"What I will tell you is that they had a disproportionate number of abuse reports that went unprocessed. And as a result, they left themselves wide open to people using their platform for purposes that maybe weren't the original intention of the people who manage it. Does that necessarily mean that we not only take that site offline, but we burn it to the ground?" Monster said. "I don't know, but I think the site can be rehabilitated so it could be more self-governing."
Just to note that Rob Monster does have certain criteria for allowing sites to use his services, as well.
"It's one thing to be sent to detention. It's another thing to get a suspension. It's another thing to be sent to a penal colony for the rest of your life," Monster said.
Getting kicked off of a provider is not "being sent to a penal colony". Nobody is forced to host your site. This is partly how free market capitalism works, last I recall. Allow me to play a sad song for parler on the world's smallest violin.
Yes, and Google can shut down your app or entire account for no reason at all and you have no right to complain about it, because free market capitalism.
You can complain if you want, but the end of the day, it's really your own fault for choosing to depend on google. If you don't like google's behavior, then you should either be self-hosting or at least diversify with other providers. Expecting the government to step in and be useful in any way here is a pipe dream.
Parler learned a hard lesson to not depend on AWS. I bet a lot of AWS customers also saw that and began taking steps to either move off of AWS or at least make it easy to migrate if needed.
Alternatively, if I spend time and resources building my own cloud infrastructure, I would like to be able to choose my clients. Political beliefs are not a protected class, nor should they be.
And politics aside, if a client had a bad moderation policy or refused to moderate their content per my standard, then I should be allowed to terminate the contract. They should then be free to choose another provider.
So you think it's ok to discriminate people. F*ck freedom of speech, let's make everything political. What if an employee talks about minimum wage? Or paid maternity leave? Or gay marriage? Should you be able to fire them freely because you're not OK with their political beliefs?
Every day I'm more astonished by what I read in this site.
About the moderation thing. They did moderate, but they couldn't manage everything due the explosive growth they had. Plans to assault the Capitol were posted in Facebook and Twitter days before but only Parler is guilty.
Everything -is- political. For some people, the status quo is amenable to them. For others, it is not. If you want to avoid politics, I think the only real way is to venture into the wilderness and live solo.
"Should you be able to fire them freely because you're not OK with their political beliefs?"
I can't speak for other countries, but the US protects from being fired due to certain characteristics. Aside from that, yes, absolutely, employers should be able to fire employees.
That said, there is nothing preventing said employees from giving said employer bad press, etc. There is nothing preventing employers from getting tried in the court of public opinion.
I don't see why we should expect the government to intervene and say "well, you can't fire anyone, for any reason, ever, as they claim it's retribution for X, Y, or Z". That, I believe, would be referred to by most americans as the dreaded "socialism" that we're so keen to avoid in favor of free market capitalism.
You don't necessarily need the cloud, a lot of times you pay a lot more for using AWS, GCP, Azure etc. There are of course times it may make sense but just because you can't or don't want to use the cloud does not mean you cannot put a service on the internet you're just going to need some classical dev ops and networking.
Hilariously, you are missing the point that it actually is illegal for the power company to deny service. In fact in my country it's illegal for them to cut your power off even if you're not paying your bills since it's considered an essential service.
Not that I disagree, no one should ever rely on Google or do any business with them. But as it stands right now, our corporate overlords completely privatized our freedom of speech, especially considering the fact that we're in the middle of Covid lockdowns, so you can't just go out and speak your mind. That's why I think the government should take action.
Like extending free speech laws to these corporations. So banks, domain registrars, payment processors, cloud services, DDOS protection services etc. can't just terminate the contract for simply disagreeing with speech that is protected under the First Amendment.
This change would substantially benefit large providers at the expense of smaller providers.
AWS can afford to be sued for hosting a forum or the costs of a boycott for hosting Stormfront - a smaller provider could easily be wiped out.
Edited to add the following.
Most of this post was wrong. ttt0 is right that section 230 protects providers in the cases I mentioned. TIL about the scope of section 230 provider protection.
And do what? Force people and businesses to have clients they don't want (outside of protected characteristics)?
I don't get why people think that the government here can actually do anything without severely impinging on personal freedoms. As a government contractor, I see first hand how f'ing useless our cronyist, bureaucratic government is. Anything they try to do will backfire and make things worse for the average citizen.
The only real solution is to get people to stop treating facebook like the one and only place for messaging people or posting things. They're only "overlords" so long as people only use facebook or twitter.
Facebook and Twitter is just a tip of the iceberg. Even if you tried to do something different, other companies you have to rely on will either force you to follow what Facebook and Twitter does or shut you down. I'm talking about services like:
> As a government contractor, I see first hand how f'ing useless our cronyist, bureaucratic government is. Anything they try to do will backfire and make things worse for the average citizen.
I don't completely disagree with you there either, but it will also get just worse and worse if you don't take any action at all. Pick your poison, I guess?
The First Amendment does not prohibit the private sector from restricting speech. Parler is free to (and did) find another vendor in the free market. If this option isn't realistic, bust up the monopoly that prevents it.
If 1A was extended to private individuals and entities, should the NFL be forced to keep Colin Kaepernick employed after taking a knee?
> The First Amendment does not prohibit the private sector from restricting speech.
If it did I wouldn't be here arguing that it should. And let's stop pretending like we are so considered about the private sector and private companies aren't ever subjected to any regulations whatsoever.
> If 1A was extended to private individuals and entities, should the NFL be forced to keep Colin Kaepernick employed after taking a knee?
I honestly couldn't care less about some sports controversies. I'm talking specifically about the banks and basic services like I listed. They simply shouldn't be allowed to gang up on anyone and remove you from a polite society just like that.
> I honestly couldn't care less about some sports controversies
I didn't ask if you did, I provided an excellent example of what you're describing.
In your scenario, the 1A would prohibit a business (the NFL), from restricting speech by an employee (Kapernick). This principle is what you're in favor of, correct?
"DDOS protection services" are not a "basic" service for the majority of private entities. So how is your new 1A written to prohibit DDOS protection companies from restricting speech?
> I'm talking specifically about the banks and basic services like I listed.
I'm not trying to be mean, but what part of this statement should I clarify for you to understand? Should barbershops be subjected to the regulations of auto industry? It doesn't make any sense.
> "DDOS protection services" are not a "basic" service for the majority of private entities. So how is your new 1A written to prohibit DDOS protection companies from restricting speech?
I'm not talking about literally rewriting the 1A, I'm taking about regulating the tech industry.
what part of this statement should I clarify for you to understand
"DDOS protection services" are not a "basic" service, so why would you include them in this list?
I'm taking about regulating the tech industry
...by extending 1A rights. So what would meet your legal standard of "tech," since now we've suddenly shifted to only regulating those? Banks are not "tech" companies.
Are you dodging the NFL example so hard because the NFL would be excluded from your legislation? They have $91B market cap and actively develop new tech.
I'm "dodging" the NFL example, because again, I do not care about NFL. At all. They can be forced to keep Colin or not, pick whatever answer you want. It's has nothing to do with it. And nothing has shifted, I'm still talking about:
If you expect me to come up on a spot with a bunch of legalspeak to precisely define what would be the target of such legislation(s), it's not going to happen as I am not a lawyer. If you disagree with my opinion and you think that tech companies like the ones listed above and most importantly the banks should be able to just arbitrarily shut down anyone they dislike in the era of Covid, just say so. But don't give me that hairsplitting in an attempt to portray it as something that's either impossible or "illogical" to do, as it's simply not true and this entire argument is just stupid, if not dishonest. It's just semantics.
