#parlio

Wael Ghonim

The power of online rumors extends far beyond their contents. Even when they are not specifically aimed at rallying masses to a cause, the transmission of even the most dubious of claims is still indicative of another kind of collective movement: an attack on the pervasive censorship system, which has encouraged online users to develop an extreme form of skepticism wherein, as Hu Yong, a professor at Peking University's School of Journalism and Communication, suggests, "news looks like rumor and rumor looks like news." In such an environment, the spread of rumors on the Chinese Internet is not surprising—and considering their implicit criticism of the credibility of authorities, neither is the effort by government officials and social media companies to restrict them. —”China’s Rumor Mill: Why Beijing Is Cracking Down on ‘Unverified’ Information Online,” Foreign Affairs

The above is from an article I wrote last month in Foreign Affairs based on my research into what kind of posts are censored on the public accounts platform of WeChat, a mobile app that is incredibly popular in China right now. Among my conclusions (you can read the full report, “Politics, Rumors, and Ambiguity: Tracking Censorship on WeChat’s Public Accounts Platform” on the Citizen Lab blog) are:

#Parlio is an unfinished, altruistic social network with a lot of evolutionary changes in the pipeline, It is designed with civil insightful troll-free conversations in mind.

Parlio claims to be open-minded and diversified albeit nothing yet can prove these claims; apart from the site definition and founders perspectives.

Membership is still by invitation and most users can only read content, up-vote a topic or a comment. It is unclear - yet promised- how regular readers turn into full members or who can contribute to the site.

Parlio has a lot of challenges and many questions to answer in the road to success. I will try to bring some here ; hopefully a civil insightful perspective.

Parlio aims at  sharing opinions and experiences that strengthen the community’s collective intelligence, However Parlio gives the microphone to the elite while the audience is totally muted, It is not a discussion and there are no opinions, it is an amplification of the already loud voices, an empowering of the powerful, meanwhile stripping the whole community of every tool it can use to give a meaningful feedback.

Social networks and the internet at large have been very powerful in creating new celebrities that enriched the general dialogue and added much fresh blood and ideology, Wael Ghonim - one of the founders- is a great example and many of the site selected elite are, However Parlio is doing the exact opposite and shutting down the road to this “elitism”, and hence to diversity.