A Suggestion: How Can Parler Become Truly Censorship Resistant?

Unsurprisingly, I am not a big fan of censorship. The social network known as Parler aims to be a censorship-resistant social network or form of alternative media to Twitter. Parler is a micro-blogging site, and just like other social networks such as Gab, they aren't politically affiliated with any partisan party.

Talking about these social networks can easily get you labeled for hate speech, and many people think these alternative forms of social networks are alt-right or anti-Semitic.

None of the mainstream forms of media are talking as much about how QAnon had flourishing communities on Facebook, or w/ Twitter and Instagram. However, they are still okay with labeling Parler as socially responsible for a small percentage of fringe users.

Now don't get me wrong, I disagree with the forced termination/departure of John Matze. However, this isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is that Parler at the end of the day is a product, and they are trying to offer a platform alternative to their competition. What does the competition do? The competition starts a campaign blaming them for violence, while looking the other way when there has been problematic users on their platform as well.

Corporations that run large social networks can't be held personally responsible for the actions of a small amount of its users. No company should have to apologize on behalf of what one of its users said. Companies with millions of users shouldn't be expected to apologize every time a problematic user shows up. The very thought of being able to do so and run a business is ludicrous.

That said, here is my offer to Parler, Dan Bongino, Rebekah Mercer or whoever is reading this. If Parler wants to take a dramatic step towards becoming censorship-resistant, I do believe they can implement our open source decentralized-internet SDK if they want to. In fact, I am personally willing to help them become a distributed network if they want to.

Currently, Parler is too centralized as it stands, and has higher risks of being taken down by authoritarian means. Building your own infrastructure and integrating P2P compatibility can take a network a step further in being censorship-resistant.

If Parler happens to be reading this blog post, I really hope they consider my offer. I also want to emphasize that if they want to integrate moderation into their platform, manual moderation over algorithmic can in the long run actually be less prone to mistakes or fairer.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this article belong to the author alone. This article does not reflect the opinions of Hacker Noon as a whole.