# New-ish "free speech" app, Parler **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [November 9, 2020, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-ish-free-speech-app-parler/925109 "2020-11-09T03:40:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 388
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2021, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-ish-free-speech-app-parler/925109/388 "2021-01-31T04:05:47Z")
Mind you, if somebody wants to advocate for European-style “digital privacy” laws where governments and businesses can’t go digging around in all our online activities whenever they want, I’m all for that (and I support [the ACLU’s efforts in that direction](https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology)). But that’s not the same thing as people expecting never to see any consequences from their voluntary and knowingly public social-media activities conducted under their own identities. Any not-absolutely-cretinous user of social media is fully aware that they’re putting their comments and photos and what-not out on a public platform to be potentially shared with the whole world. That voluntarily shared information is part of an individual’s public persona on the internet. Demanding that everybody should just ignore the aspects of your public persona that they find problematic is not at all the same thing as not wanting the world to see your private emails or browser history or online purchases. And I’ll also point out that we shouldn’t just gloss over the other false equivalence Sam\_Stone’s trying to draw here, between “conservative views” and “liberal views”. To quote a previous well-made point: > [@RitterSport](#): > > They didn’t ban speech on the right. They banned threats to democracy and calls for violence. They banned the accounts of people who threatened democracy and called for violence. > > You can spend all day advocating for a weaker central government, calling for abortion restrictions or making it illegal, pushing for lower taxes and a weaker social safety net, calling for lower regulations and elimination of trade barriers, advocating for public funding of religious schools or elimination of public schools, calling for a stronger army, you name it. > > What you can’t do, on the right or the left, is call for the murder of your opponents or the overthrow of the country. People on the left aren’t saying that we should shun or ban law-abiding rational people who merely have different views from ours on how best to run our democracy. We’re saying that we’re okay with shunning and banning non-law-abiding, non-rational people who are advocating violent destruction of our democracy. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-ish-free-speech-app-parler/925109)._