The "big tech" moves of the past week might have had some sort of objective and one of those objectives was to shut down Parler, a Twitter clone that was gaining real steam after the ban on Donald Trump on Twitter and Facebook. Gab has a similar massive uptick in users. I will admit that I opened accounts on both of them just to see what they are all about. They are essentially clones of their counterparts and this is not surprising to anyone.
The thing I find so amusing about people moving over to Gab and Parler is that if it weren't for the big tech stance on these things, the banning of prominent voices on the right, and their really silly justifications for doing so, a vast majority of people, including myself, probably wouldn't have ever heard about Gab or Parler let alone bothered using them.
Gab is doing a pretty decent job of increasing their server capacity and now at least on mobile devices the site is at least functional, such is not really the story on the PC interface. It is my understanding that they keep adding more to their infrastructure and I would imagine they will continue to do so to take advantage of this movement of sorts to get away from FB and Twitter.
Parler on the other hand is still down and since Amazon pulled their servers (and Parler is suing them for this) it could be a while yet before it is back up. However, they almost certainly will come back up and when they do their growth could be explosive yet again.
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So now the media is jumping on board to try to brainwash the masses into believing that Parler is "dangerous, racist, homophobic, extremist," and insert whatever buzzword you can think of into that list and it has probably already been said.
One such article by an unusual source, Gizmodo, goes out of their way to showcase that active duty military and police officers are using Parler as well. They then try to include as frequently as possible some sort of correlation between Parler and the police near the Capitol breach despite the fact that they don't have one example of this being the case.
The provide examples of Police officers in their stations, but the one example they focus on a lot is a police station in Portland, which I don't know if you are aware of this but it is quite a long ways from the Washington D.C. Capitol building.
They also refer to videos posted by active-duty military on Parler as if that was something that is illegal or even frowned-upon. I wonder how many active-duty military are on Twitter and Facebook? Gizmodo doesn't seem to have a problem with that.
The article goes on to cite that an FBI report stated that there was a high level "threat of white supremacist groups infiltrating and recruiting law enforcement and military" and this information is conveniently placed in the middle of all of this information they are presenting. However, if you click on the link they provide it shows that this FBI statement, and the investigation that supports the statement, was made in 2006. How many of you were using social-media in 2006? Facebook wasn't even created until 2004 and was FAR from mass adoption in 2006.
This tactic of inserting data that does prove A point, but not THE point in question is a common tactic used by bogus news operations. Point being, the FBI statement about white supremacist groups has nothing to do with social media at all, let alone Parler.
At many points the article refers to very vague assessments in its wording such as "experts agree", "there is evidence," or "a video appears to have been _____" and then they go on to insert words after it that have the intent of making Parler look bad and responsible for all the trouble in the world.
Gizmodo normally writes about tech stuff but occasionally they delve into the world of politics in their articles. When they do so, there is always a left-leaning slant to what they do. In the few articles of theirs that I have read regarding politics, it normally is only slightly left, this one on the other hand uses devious tactics of journalism to try to paint a picture that is far more fantasy than reality to further support the media insistence that Parler = bad.
Basically, they are making up 90% of the points they have written here.
Make no mistake, I am not trying to suggest that Parler is a neutral platform, there is no denying that it is comprised of mostly conservative users - this much is evident and I don't need a news outlet to determine that - one need only look at it for a few minutes to figure that out. What I am trying to say is that the media is piling on their attack towards Parler and now tech publications that very few people read are jumping into the fray and using terrible and unethical journalistic tactics in the process.
Do yourself a favor Gizmodo, stick to technology and leave the politics to the already huge pile of garbage "news outlets" that are already covering it. Do it not and you risk ending up in the ever-growing pile of journalistic ....
