Many conservatives, including high profile ones, have moved or are transitioning onto the parler platform away and from twitter as a consequence of jack banning carpe donktum-a favorite by many for his talent at creating conservative memes. Also there is no doubt that twitting is controlling the trending tab and the top posts under the trending tabs, hindering conservative engagement.
see https://twitter.com/carpedonktum?lang=en
I too was going to sign up and try to make an early voice for myself. But unlike many others, I took the time to read the terms of service and it is just revolting and unethical. I can understand, I was early on the scene created a social media site that never took off, the desire to keep liability to a minimum, Many things can go wrong and without venture capital, one mistake can bankrupt your company and compromise all your customers. Think it can't happen? many sites have bad code, many sites have internal employees who make mistakes or maliciously harm the company itself. they spell that out in section 11 of the EULA.
eula:https://legal.parler.com/documents/useragreement.pdf
archived: http://archive.is/KfoyV
So if anything goes wrong, they put in their EULA, that they cannot be held liable in the courts-only through arbitration of an arbitrator of their choice. for small claims, you cannot even use and attorney-and you have to use the phone or internet even if you have severe anxieties. That is likely an Americans with disabilities act violation.
More, that you cannot participate in a class action lawsuit against them. Many agencies, especially governments, do illegal things. In the instance of a small government, they know a person isn't going to spend $10k+ or more to fight off a $25 fee. In the private sector when a bunch of small torts start to add up, your class action lawyers may act on a contingency basis expecting say 25-40% of the pie-some may be parts of big firms going to invest millions to dig through discovery. They are quite expensive for companies, and many companies would rather settle than divulge internal documents. Granted a class action lawsuit would be barred due to the arbitration agreement, but supposing there is a situation where the courts would have jurisdiction they removing the option of a class action.
Worse, you have ti legally idemnify them, and pay the cost of their defense. So if some troll decides to do a take down order injunction of your post, whether going to the family courts crying harassment, or a civil court claiming copyright violation, or outright sues them for damages. Guess who is going to be paying for parler's attorneys, and any settlements they reach. Granted section 230 helps to an extent, but do you really want to be paying say $1000/hour each to x lawyers, any travel expenses, and hotel suites, etc, etc until a judge grants a section 230 dismissal.
i had mentioned these things on telegram last night [Milo's chat]. One person piped up and said "fed fed", but I am not sure in that context. Another user followed up and asked if he thought the parlor app was owned by the feds.
And to be quite honest we can't rule that out. The federal government, particularly the left wing USDOJ [including the FBI], have been targeting right wing extremist and the president himself-even the IRS targeted tea partiers. To sign up, I am seeing reports that they send an sms to your telephone. So even if you were to use a vpn or tor, the feds would still be able to track your phone-unless you are quite organized and have third parties in remote foreign places who can do all that for you. There is only a veneer of anonymous speech if true-normally the government would have to issue a warrant to get a person's identity.
So if the claim that parler=feds is true, the government would have a complete map of everyone's private messages, posts, network, location, and most importantly identity. You couldn't sue because of arbitration. I am not sure if the Federal Arbitration Act can sidestep section 1983 liability if it is exposed that they really are a government agency or working for them, but so long as the government pretends it is a private entity that isn't conspiring with the government then that question may not be raised.
Worse, if it is controlled by the USDOJ, they could run analytics and perform opposition research for the DNC. What might be a passing bad joke or maybe a bad idea or friended/liked the wrong person/post, they [USDOJ] could hold onto such information until it was conveniently timely to commence a federal action or smear campaign right before the election itself.
As tempting as it may be to dump twitter and move to Parler for most conservatives and libertarians, even without jumping to whatifs, we should just look at the EULA and see it is almost as bad as the south park human icentipad/itunes elua.
