Diffusion in Parler Social Networking App
Parler is a microblogging and social networking app launched in 2018. The platform is promoted as “the world’s premier free speech platform” and rose to prominence during the 2020 US presidential election, as Donald Trump and other conservative figures were banned from Twitter and Facebook for using harmful language. As a result, Parler has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and far-right extremists.
The popularity of Parler among people with conservative political beliefs can be explained with the concept of diffusion. In the figure below, we can see a graph of potential users of Parler. There are two clusters in this graph, perhaps indicating groups of people with slightly different conservative viewpoints, but even if there are only two people in this network that use Parlor, the behavior will cascade into the entire network. This will create a complete cascade, resulting in more users of Parlor that have conservative political beliefs.
In the figure below, there are also two clusters of people. However, we can see that the behavior of using Parler will be very unlikely to spread into the liberal cluster, as there will inherently be less common nodes between the clusters.
Because people of differing political opinions are unlikely to use Parlor, this creates an echo-chamber inside of the app. Here, conservative beliefs are amplified and reinforced inside a closed system, which can be dangerous. Information will not be objective, and it is hard for users to form their own opinions if they only see a biased perspective. For example, Parler acted as a central communication platform for the January 6th U.S. Capitol riots. Users planned and incited other people in their network to join in on this violent demonstration, and because there are no differing opinions on this platform and a lack of moderation, this extremely violent act was executed thoroughly.
However, because Parler only appeals to people with conservative beliefs, it is difficult for the behavior of using Parler to diffuse into many networks and gain as many users as other social networking platforms. For example, while Parler has 2.3 million active users, Twitter has over 211 million active users.
https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/sio-parler-contours