> tech companies like the ones listed above and most importantly the banks should be able to just arbitrarily shut down anyone they dislike
Yes. If you want to be served by good companies who genuinely value you as a customer because they view doing business with you as beneficial, that's the easiest way to get there.
The alternative is bad companies providing the worst possible service they legally can to customers they don't really want because the law forces them to, which makes it more difficult for good companies to compete with them for market share.
But if the bad companies arbitrarily refuse to do business with anyone they dislike, the rejected customers will go to the good companies instead, which helps them grow and improve their service.
Note that this is exactly what happened with Parler: "bad" AWS refused them, so they went to a "good" hoster instead.
> If you want to be served by good companies who genuinely value you as a customer because they view doing business with you as beneficial, that's the easiest way to get there.
We are already here. Generally speaking this is most often true when the client is forced to use certain services, not the other way around. Like public healthcare or public institutions in general. On the other hand, in Europe my bank is legally obligated to provide me a basic service and they treated me very nicely whenever I had any problems, I can't complain. Also we can circle back to the Google example - they treat everyone like garbage precisely because they can arbitrarily shut down anyone, anytime, for no reason at all.
> Note that this is exactly what happened with Parler: "bad" AWS refused them, so they went to a "good" hoster instead.
Almost everyone, if not everyone, does the same thing. Parler will either have to become just a second Twitter or they will be kicked off their new hosting too.
> in Europe my bank is legally obligated to provide me a basic service and they treated me very nicely
Most likely you're not the kind of customer they'd rather not be doing business with.
> they treat everyone like garbage precisely because they can arbitrarily shut down anyone
Do you expect them to treat people they'd prefer to shut down better than garbage if they weren't allowed to shut them down?
> Parler will either have to become just a second Twitter or they will be kicked off their new hosting too.
Is there nobody among Parler's millions of users who'd be able and willing to host them so they don't have to worry about alignment of interests anymore?
> Do you expect them to treat people they'd prefer to shut down better than garbage if they weren't allowed to shut them down?
Yes, because they would at least have to come up with a valid reason for refusing you a service. You won't just wake up one day to see everything completely gone, without any explanation.
> Is there nobody among Parler's millions of users who'd be able and willing to host them so they don't have to worry about alignment of interests anymore?
Maybe there is, I don't know. But it doesn't end on hosting. Even if you manage to successfully keep your hosting, someone else will come after you. Like the domain registrar, payment processor, DDOS protection and the final bosses - Visa and MasterCard.
As you're just trolling at this point, this will be the last thing I'm going to say.
Your example is not "perfect", it's stupid. No, NFL doesn't count as a tech industry and it's not in scope of what I want to regulate. I told you what types of services should be regulated since the very beginning, but you just keep arguing semantics whether the banks are a part of tech industry or not. I'm not even talking about Twitter or Facebook here and these are the tech companies. No, banks aren't tech industry either. The definition of a "tech company" doesn't really matter in what I'm arguing for. It was to very roughly describe what I mean. And there is nothing else I can do if you're unable to argue in good faith.
If "you can complain if you want", then "Nobody is forced to host your site. This is partly how free market capitalism works" is not any kind of rebuttal to their complaint, is it?
So your entire argument is that nothing illegal was done? I don't think anyone claimed otherwise, so that doesn't contribute anything to the conversation.
> It's really your own fault for choosing to depend on google.
There you go. Signing up to their services means that you are aware of the terms and conditions and it includes termination of service for any reason. Tough.
> If you don't like google's behaviour, then you should either be self-hosting or at least diversify with other providers.
They didn't listen to us when GitHub kept going down nor did they listen when Google took Element and Mastodon's apps off the Play Store (The outrage was visible). Oh well, its their platform and they are private companies, blah blah blah.
I guess when rvz was screaming for self-hosting and having control over your own infrastructure as possible, others said AWS, GCP and Azure made it a point and click setup and 'It's just easier because someone else is the sys-admin and its not my server'.
Cancel culture has been frivolously applied to a lot of situations where it does not make sense to. Rob Monster literally has said himself he wants to provide a place to foment specifically far-right ideology. He is extremely deserving of a “cancel”.
Yes, it is. I don't think that you should be cancelled for being a communist, a nazi, a black nationalist or whatever, simply for holding such opinions. Really outrageous thing to say, I know.
People refusing to speak with you or buy things from you is not "being canceled". You do not have a right to force people to listen to you, or force people to do business with you.
You are protected from the -government- by the 1st amendment, and other laws prohibit you or your business from discriminating based on protected classes. You are not protected from the court of public opinion, and rightly so.
Of course you should be free to say "I agree with Nazi views", and of course I should be allowed to say "that's idiotic, goodbye".
I really don't understand how people seem to think that I -must- respect your opinion no matter what it is, and that I -must- continue to speak with you or do business with you. Where is -my- freedom? If you disagree, then don't give me money and maybe my business will fail! But I should be free to do that.
While access to the airwaves clearly bumps up against questions of First Amendment rights and protections thereof, the airwaves themselves are a finite national resource---at least the way the system was originally set up, two signals cannot share the same carrier frequency, so the FCC has the responsibility of allocating those resources.
The allocation criteria include responsible use of the resources by those to whom they've been allotted for the public good, because those resources have been de facto denied to other private citizens. What that "for the public good" clause means, though, is forever under scrutiny and up for debate.
For historical reasons, the FCC distinguishes obscene or profane material from the general category of material with a viewpoint. The FCC is constrained from sanctioning broadcasters for broadcasting a particular view, but does have general authority to sanction across the board for profanity broadcast within a certain time range (when children are assumed present) and from obscene material at all points in time. For more information: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-freedom-speech
The Internet did not grow up in an ecosystem of similar government constraints because it is not a resource with the physical finiteness of communication spectrum---we can always attach more computers. Plus, if I understand the philosophy correctly, a fundamental difference was understood between broadcast material---what's your user can receive whether or not they wish to but just leaving their receiver tuned to the relevant station---and online material, which the user only receives if they make an explicit request for.
All of that having been said, this is all muddy, and arguments can certainly be made that various aspects of it are incorrectly reasoned, outdated, or bad analogy.
He has said himself that he want to provide a space to foment and cultivate far-right ideology on the internet. That’s a Nazi and your prevaricating is obvious.
Cancel culture is not really a thing, as much as comedians like to talk about it (on huge platforms like netflix).
People are speaking with the only thing companies give a damn about- money. They want people to be held accountable for things, and are actually willing to put money where their mouth is. If you disagree with that, then you disagree with free market capitalism.
It's not even really political, as people on both sides get "canceled"- I mean, occasionally get held accountable for their actions. There are dumb instances (like Al Franken, Aziz Ansari, Jeffrey Tambor) and others where people jump the gun, but overall I can't say it's really a bad thing. People need to be held accountable for their actions, end of story.
As the saying goes: if you see shit everywhere you go, check your shoe.
I mean, you can assert that baselessly, or you could read literally anything about the prevalence of "cancellation" in both the private and public spheres, especially among gen-z cohorts:
People now realize that they can assert their opinions and hold people accountable, whereas in the past other people may have just shrugged and gone "well, that's just how it is".
In the case of the article you linked, the first example of "canceling" was someone walking out of a classroom after requesting a song to not be played. This is not unreasonable given the R.Kelly allegations and documentary.
The second example of "canceling" is literally just deciding to ignore someone, and make other people aware of it and reason behind it. How on earth is that a new phenomenon? She had a valid reason too!
The third example with James Charles is also not unreasonable, and by "canceled" they really mean "people got upset and didn't want to watch his videos anymore". Are you seriously going to argue that if I get upset with someone, I should continue to watch their videos? That's not canceling someone!
So I'm going to repeat it: Cancel "culture" is not really a thing. People from these last two generations are more vocal about their beliefs. And good for it.
