Court Docs Show Facebook Played Much Bigger Part In Capitol Riot Than Parler, Yet No Consequences

It’s been more than a month since the app stores of Google and Apple joined forces with Amazon Web Services to knee-cap an upstart competitor, Parler. The stated reasoning was Parler’s lack of content moderation policies, which Apple, in particular, claimed led to Parler’s use as a forum to “plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.”

This reasoning was confidently repeated across the corporate press. “The Capitol mob began organizing . . . on platforms like Parler and Gab,” Vox asserted. Planning for the “mob violence that descended on the U.S. Capitol . . . took place openly on websites popular with far-right conspiracy theorists,” National Public Radio proclaimed. Facebook shut down Stop the Steal groups, said The New York Times, so planning moved to Parler and Gab.

“These events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate and don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” sniffed Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer.