The Trump fans, right-wingers, conspiracy theorists and anyone else who frequent Parler have been getting bombarded with content they don’t necessarily want to see: a staggering abundance of porn. Parler, a conservative social network that bills itself as a haven for free speech, has fairly lax moderation policies. And that’s what makes it attractive to pornographers.
Keeping America Nekked
According to The Washington Post, adult businesses, including escort services and online sex shops, have flocked to Parler using hashtags like #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020. Recently, anyone on Parler who followed the hashtag #sexytrumpgirl was treated to pictures of topless women and links to hardcore porn that would bombard users with incredible speed and frequency.
In a conversation with The Post, Parler’s Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff defended the manner in which the company moderates content.
“Broadly, our whole guiding principle is that we want to allow everything that the First Amendment protects as speech, and nothing that it doesn’t,” Peikoff said.
Henry Farid, a University of California at Berkeley computer science professor, told The Post that Parler’s failure to moderate content is reason for concern. “When you say, ‘We don’t moderate content,’ you are inviting this content,” said Farid, who has helped develop image-detection technology used by social media sites. “My prediction is they will be overrun with this stuff.”
There was a time when Parler banned pornography, but then it made changes to its terms of service that basically allowed anything legal to appear on its site. The problem is that Parler doesn’t have an automated system to moderate posting, nor does it even have paid employees to filter incoming content. In fact, Parler uses outsourced volunteers to do the moderating, but the volunteers deem content to be objectionable only after it’s been flagged by other users.
“[Parler’s] systems and policies have given wide latitude for images of adult nudity and sexual behavior,” a Washington Post review found. “A variety of pornography is easy to find on the site, using both search terms that are explicitly pornographic and others that are not.”
In other words, it isn’t just the on-the-nose hashtags like #sexytrumpgirl that have led Parler users to pornography. There are also less obvious ones like #trump2020 and #wwg1wga, which stands for “where we go one, we go all,” the rallying cry for QAnon. In case you’re not familiar, QAnon is a conspiracy theory claiming that America is run by a cabal of top Democrats and celebrities, who also happen to be Satan worshippers, pedophiles, and child sex traffickers. The hashtag #sextrafficking has also appeared on Parler – and, yes, it takes users straight to porn.
While adult pornography is constitutionally protected free speech, sexually explicit imagery on Parler could offend users who are not looking for that material, and it could also affect any plans that Parler has to expand its advertising. The Post points out that major companies typically don’t want their ads to appear alongside “controversial imagery.”
Parler Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Wernick told The Post that he didn’t know much about the pornography that appeared on his site. However, he did say he’d investigate.
“I don’t look for that content, so why should I know it exists?” Wernick said, adding that pornography would certainly be of concern to Parler. “We don’t want to be spammed with pornographic content.”