If you are a fan of cancel culture, you're free to express that opinion.
But what you seem to be saying is "cancel culture exists, but is not a problem IMO", given that you quoted several instances of it existing, and literally said "People from these last two generations are more vocal about their beliefs" (and thus, in their own words, cancel people).
I'm not sure what you are imagining as the strawman of "cancel culture" which you are asserting doesn't exist?
I am a fan of people being vocal about their beliefs, even if I don't necessarily agree with them. People should be held accountable, and I don't think anyone would find this to be unreasonable.
I do not think what people recently have been referring to as "cancel culture" exists. They are prescribing their own view onto what humans have been doing for hundreds of years. The primary difference is that people are now holding others accountable more than they did before. So maybe one could refer to this as a new "accountability culture".
But walking out of a room because you did not like the content is not a new phenomenon. Giving someone the cold shoulder because you don't like them or they did something to you, is not a new phenomenon. Choosing to not listen to artists because of their controversial life is not a new phenomenon.
To reiterate. For that second example, she decided that she didn't want to engage with him because he used racial slurs. This is not "canceling" someone- it is calling them out for unacceptable behavior. Nobody was forced into agreeing with her. So to call this as "canceling someone" is patently ridiculous. She's free to point out he uses racial slurs, and others are free to continue to engage or disengage. This is not "cancel culture"!
I did not quote several instances of "cancel culture". That article had several examples of people putting their foot down about their beliefs. Nothing new here.
>I am a fan of people being vocal about their beliefs, even if I don't necessarily agree with them. People should be held accountable, and I don't think anyone would find this to be unreasonable.
How can you be a fan of people being vocal about their beliefs, even when you disagree with them, while also being a fan of punishing people for being vocal about beliefs which you disagree with? (Assuming you're not a sadist)
But he's actively endorsing a viewpoint which attempts to silence (through social coercion) dissenting views. This is at odds with his professed support for... dissenting views.
“People are calling out injustice rather than letting it slide” is the viewpoint he’s endorsing, which is an “attempt to silence dissenting views”? Silencing dissenting views has a very concrete meaning, which has apparently been hijacked by some people to fit their narrative of a non existent cancel culture.
The phrase "get held accountable" is an amazing use of passive voice.
It's effectively the same as the transitive verb "to punish", but it avoids having a subject entirely.
The implicit subject becomes some universal morality, which we might personify as God. People who use it assert that they act on behalf of God -- or, perhaps, that they themselves are God. "Deus vult!"
It's very similar to what I've heard described as a "fact-shaped" phrase. For example: "Time's up." Here you transform the imperative sentence "Comply now!" into a declarative sentence. You make your own will sound like an irresistible law of nature.
A person who observes the frequent abuse of this rhetorical device might conclude that facts do not exist at all, but are merely expressions of Power. An alternative to that cynicism is to maintain belief in Fact, while recognizing "fact-shaped" rhetorical tricks for what they are.
Returning to the original topic: When we say "People need to be held accountable for their actions", we are really saying "It is good that people punish one another." That is probably still true. But now we see more honestly the interaction of multiple parties. And we can consider the structure of those interactions.
For example: Do we still get the good things that come from repeated games, when the punisher cannot themselves be punished?
"Returning to the original topic: When we say "People need to be held accountable for their actions", we are really saying "It is good that people punish one another." That is probably still true. But now we see more honestly the interaction of multiple parties. And we can consider the structure of those interactions."
While I don't disagree with making things more explicit, I believe the intent in the original phrasing was clear enough.
"Do we still get the good things that come from repeated games, when the punisher cannot themselves be punished?"
A lot of times, celebrities don't even get "canceled". They lie low for a bit, and come back. While it's true that sometimes the public is unfair and jumps the gun, the only thing we can do is be vocal about well... not jumping the gun on allegations.
While the populace at large can't get punished, the punishments are also much softer. Louis CK didn't go to jail- he just had his comedy career ended (rightly so). He's mostly free to do other things, especially around now that people are starting to forget. Which is also an issue of the populace at large- it has a bad memory for most people.
Was Parler really loosely moderated? I never used it, but I heard stories about some pretty heavy handed moderation. They were famously quick to ban people for perceived trolling.
I find this to be a bit of a bad comparison. /r/politics downvotes opposing viewpoints - they aren’t banned. And there are many, many other subreddits where you will find opinions completely different from those of the /r/politics orthodoxy.
There's not really a way to prove it, since reddit doesn't have transparent moderation, but in my experience /r/politics tends to ban users with different viewpoints.
Why would there be a lot of opposing viewpoints that are buried under downvotes if you sort by controversial then? You’re making claims with no basis whatsoever.
You believe something that doesn't have a way to prove it? Were you banned personally? Or are just believing anecdotes from people with an agenda?
What makes you believe it then? Anyway, that sub bans people only for violent threats and such, but opposing viewpoints are downvoted a lot. They even have some pro-Trump mods on their team who can see and reverse mod actions including bans.
Anyway you can try an experiment if you care, post on there (with a new account if needed) very partisan stuff, but don't advocate for violence, and you'll find yourself not banned.
Do they? Or is it someone with opposing view points that also happen to be racist/belligerent getting banned, and think it's because of their opposing view points rather than being racist/belligerent?
I have no experience with /r/politics but I've seen other subreddits make absolutely no distinction between "having moderately opposing viewpoints" and "being racist/belligerent/troll/brigader", so it results in a ban.
No, you're thinking of /r/conservative, which literally has "flaired users only" posts, and insta-bans people who express even mild criticism of conservative talking points.
"Do not violate the Mission Statement. (We provide a place on Reddit for conservatives, both fiscal and social, to read and discuss political and cultural issues from a distinctly conservative point of view.)"
And when you suffer from constant brigading, this is a reasonable way to deal with it. If /r/liberal did this, fine. /r/politics belies its name by being a liberal echo chamber. And _yes_ you can easily get banned there for expressing perfectly benign, but unpopular views.
The moderation scheme was silly. Reported comments would go before a jury of other parler users. If the jury voted so, the comment would be treated as rule breaking and the account could be sanctioned.
This is obviously flawed, because juries would vote innocent comments not supporting the mainline parler views to be extremely rulebreaking, and vote death threats (+doxxings, etc) that aligned with mainline parler views to be OK. In some ways it’s a great example of why pure community-led moderation doesn’t really work.
So the moderation was either extreme or near nonexistent depending on what political views were being expressed.
"Politics are downstream of culture" -- Andrew Breitbart
He might be wrong about a great many things, but he was right about this. Intolerance (under the guise of "cancel culture") is a result of growing tribalism. Two parallel cultures fighting for supremacy.
That jury is fundamentally a great idea (that's why we use juries today). The only problem is the culture of intolerance.
Parler's jury is just a representation of that intolerance just like their users being kicked off Twitter was a representation of intolerance from the other side.
Unfortunately, this intolerance has become a part of culture and inevitably flows downstream into intolerant politics. If the intolerance doesn't stop, separation or war has always been the result. I fear that people on both sides won't see this until it is too late to prevent.
>> This is obviously flawed, because juries would vote innocent comments not supporting the mainline parler views to be extremely rulebreaking, and vote death threats (+doxxings, etc) that aligned with mainline parler views to be OK.
SkySilk appears to specialize in VPCs and cloud hosting, not colocation. Their AUP doesn't appear to give Parler much relief either[1]:
> We specifically reserve the right to refuse to provide the Service to customers or End Users engaged in the dissemination of material that may cause us to be subject to attacks on our network, or that while technically legal, run counter to our corporate principles.
