Parler’s Porn Problem

Constitutional rights are a big sticking point for many conservatives—particularly the Second Amendment’s right to bearing arms, and the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech. But free speech applies not just to political speech—it also covers hardcore pornography. That’s what alt-right social media app Parler is learning as its popularity skyrockets, and adult content like pornography, escort services, and more flock to its wide-open policies.

When Parler launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship.” It quickly changed its mind, however, banning pornography and becoming, reported BoingBoing, “more censorious than Twitter, with the exception of allowing hate speech.” 

Over the past month, conservatives of many stripes have defected to Parler, as Twitter and Facebook cracked down on the baseless claims that Trump and his supporters were making about the election results. The result has been that Parler’s popularity has skyrocketed. According to LA Mag, “It was recently the number one pick on Apple’s app store while generating more than 4 million downloads in the first two weeks of November, and Parler execs claim the site now has 10 million accounts.”

And Parler’s surge in popularity came at the exactly same time that the platform decided to re-relax its policies on smut—possibly in an attempt to stay competitive against its mega-platform cousin Twitter, which allows adult content. But there’s a difference: Twitter has been walking a fine line with porn for years, trying to allow it on the platform while not letting itself be entirely inundated with sexually explicit imagery and videos. Twitter now uses “automated systems that prevent excessively rapid posting, as well as other spammy behavior, and employs human moderators to enforce its policies,” reported the Washington Post this week. Parler, on the other hand, “outsources moderation to volunteers who judge potentially objectionable content after it has been flagged by other users.” 

As a result, the Washington Post’s recent review found, “The site’s lax moderation policies, in keeping with its claims to being a bastion of free speech, could make it a magnet for pornographers, escort services and online sex merchants using hashtags targeting conservatives, such as #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020,” reported the Post. 

Chron.com wrote, “Terms such as #porn, #naked and #sex each had hundreds or thousands of posts on Parler, many of them graphic. Some pornographic images and videos had been viewed tens of thousands of times on the platform, according to totals listed on the Parler posts.” 

But even non-pornographic search terms and hashtags are in on the action, reported The Washington Post: “These included #trump2020 and #wwg1wga, a slogan for the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, with its baseless claims that leading Democrats and Hollywood celebrities are Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Searches of another hashtag popular with QAnon adherents, #sextrafficking, also yielded numerous pornographic images the same week that they appeared on #sexytrumpgirl, The Post’s review found.”

What can you do? Adult content creators and marketers have been increasingly pushed off social media for years—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr all take hard lines against smut. When any platform relaxes its anti-porn policies, that means that adult content will flood in, with so few other places to go. For years, Twitter was one of few places where advertising hardcore content has continued to be allowed…and now that Parler is trying to keep up with their competition, it appears they’ll have to deal with oceans of smut, too.