How Parler Reveals the Alarming Trajectory of Political Violence
Article/Op-Ed in The New York Times

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Jan. 25, 2021
Heather Hurlburt and Candace Rondeaux co-authored a New York Times op-ed about threats from platform migration.
While the tech industry must take more assertive action on moderation, policymakers must also acknowledge that the self-policing model adopted by Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon and others is broken. All sides would be better served by the adoption — and vigorous enforcement — of legal norms for online content moderation, incitement and expectations of privacy.
In the long run, this shift will also help Silicon Valley firms manage competing expectations from major global markets, which have often instituted much more aggressive government oversight. The question for the United States is whether the future of the internet runs toward Europe’s community-oriented version or Beijing’s authoritarian-empowerment model.
The threats to national security posed by this information disorder demand more open collaboration between policymakers, the tech industry and the research community. Together, they must accept the fact that the internet ecosystem of right-wing extremism is vast, and that the risk of its exponential expansion on the dark web is substantial.