I laughed when his link to his article turned up a 404 at medium with account suspended. Not entirely sure yet if it was a morbid or cynical laugh.
At a more technical level, do we need a 4xx code for "memory holed"? Was this an oversight of the IETF, or should Medium and other discerning and socially responsible content providers use the other available 4xx codes?
Here, 404 "not found" is a pretty lie.
We could start off with the basic 400 "bad request". This is closer to the truth. In fact, it is too close to the truth because it means "client error". (Is it a crime yet to click on "not found" articles?)
So, ok, let's try 401 "unauthorized". This is still better than "not found" but, again, just a bit too honest.
But, really, Medium.com should be responding with 403 "Forbidden". This is the unvarnished truth from the mouth of the server.
403 - Forbidden: "The request contained valid data and was understood by the server, but the server is refusing action. This may be due to the user not having the necessary permissions for a resource or needing an account of some sort, or attempting a prohibited action e.g. creating a duplicate record where only one is allowed)."
It is less universal than e-mail (and potentially less-secure), and certainly less secure than TOTP. It also costs money, whereas the former two can be had for free.
Isn’t email hard to set up though? As in, Gmail silently dropping your emails even with DKIM set up properly? There’s services you can pay to have more luck, but then you’re at the same downside as texting
Yes, it absolutely is (though I do still run my own). I do know that it's easier than setting up a phone provider, however, which is more equivalent to setting up one's own ISP.
i have simply assumed that the purpose of this requirement generally is for the platform owner to establish your real identity for monetization and/or indemnification, and that any benefit to the user is incidental.
who ever said that "security" meant yours? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People will think twice about posting threats, child porn, and other illicit things when they have some skin in the game. This definitely cuts down on moderation requirements.
I think those who think this misunderstand the type of security it is meant to provide. It's not about blocking account takeover attempts. Services mostly don't really care about that, because it doesn't affect the service as a whole. It's about reducing spam, bots, and other organized hostile activity towards the service as a whole. It's tough to create a bunch of accounts in a way that the site can't easily track if you have to provide a real phone number. Yes, everybody knows about buying phone services on the internet, and they do seem to have ways to block using those numbers.
Pretty much every service does this. Try signing up for a Google, Facebook, or Twitter account without providing a real phone number. Usually if it works at all, the account created will be rapidly blocked until you do provide one.
Then I will get spam through my phone number then each time I register it for 'SMS authentication'. Then you'll later ask how did these services not only get my phone number, but also upload my entire address book for 'security reasons'.
You're right that you may get a lot of noisy authentication spam texts. Alas, none of the companies involved seem to care. Judging by their popularity, most of their users don't seem to care much either.
Is a captcha enough? I've never worked in bot/spam mitigation for a large public platform before, so I don't really know. Based on how universal phone number requirements are for these services, and how much trouble they seem to have gone to in order to block using easily purchased numbers, I'm going to guess that captchas aren't enough.
Parler asks for an absurd amount of PII. I always figured it was a way for the Mercer crowd to assemble a dossier on the extreme right for use in future highly targeted mobilization efforts.
The only time they request additional PII is for verification.
(As a security & privacy advocate with a job in the space, I dug into this last summer and again just before the January shutdown. It was never true just for signing up.)
I don't want to be all conspiratorial or anything but wasn't Parler hacked during the Capitol Hill protest and a bunch of protesters where caught? To me this seems like a successful honeypot.
It's all network effect. Parler somehow got some endorsements by well known Republicans like Hannity and Trump at a time when people on the right were looking to switch to something else, so they ended up with a lot more users than Gab.
I always worry about the objectives and goals behind the people in the shadows injecting money into projects like this. Twitter started off as an open forum, but look at it now.
Which is a direct result of a platform which allows free speech - including speech which neither you nor I may not like.
But to me, free speech means anyone can speak their mind, no matter how ghastly others find it.
And on Gab, I have encountered some pretty unsavoury speech - however, copious use of the Block feature on those I find especially distasteful means that I encounter less of those I find as such.
I'd rather have a platform based on free speech and be able to filter 'undesirables' out myself, than have the platform itself choose the speech it prefers me to see/hear/read.
> But to me, free speech means anyone can speak their mind, no matter how ghastly others find it.
> And on Gab, I have encountered some pretty unsavoury speech - however, copious use of the Block feature on those I find especially distasteful means that I encounter less of those I find as such.
As I understand, being on Gab is pretty much seeking out "ghastly" and "unsavoury" speech. For instance, this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145412) described it as:
> I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.
So I guess the question is: what content do you see after your "copious use of the Block feature."?
> I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.
That's interesting. Gab.com's timeline is public and is visible to everyone (there is no need to create an account). I just took a peek at it right now and I don't see anything misogynistic, etc. As you quote this particular as a supporting reference, would you be able to share some of Gab's specific timeline content that made that comment writer think that?
> As you quote this particular as a supporting reference, would you be able to share some of Gab's specific timeline content that made that comment writer think that?
> I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.
This is clearly not true and easily shown to be so.
There's either free speech, which will include a lot of unsavory, horrible or downright evil content, or there is censorship. It's one or the other. And while censorship might be considered a reasonable trade-off, it immediately turns the platform into a mouthpiece for the politics of the people who run it. And once someone has that kind of power, its abuse is inevitable.
My understanding was that the “first wave”, so to speak, of Gab users were the hardcore folks who genuinely had extremist views.
Free Speech and censorship resistant platforms tend to attract users in waves. The first wave is the most extreme, as those users get kicked off mainstream platforms first. Then subsequent waves of users join as less extreme views become problematic. While those waves are less radical, they still have to contend with being in the same pool as the others. Ordinary folks join for idealistic reasons and then see a bunch of radical content. I’m sure that puts a ton of people off. Parler, it seems, wants to be free speech but not that free speech, if you get what I’m saying.
> My understanding was that the “first wave”, so to speak, of Gab users were the hardcore folks who genuinely had extremist views.
> Free Speech and censorship resistant platforms tend to attract users in waves. The first wave is the most extreme, as those users get kicked off mainstream platforms first. Then subsequent waves...
I don't think that's true of social networks. Take Gab for instance: its "first wave" has solidly given it a reputation as a place for extreme racists, which repels everyone else (except maybe a handful of civil libertarians with questionable judgement). That reputation prevents "subsequent waves" of more moderate folks, who would rather go to a different platform.
Also Gab, Parler, et al are really reactions against moderation, not censorship. However, most users actually welcome some level of moderation.
Most users of parlor are not technical people and don't understand anything about it. The reason why parlor got popular is because it was easy for disinformation to be spread and people want to believe in it.
For example when that at&t network center was bombed there was a fake image going around that it "wasn't the van that exploded". I had someone try to "prove to me" it was true by linking me to parlor and it's users creating conspiracies on top of conspiracies. The users there will accept disinformation and made up conspiracies if it benefits their team.
That's sadly the reality of it. People that don't understand tech should not be on the internet. They don't understand the concept of people can and will lie freeley behind a camera or keyboard.
A classical example of "my ignorance is just as good as your education because I don't know any better."
There's obviously a difference between the broad understanding OP is talking about, and the low-level physics that goes into a computer.
Also, one could say that there's a stark difference between saying people who do not understand how misinformation works on a platform should not use that platform, and for example saying people who don't understand toasters shouldn't use toasters.
For the record, I don't understand the low level physics of toasters. As far as I know, they're magic bagel browning devices.
A toaster has fairly benign failure modes, so this strawman isn't really a reasonable one. Though I hope you understand toasters enough not to trigger your smoke alarm every time.
Having the ability to properly operate any machine is not 'elitist'. Computers and the internet were not made for the purposes they are used as now - and therefore they are heavily exploitable for others profit. People that don't understand how it works are significantly more suspectible to apply real world principles in ways that are entirely non applicable.
The average person trusts what others say and does not have a basic understanding of what constitutes facts and evidence. Therefore they cannot navigate truth through the internet.
The problem with social media users (and propagandas victims in general) has nothing to do with how computers work and everything to do with how people work.
You're saying that one side's lies are worse than the other side's lies. There is at least as much misinformation on Facebook and Twitter as there was on Parler. What you're really complaining about is that Parler doesn't censor the people you want to see censored.
People who write 'the concept of people can and will lie freeley behind a camera or keyboard', 'it's users', and 'Parlor' should perhaps pause before accusing others of ignorance in some field.
>People that don't understand tech should not be on the internet. They don't understand the concept of people can and will lie freeley behind a camera or keyboard.
You're under the mistaken impression that people who "understand tech" are never taken in by these conspiracy theories but I've seen plenty of comments on HN supporting QAnon, "stop the steal", pizzagate, COVID conspiracies and anti-vax, scientific racism, anti-semitism, UFO woo and the paranormal, you name it someone on Hacker News believes it.
The evidence that being able to use a computer and being able to think critically or even maintain a rational grasp on the nature of reality are orthogonal skillsets is all around you.
>People that don't understand tech should not be on the internet. They don't understand the concept of people can and will lie freely behind a camera or keyboard.
This is a silly statement. Do you (whoever first said this) think widespread misinformation started with the internet? It has nothing to do with tech and everything to do with people.
People who don't understand people should not be on the internet. Their knowledge of tech is completely orthogonal.
This is exactly equivalent to when people thought Reddit was something novel when they mobbed and doxed various people in their vigilante internet sleuthing of the boston marathon bomber. It's mobs being mobs: always has and always will be.
I sorta get it, from the standpoint of just allowing folks to speak their mind without repercussions. Unfortunately in practice that invariably drifts to being somewhere that the worst dregs of society congregate because they aren't welcome anywhere else, and then, well, your site becomes the cesspool that Parler was. :\",
I believe the "echo chamber" concept is overrated. It's really not difficult to go out and find somebody representing the other side of an argument. You can construct yourself an echo chamber if you want, but you don't automatically get one.
The narrative that reasonable points of view are being censored out of existence is part of a narrative constructed to leverage the right-wing persecution complex. There are plenty of right wingers all over social media; it's chock full of them. But that persecution complex has turned into violence, and that complex is perfectly positioned to pretend that trying to stem violence is censorship. (They didn't seem to mind when it was being used to fight anti-American terrorism.)
If you don't want an echo chamber, don't make one. Seek out sensible people with different points of view, which is no harder than taking up an interest in ballet dancing or Malaysian cuisine. They weren't being excluded from your non-ballet-mee-goreng-free circle.
You're not required to give equal time to conspiracy theorists -- and there do exist non-conspiracy-theorist right wingers to talk to, if that's what you want. Social media isn't banning them. The ones who are being banned are using that language to pretend that there's a different reason.
I mean, sure, there are companies trying to build a decentralized web, but I think that's different that saying an individual hosting provider will keep you online.
This feels like saying "The Tor network will keep you online". You still need someone providing hardware and electricity. Unless I'm missing something about these offerings.
> This feels like saying "The Tor network will keep you online". You still need someone providing hardware and electricity. Unless I'm missing something about these offerings.
Nobody but you knows that you're hosting hidden tor service. One need to perform a sophisticated attack to discover its location. You can buy VPS from Amazon and host your hidden tor service there and Amazon guys won't have a clue until NSA guys will come to them.
That's true but it's fairly specific to Tor and maybe Freenet. Most decentralized systems don't use onion routing so it's easy to trace any piece of public content back to where it's hosted.
On Safe Network (developed by Maidsafe)
* data is self encrypted client side
* IP is scrubbed and given a Kademlia or XOR address? I forget exactly
* qp2p (QUIC implementation in rustlang w/extra features) encrypts traffic
* nodes can’t choose their disjoint section (shard) and are randomly relocated (churn).
Nodes are made up from a ‘Safe’ (previously called ‘Vault’) executable file and some spare space on disk of everyday computers. Nodes first go through a short PoW resource proof so the network knows the nodes capabilities and how to place them. Sybil attacks are prevented in many ways including random placement in sections and random relocation, and node ageing, which is a way of incremental responsibility when a node behaves all the way into the next relocation event and that is halved if misbehaving or offline. You would have to control a significant portion of the network to cause a problem and would be cost prohibitive in most cases.
In a young network the highest risk comes from a ‘Google attack’ where they deliberately allocate their resources early on and either try to control the consensus or rug pull their resources which would cause massive data loss.
Safe Network also has Safe Network Token (SN) as an digital payment/incentive layer for providing or purchasing network resources (bandwidth/cpu/storage).
If you think CRDT’s or Asynchronous Trutworthy Transfers (AT2) are neat innovations you should definitely check it out as Maidsafe is really pushing the envelope there.
safenetforum.org
https://primer.safenetwork.org/
Definitely love MaidSAFE. I asked them several times how they recover from corrupted section consensus and they say they don’t. Vitalik Buterin has a problem with that, as do I. But I guess churn eventually recovers it right?
If you have a lot of sleeper nodes coordinate a google attack the network is unrecoverable though...
Encrypt filesystem. While technically they could monitor RAM traffic or even CPU instructions, I would be extremely impressed if they have necessary tools to spy on tor nodes.
But isn’t an onion service just a server only accessible over TOR? What I’m asking is: where was the server? Who was physically hosting the website (either knowingly or unknowingly)?
Also this bullet point under "Lawful Purposes Only":
> Acting in any manner that might subject us to unfavorable regulatory action, subject us to any liability for any reason, or adversely affect our public image, reputation or goodwill, as determined by us in our sole and exclusive discretion.
From NYT:
> It was unclear how Parler had figured out how to host its site on computer servers, the central technology underpinning any website. Many of the large web-hosting firms had previously rejected it. For other services required to run a large website, Parler relied on help from a Russian firm that once worked for the Russian government and a Seattle firm that once supported a neo-Nazi site.
I'm slightly left of center so parler is not for me - but I am curious and I like to see what's going on outside of my bubble. When I had to commute to work for instance, I'd listen to AM talk radio on the way in. It did nothing but reinforce my left of center world view. In any case, my point is that in this society we live in, merely having an account is seen as an espousing of the views. With parler's poor history of user data handling, there is no way I am even creating an account and risk having my (real-life) reputation take a hit. It's a sad state of affairs.
Now, one might argue that I've just said I'm slightly left of center on hackernews, why don't I fear that - it wouldn't take much for someone who already knows me to tie my person to this account. I guess parler has a reputation as being (extreme?) far right and that's the difference. Again, it doesn't make much sense.
Actually it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot things I don’t want to be associated with. I’m also left of center and I’m not actually worried about having a Parler account, but there are a ton of websites that scare me way more.
I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.
I'm honestly not sure what I expected to be honest. I signed in once, scrolled a bit, recoiled in disgust and haven't been back.
An observation that someone on HN pointed to when the Parler take-down originally occurred:
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
> I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.
That's interesting. The public timeline on Gab is visible to everyone (there is no need to sign in). I just took a peek at it right now and I don't see anything misogynistic, etc. Would you mind sharing some of its specific timeline content that made you think that?
I joined Gab very early on in its development, when the devs were still running it as a reskinned WordPress site.
It very much was exactly as the gp describes, though I've been told that the platform has become more tolerable as its community has expanded. I haven't check back however.
Gab's public feed shows a subset of the top and hot posts, most of them look pretty tame.
This comment actually shows why surveillance in a society is bad. You are altering you behaviours simply because of worry you may be judged and not for doing anything wrong but just for looking.
Not the original poster but, it seems pretty direct to me: everything we do online is logged somewhere online, for most practical purposes forever, and that’s the surveillance they are worried about.
I’m really worried about this and I think it’s going to be a massive problem in the next few decades if trends continue. Especially because society’s views on what is acceptable changes with each generation. What we say today may be perfectly acceptable now, but can be considered hateful or [xyz]-phobic in the future.
I try to tread carefully but even still, everything I have ever posted can be taken wildly out of context and used against me by some activist in the future.
This. People seem to forget how much has the Overton Window shifted over last 4 years, or 10.
In a 2008 interview, Obama said he wasn't in favor of gay marriage. Today, that would be cancelable offense for a random liberal person, and retroactivity is a thing in that culture. Brendan Eich was forced to resign in 2014 over an anti-gay-marriage donation from the same year of 2008.
Not in 2008 but in 2014 yes it does. I don't disagree with the Overton Window moving. Obama informed us of his change of thought in 2012 [0] (still later than I would have liked). Eich never did that even in 2014 when he was called out for it.
I understand and respect that people's views can change and I'm more than willing to allow them to change their positions. Eich never changed, that is why he was "canceled". Also it's important to note this wasn't just an internet "mob" that "canceled" him, people who worked under him didn't want him in that position and spoke out about it.
Absolutely. E.g., looking at porn with a verified account. Just about everything has a database table of everything that an account has viewed which allows someone the opportunity to be judgey.
Maybe, but I see what they mean. The real life analog is just social/cultural pressure which is usually relatively local and personalized.
Online and with the general risk that your entire diary gets opened up - folks are cautious about their actions with that in mind. Also I think it’s that the judges are not local/personal entities. So they are difficult to reason with or explain context.
Not really. I'm in the same boat: I'm an independent who likes to get an omnivorous information diet, but I've regularly avoided looking into certain things I'm curious about because I know there will be a record of it and a bunch of data sellers providing a misleading snapshot of who I am and what I believe. What did Richelieu say? "Give me seven words spoken by an honest man and I'll find something in them to hang him?" In today's surveillance society it's intelligent to limit your footprint, which is exactly the chilling effect free speech and free society advocates are worried about. (Glenn Greenwald's "No Place to Hide" is a great read on the topic.)
I pretty much stopped caring - in a post-snowden world where we found out that merely visiting a linux forum gets you on a list[1] I figure I'm already on a good good chunk of them.
That and a curiosity about the world and history (particularly the cold war) means just the stuff I look at on wikipedia would look awful out of context.
Yeah that's one approach, you can just choose not to care. I'm sure I'm also on Linux lists and crap like that, but that doesn't mean I want to end up on a bunch of other ones. Particularly with the vehemence in American politics today, I don't want either side putting me on one of their enemies lists just because some site I signed up to check out got hacked and all of the user info got dumped. Seems easier to just check out, live my life, and try to be kind to the people in the real world around me. If I want a political discussion I'll go chat with some of my friends.
I think it’s not just the NSA’s list that the poster is worried about- they are worried about being associated with violent nut jobs by polite society, and getting canceled.
How successful do you think a background check service for tech startups would be that gives you a percentage rating of how racist,homophobic,etc. an applicant is.
Could pivot to an “auto-cancel” saas if you will. You could even cancel people in bulk.
Jokes aside I’m sure there would be appetite for such a thing. Under the guise of “employee safety”.
And one of the first lists to check would be Parler.
Do not think about dragnets as dragnets. Do think about them as a searchable storage of facts usable for future persecution.
Look at any authoritarian regime. Once they decide that a particular person has to be destroyed, they dig through their entire history to compile a dossier of Evil Things that person has said and done. You need searchable history for that, though. Or a lot of manpower. But databases are better for that purpose.
Similarly, if you can show that (unwanted person) said the N-word in 2004, you can probably get them destroyed today i the U.S. The hit piece just writes itself.
How can you dispute we live in a surveillance society?
Everything we do or say, everywhere we go, is being tracked somewhere, unless you are extremely vigilant. And even if you are extremely vigilant, I'm sure you will slip up somewhere along the line.
> Colleen Oefelein, who identified herself on Twitter as an associate literary agent with the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, appeared to confirm her termination in a tweet on Monday morning.
> "Well thanks Twitter and @JDLitAgency," Oefelein wrote. "I just got fired because I'm a Christian and a conservative."
"The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency was distressed to discover this morning, January 25th, that one of our agents has been using the social media platforms Gab and Parler."
heh, your comment is pretty much exactly me, AM radio station and all. except that i did create an account just so i could see first hand what was being said.
Aside from the political stuff, this illustrates how a company can be reliant on another vendor. AWS was a single point of failure for Parler (along with a few other services like domain registration).
For a one man show in a garage (or a very early stage startup), it's probably okay to focus on features and not backend resiliency. But by the time you have a board of directors, someone should have asked how they would handle losing a core service. Especially in this case someone should have seen that their business was high risk- either explicitly because of their plan/model, or incidentally because of the crowd they attracted.
Maybe Parler had a plan for some things, but they clearly weren't ready for a setback at this level. I wonder how prepared other companies are for losses/denial of service like this. Could Ford's supply chain weather a vendor dropping out? Could Kellogg's cereal?
Ironically, a one man show in a garage would be more resistant to legal challenges than hosting on aws. If you want to take down my server you have to either issue a warrant to search and seize my home, or a warrant for each of my ISPs, or intervene at the IP block or DNS level.
The outcries over freedom of speech were just pathetic from a technological standpoint, it's a bunch of web 4.0 developers and users who felt entitled to services that even a 90s computer enthusiast would be able to provide.
On some level it's not just Parler's fault, the internet has become more complex, and maybe some ISPs and modems provide some roadblocks like shared IPs and obnoxious firewalls, but after months they are still unable to lift a physical building place computers on property they control. It's like they are either incompetent or purposely looking for refusal of service so they can martyrize themselves.
Of all the "deplatformings" this one is the hardest to feel sorry for. They clearly had a lot of technical debt and very little expertise in what they were doing. Seeing their AWS bill, it's apparent they were not without resources either.
As far as I am aware, they are still just moving around their horrendously cobbled together Wordpress monstrosity to whatever giant benefactor that has a couch they can crash on. It's clearly other peoples' fault that they are so dependent on other's technology!
And while I am very receptive towards conservative ideals as well as criticisms of tech and mainstream media, this is a bit like watching someone starve to death because Blue Apron stopped delivering to them.
From a purely technical perspective, I've never worked for a SaaS company that had SOPs for "what if our cloud provider pulls the plug on us today?". I'm sure big enterprise companies do this, but small nascent companies probably don't consider this to be one of the bigger risks that they face.
Sure, they run an unpopular business, but I would not predicted the convergence of (1) the Capitol Hill riots would have taken place and (2) that the media would characterize it as a coup attempt or similar and argue that Parler was responsible (as opposed to Facebook where the planning seems to have taken place) and (3) that this would result in AWS kicking them off of their platform overnight. It's really hard to predict where the mob will focus it's wrath or in what proportion.
Well, we at OrgPad.com are not big or very complex but we sure thought about not having access to our main production platform (we heard about the "glitches" that DigitalOcean had and other such events). We explicitly backup to both the same and a very different provider so we can fully restore/ bootstrap everything within hours. We figured, this is good enough for now.
Did you mean "today" literally or as in "modern times?"
They represented a white supremacist denied a permit by the city of Charlottesville in 2017 (for the rally where a Nazi sympathizer killed a protester). They were criticized; they weren't canceled or deserted.
