to “Skip” adding Hannity as one of your friends, you are taken to a second screen asking you again to “Personalize your Parler Experience”:

Look Familiar

Again, ignoring how confusing it is to have two identical steps (Kinda looks like the second one is their equivalent of “Pages” vs “Individuals”, though the distinction is unclear), and that they already suggested I follow Hannity, all of the suggests are pro-trump far right groups. The only question mark I had was “Transparency 2020” which is unrelated to any real organization that I could find, only reposts things claiming the 2020 election was rigged, and “transparently” describes itself only as “Unfiltered Content”.

So every page suggested during the setup process is Pro-Trump, and Far Right. If this is a mere coincidence of circumstance, it doesn’t start off on a good foot, and as a software developer, it occurred to me that the answers to the first 3 questions on this screen could very easily be used as a purity test, to spot and assist in banning users (We can get to that later). So far not seeing a lot of the “unbiased” claimed in the tagline. But let’s give it a shot. When you first join, you automatically make your first post:

Putting words in your mouth is the opposite of censorship!

Seconds after my “Hello Parler” Post, I had my first user interaction!

Wait, THE Ron Paul

Not sure if these automatic posts are a part of the Parler system, or just taking advantage of the fact that it currently has a really bad bot problem. In case you are thinking that an auto welcome post from Ron Paul means there is a non-Trumper on the system, he changed his position on Trump a while ago. Batting 100 still. So yes, while all the content and content producers so far seem to be MAGA Trumpers and Right wing “news” outlets, that doesn’t mean that the platform is biased. Just everything on it, right? The answer there comes when you go to the other tabs available in the App: “Discover” news, and search. For the Discover news tab, there are two feeds, “Partners” and “Affiliates”. I scrolled and checked bias for a while, but all of the content featured partners and affiliates were right leaning. As for the content (Which I could only find through their search hashtags function, a limited and kind of broken way to see “Trending Content” I suppose), was all either extreme right posts, or “sexy time” spam bots targeting evangelicals.

Alllllright. Sexy Time. Real Lady. High five.

So, the lions share of the current contributors, affiliates, partners and non-spam content are Right Wing.

Does that make the Platform Right Biased? For all practical purposes it does.

The CEO has acknowledged their membership problem, and has claimed to put up a 20k bounty for “an openly liberal pundit with 50,000 followers on Twitter or Facebook to start a Parler account.”, they had it at 10k but had to raise it up when nobody took the bait.

So maybe, the day will come when the wash of 2020 Trump mourners looking for a news feed that kept feeding them the reality they want to believe without all those pesky fact checkers, subsides. And maybe a few brave liberal influencers will come to the platform seeking to stand against the red hordes. And maybe a slow trickle of left leaning regular users and lurkers will come to follow that content rather than where those contributors normally post. And just maybe then everyone else will come in, and the content and contributors will find the same natural balance that Facebook and Twitter has in terms of left and right voices.

But personally I don’t think there will ever be anything close to the user and content base parity found on other sites, and If I’ve learned anything about what makes a social media site successful it’s having as many people on it as possible. And whether intentionally or sheer coincidence Parler has gotten off to a really bad start alienating half of its potential user base. Nobody is going to want to go somewhere to get bullied. Better to burn the brand and try again, with a rallying cry that is less one sided, or just admit to being a right biased safe space.