When I heard that many conservatives were fleeing Facebook for Parler, I thought: "Now this is something I'm just going to have to check out!"
So far, it's definitely a trip. Hazard, that is.
I have never seen a cesspool of disinformation and bullshit quite this extensive. And I've been to creationist museums!
When you sign up, you are asked for more detailed information, but really all you need is an email address and phone number. Since I was sock-puppeting, I used my old email account and a tertiary phone number. You need to enter a "capcha" string of characters to prove you aren't a computer. Your phone number is then pinged with a special code you have to enter in so that the system knows you're real - pretty standard stuff. Then you have to choose your own handle and moniker, assuming you don't want the same ones as your email address. I didn't, so I altered them.
Immediately I was offered options on who to connect with - nearly all of them conservative media personalities. I found no friends I knew from Facebook, even the conservative ones. I went with Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Dinesh D'Sousa and Tucker Carlson, since that's all I could find whom I knew, or even heard of. Rush Limbaugh apparently got beaten to his own name, and like Trump on Twitter (@TheRealDonaldTrump) Limbaugh's moniker is @RushLimbaughOfficial. (Ha!) I tried to find Mark Belling and Vicky McKenna, but neither of them seemed to have an account just yet.
It's really a bad copy of Twitter, without the character limits. But also without much ease of navigation. You can scroll, and search - and that's about it. Bo-ring! As for connections, you can try to find people, but unless they've used their real name, it's downright impossible. This is a VERY anonymous format. Apparently, everyone here wears a mask - and probably refuses to wear a mask to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the outside world.
And what is found here in the way of content? In a word: FRAUD! It's pretty much all about election fraud, all the time in this upside-down world.
Trying to find a few local people to connect with, I tried searching for usernames, but found nothing solid. So, I tried searching by hashtags, which Parler allows you to do. Under #Milwaukee, I found an article posted (the term here is "Parley") by a woman named Margaret Menge from something called "insidesources.com." (Never heard of it. In fact, I found lots of links to lots of "news" outlets which I'd never heard of before. It's mostly off-the-beaten-path fringe shit, here.) Margaret's article, titled, "Hold It: Wisconsin's Vote Just Doesn't Look Right," states that the increase in voter turnout is nowhere near in line with the increase in population in various places in Milwaukee or Madison. As examples, she cites population numbers in Wauwatosa, and expresses incredulity that Biden increased his vote total by 28% from Obama's totals there when it had only grown at a rate of less than 0.5% per year in terms of population. She cites other similar examples with West Allis, Whitefish Bay, River Hills and Glendale. She concludes from this that the voting totals simply can't have been that high, unless artificially inflated. But apparently Margaret had forgotten (or perhaps, never learned) that only about 60% of eligible voters ever truly participate in an election, even in a presidential election year. In 2020 so far, the estimate is that 65% of eligible voters participated, and that number is still climbing! That leaves plenty of room to make up for the discrepancy Margaret cites. Lots of people who didn't normally vote decided to this time around - because they were that pissed off!
Another "article" is cited by a woman named "Jill," which purports to have a Democrat operative confessing that "We've been rigging elections for 50 years!" There is a link at the bottom of the picture, but not so fast! Because the link is shown in a .jpg image, meaning that you can't click on it and get taken to the article! To even TRY to read it, you have to write out the incredibly long URL and re-type it into your browser. So, just to fuck with it, I did exactly that! Here's the "article" right here: https://thenewamerican.com/democrat-operative-admits-we-ve-been-rigging-elections-for-50-years/ The actual video, it turns out, is from the 2016 campaign, and was meant to attack the Hillary Clinton campaign, not the Joe Biden one! Furthermore, the headline was bait-and-switch from the actual "confession" of the "operative." His actual quote was, "You know what, we've been bussing people in for 50 years to deal with you assholes, and we're not about to stop now!"
Did you get that? Not "rigging elections." "Bussing people in!" This hatchet piece actually thinks that bussing people to the polls is somehow "election fraud." Because heaven forbid people without a car get to vote regarding issues pertaining to public transportation!
Looking further, I found that "Jill" had posted lots of other articles in exactly the same way: .jpg only, making it extra difficult to check the link and actually read the article.
Just read the headline, sheeple. Don't do any follow-up research.
But that one's not even my favorite. Someone named "PoiZnus" posted, "Run this up the flagpole!!! Top Election Chief of #Milwaukee CAUGHT on camera illegally tabulating 169,000 mail in ballots." If you follow the link, you get taken here. No, seriously, check the video out!
And what do you see in the video? You see a woman going to the vote tabulation machine, AND DOING HER JOB JUST FINE AND LEGALLY! What illegality is this woman supposed to have been caught doing?!
It's fake outrage! The reader is meant to see the headline with a link and assume the rest!
The purpose of these postings is not to disseminate truth, but rather to fool people into believing that proof of fraud on the part of the Biden campaign is rampant and everywhere. But scratch past the surface, and follow the links just a bit, and you'll find it's all smoke and mirrors! These links to "evidence" contain nothing of the kind!
That won't stop the people who sign into Parler from believing that all these links are genuine, and that all this "evidence" is true.
Frequently seen is an image of a pair of vote-tabulation curves, showing Biden's surge at the end with mail-in ballots, seeming to make a letter "F." Naturally, the letters "R-A-U-D" were added to this, and the image has become viral on this relatively new platform. (See headline image on this blog post.)
Inside this new bubble, fake news has been taken to a whole new level. Pure, fucking, evil.
If fake news was like cocaine before, Parler is the equivalent of crack!
Eric
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