I could care less about their terrible tech stack. What I will not stand for is the deletion of opposing viewpoints and the seeming lack of moderation over talk of violence, hate mongering and the cultivation of racist and neo-Nazi sentiment.
While I don't agree with its content, I don't believe in people like hosting providers applying moral tests to their users. The Government/law should be the only people shutting them down.
Imagine that data center will ask you to move out because you're helping Parler. Imagine that your bank will ask you to find another bank in a three days and other banks will not want to work with you. When will you give up?
Calling this cancel culture is imo off base. A lot of people view this as an extremist cult bordering on brainwashing and terrorist training.
I fear that there is definitely something brewing in our online habits these days, and it may be significantly damaging to society.
The problem however, is that removing these groups will not inherently solve them. I would support removing of these extremists if i thought it would do good. It however, won't. It will further build the fire of self-victim identification and extremist views which fuel them.
We need another approach at solving this problem. Of which i think is two fold:
1. Groups (both the left and right) struggle to stand up against the undesirable extremists within.
2. Our ingestion of information is not filtered enough by our own brains. We consume freely, and largely due to extremists and bubbles we end up consuming garbage.
All of this said, i feel like attempts at dealing with Parler is vastly different than the "cancel culture" which attempted to rename the https://rubocop.org/ tool. One is a misguided answer to extremists - the other is an attempt at protecting hurt feelings over bad words. Very different.
The ones who post racist homophobic and misogynistic memes on Parler? Yes.
If they're not, as your question seems to imply, then "all" conservatives are racist/etc. But i'm not saying that, i'm saying the racist ones are the extremists.
Likewise the people who mean well, but are incorrect, on the left who tried to rename Rubocop are extremists.
Do you honestly believe that someone who posts a misogynistic meme is an extremist or is it hyperbole? I personally would reserve the term for someone who commits violence out of some ideology. I never thought to look before but the first definition from a DDG search says something that would put a very large number of people into that category;
>A person who advocates or resorts to measures beyond the norm, especially in politics.
Someone calling for UBI five years ago could be called an extremist. Though it does need someone to define 'the norm'.
Is this really cancel culture or just minimizing legal exposure by hosting and supporting an extremist group that gives protection to people claiming to plan to physically hurt others
It's essentially a cultural cancer that is killing the US, making it a widely intolerable place to exist. People have been excusing it for many years now, pretending that it's just extremists being cancelled (and how that's no great loss), however that's not remotely close to true at this point. The US is increasingly becoming oppressive culturally. What's happening is almost the opposite of the 1960s-1970s cultural revolution; the cancel culture mobs today are like the Spanish Inquisition, they're kind of like zealot intellectual prudes (but for their biases, their ideas; traditionally prude refers to being easily shocked about eg nudity or sexuality, but in this case it's triggered SJW types largely regarding matters of intellectual discourse).
Over the span of about the prior 10-12 years in China the authorities there decided to crack down on speech online increasingly. For a time, in the early 10-15 years of the Internet there, China actually had a modicum of loose (not free) speech online, where you had a bit of room to talk about subjects that were close to taboo. That's all gone now and has been for years. That process of erosion, crack down, is what it feels like is happening in the US, merely under a different mechanism; instead of a central government authority implementing the oppression, it's mob platforms like Twitter and Facebook where the platforms openly allow hyper aggressive and concerted attacks to take place as a matter of routine. And even though it's not the government doing it, the effect is similar: they go after your life, your job, your friends, your character, your home, your family, your safety, anything they can.
The only solution is to abandon services like Twitter and Facebook, deplete their power. About 15-20% of my Facebook friends (quite normal people, not extremist types, not privacy advocates, etc.) are abandoned ghost accounts now, deleted, paused, etc. In talking to some of them, they got a taste of the horrible nature of how FB can be used as an attack mob platform, how ugly and or toxic it can be, and they wanted no part of it. Hopefully that process keeps spreading.
This decade we'll see a massive rise of walled encrypted communities, where outsiders will largely be kept out for the safety and health of the community. Outsiders will be treated with intense scrutiny, like we were back to living in tribal times (intellectually we're back to living in tribal times). People will begin to live in intellectual silos online to protect themselves from the attack mobs. They won't be decentralized as techies would hope, they'll still be centralized and hosted in the cloud. Interestingly this process will make the divisions in the US worse, the bubbles will become worse; and it will also be considered a big problem by authorities as extremists will begin very commonly using these walled-off encrypted groups/communities to organize out of sight (Parler / Gab will end up as a public fluke, most of those people will end up in hidden-away silo'd communities as the scrutiny continues to get worse on their bad ideas). Authorities will use this process as another argument to go after encryption.
Now would be a good time to build a new version of a social groups platform. Ning as a concept will end up being a $50-$100 billion product, although not quite as they envisioned the concept (they flubbed the entire thing). You want to lean in to selling to tribal intellectual isolation, intellectual bubbles, bet on that not against it, for that's the direction and there is absolutely nothing that's going to stop it. Public Facebook will shrink, public Twitter will shrink, private isolated social groups will dramatically expand. Whoever makes this easy and safe (encrypted, no data leaks, no hacks, top focus on security), in the cloud in a centralized manner, will win and win very very big.
edit: To the downvoters. I know you don't like it, I understand. That doesn't matter, it's the fut...
I agree cancel culture is a pernicious undermining of civil discourse, but this is not cancel culture which is about de-platforming perfectly legal speech.
It’s literally illegal in America to incited and plot murder and insurrection against the government of the USA. Not joking, not boasting, but actually plotting and then executing the plan for real.
There’s a perfectly reasonable argument that while merely disseminating such messages as a platform may not be criminal, that knowingly disseminating or facilitating such discourse while being fully aware of it is reckless and irresponsible. I think if Amazon doesn’t want to behave recklessly and irresponsibly in that way, that’s a reasonable position for them to take.
There’s clearly a cultural blind spot here. If these were Islamic terrorists plotting a repeat of 9/11 nobody here would have any concerns about this.
I believe in your right to free speech, but I don't have to let you into my living room to share your speech.
Vendors have every right to not want to host people they don't support.
If you really cared about free speech, you would demand that the government run their own hosting platform in which no one could be deplatformed. But I'm pretty sure no one actually wants that.
> If you really cared about free speech, you would demand that the government run their own hosting platform in which no one could be deplatformed. But I'm pretty sure no one actually wants that.
Some people did argued that. I personally have no opinion on nationalizing the hosting platforms or social media.
"With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths." — Chomsky
Therefore Parler, which would often ban leftist content, and for that matter any platform that rejects doxxing, threats of violence, off topic or illegal content, is run by Stalinists.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable conclusion and not a thought-terminating cliche at all. I guess we can all just pack it in and go home, no point in even debating this issue anymore. Everyone is a Stalinist.
The "tolerating intolerance" paradox rears its hideous head once again. As someone who grew up during the Internet's early "fuck censorship" days, the cognitive dissonance causes me daily pain.
Every site on the early internet that dealt with user-submitted content practiced censorship. Even USENET allowed censorship. There were no "fuck censorship" days on the early internet, even the edgiest of edgelord sites drew a line somewhere.
There was a casual distinction between removing spam/trolling and actual censorship, and since "platforms" weren't as much of a thing anyone could go set up their own mailing list or web site or IRC server and still be part of the action. The word "censorship" back then implied that (and it seems juvenile now) the gubbermint was comin' ta get all us freethinkers. The belief was that the Free Flow of Information would allow the truth to win out, and that as more people came online they would cast aside their illusions and embrace whatever vaguely anarcho-whatever utopian vision permeated the Internet back then.
At least, me and my fellow kids had that naive belief. Maybe the older folks online already knew better.
Neither Parler (nor Gab) defended the views they hated. If you've seen the front page of either you can't argue in good faith that they did. In fact, they banned dissenters.
By this standard Chomsky would argue Parler "prefers Stalinist standards." Do you believe they do?
I'd like to see an Internet rfc for how social media companies could share content (RSS may be sufficient) and then have the Feds refuse to have accounts on sites that do not "tear down their walls" and allow for easy, 1st order, content sharing
I'm surprised that this revelation comes as a surprise to you.
The core problem is that anybody can call themself a Christian. Anybody can say that they're following Christ's teaching, living a Christian life, etc - regardless of how closely it tracks with the things that Christ did or said.
(By "can", here, I mean can in a practical sense. I mean that these things occur. I do not mean that any of these things are approved of by any particular natural or supernatural being(s).)
By extension, anybody can hang up a shingle and call themselves a Christian church. As a result, you have thousands of Christian sects. These sects exist within a spectrum ranging from somewhat pro-semitic to rabidly anti-semitic.
Even within sects - especially the largest - you will find that adherents are scattered over a pretty broad range of that spectrum.
So, yes - there are a fair number of anti-semitic Christians. Their existence should not come as a surprise to anyone.
I made an account pretty early on, before the thought had crossed my mind that I might acquire some perceived associations I wouldn't want. I had a silly reason, I just wanted to follow a conspiracy theorist friend of mine that moved there. They're certainly not joking about their theories but I find them hilarious.
After seeing it was back online I figured I would log in and post communist memes until they banned me, but it seems I am unable to login. Looks like their technical problems continue.
A number of the users from Parler joined the social network I built. Although I don't lean conservative in my own views (center), I believe that silencing those you feel are mis-informed or wrong only makes -- and has made -- the problem worse. An open ~discord~ discourse(oops, edit) is needed. People don't get that on Parler either. They should have a place they feel comfortable speaking about their (non-violent) views. And others should have the tools to voice their opposition openly -- and anonymously -- as well. Social networks have polarized people nearly beyond repair. I don't have to agree with you to believe you still have the right to voice your opinion. You have the right to be wrong. You have the right to an opportunity for growth.
Funny note, Parler did a copy-pasta of our motto in their re-launch.
I think that's common knowledge? It was a 4chan meme that got taken seriously because the groups it was mocking were so detached from reality that they interpreted satire as truth.
So it seems the prevaling narrative from the lefties here is that because Parler was used to incite the riot it was deserved to be shut down? Is there proof Parler was anymore responsible than every other social media platform?
If this is the case, why don't we just packet sniff the backbone and block internet to any home that is perceived to be engaging in anti-American or violence?
What objective standard are you using here? Is it just ok to punish people you don't think you like?
Seems like in a post truth world its more important for lefties to ensure they are controlling narrative then seeking truth. And many lefties fear free speech as they fear it will hurt them. Ironically, they are creating precedents which will hurt us all. Censorship is a double edged sword.
284 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadJust to note that Rob Monster does have certain criteria for allowing sites to use his services, as well.
"It's one thing to be sent to detention. It's another thing to get a suspension. It's another thing to be sent to a penal colony for the rest of your life," Monster said.
Getting kicked off of a provider is not "being sent to a penal colony". Nobody is forced to host your site. This is partly how free market capitalism works, last I recall. Allow me to play a sad song for parler on the world's smallest violin.
Parler learned a hard lesson to not depend on AWS. I bet a lot of AWS customers also saw that and began taking steps to either move off of AWS or at least make it easy to migrate if needed.
And politics aside, if a client had a bad moderation policy or refused to moderate their content per my standard, then I should be allowed to terminate the contract. They should then be free to choose another provider.
Every day I'm more astonished by what I read in this site.
About the moderation thing. They did moderate, but they couldn't manage everything due the explosive growth they had. Plans to assault the Capitol were posted in Facebook and Twitter days before but only Parler is guilty.
Everything -is- political. For some people, the status quo is amenable to them. For others, it is not. If you want to avoid politics, I think the only real way is to venture into the wilderness and live solo.
"Should you be able to fire them freely because you're not OK with their political beliefs?"
I can't speak for other countries, but the US protects from being fired due to certain characteristics. Aside from that, yes, absolutely, employers should be able to fire employees.
That said, there is nothing preventing said employees from giving said employer bad press, etc. There is nothing preventing employers from getting tried in the court of public opinion.
I don't see why we should expect the government to intervene and say "well, you can't fire anyone, for any reason, ever, as they claim it's retribution for X, Y, or Z". That, I believe, would be referred to by most americans as the dreaded "socialism" that we're so keen to avoid in favor of free market capitalism.
Their rights aren't violated.
https://xkcd.com/1357/ seems appropriate.
And do what, exactly?
AWS can afford to be sued for hosting a forum or the costs of a boycott for hosting Stormfront - a smaller provider could easily be wiped out.
Edited to add the following.
Most of this post was wrong. ttt0 is right that section 230 protects providers in the cases I mentioned. TIL about the scope of section 230 provider protection.
I don't get why people think that the government here can actually do anything without severely impinging on personal freedoms. As a government contractor, I see first hand how f'ing useless our cronyist, bureaucratic government is. Anything they try to do will backfire and make things worse for the average citizen.
The only real solution is to get people to stop treating facebook like the one and only place for messaging people or posting things. They're only "overlords" so long as people only use facebook or twitter.
> banks, domain registrars, payment processors, cloud services, DDOS protection services etc.
> As a government contractor, I see first hand how f'ing useless our cronyist, bureaucratic government is. Anything they try to do will backfire and make things worse for the average citizen.
I don't completely disagree with you there either, but it will also get just worse and worse if you don't take any action at all. Pick your poison, I guess?
If 1A was extended to private individuals and entities, should the NFL be forced to keep Colin Kaepernick employed after taking a knee?
If it did I wouldn't be here arguing that it should. And let's stop pretending like we are so considered about the private sector and private companies aren't ever subjected to any regulations whatsoever.
> If 1A was extended to private individuals and entities, should the NFL be forced to keep Colin Kaepernick employed after taking a knee?
I honestly couldn't care less about some sports controversies. I'm talking specifically about the banks and basic services like I listed. They simply shouldn't be allowed to gang up on anyone and remove you from a polite society just like that.
I didn't ask if you did, I provided an excellent example of what you're describing.
In your scenario, the 1A would prohibit a business (the NFL), from restricting speech by an employee (Kapernick). This principle is what you're in favor of, correct?
"DDOS protection services" are not a "basic" service for the majority of private entities. So how is your new 1A written to prohibit DDOS protection companies from restricting speech?
I'm not trying to be mean, but what part of this statement should I clarify for you to understand? Should barbershops be subjected to the regulations of auto industry? It doesn't make any sense.
> "DDOS protection services" are not a "basic" service for the majority of private entities. So how is your new 1A written to prohibit DDOS protection companies from restricting speech?
I'm not talking about literally rewriting the 1A, I'm taking about regulating the tech industry.
Are you dodging the NFL example so hard because the NFL would be excluded from your legislation? They have $91B market cap and actively develop new tech.
https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/technology/technology-and...
> banks, domain registrars, payment processors, cloud services, DDOS protection services etc.
If you expect me to come up on a spot with a bunch of legalspeak to precisely define what would be the target of such legislation(s), it's not going to happen as I am not a lawyer. If you disagree with my opinion and you think that tech companies like the ones listed above and most importantly the banks should be able to just arbitrarily shut down anyone they dislike in the era of Covid, just say so. But don't give me that hairsplitting in an attempt to portray it as something that's either impossible or "illogical" to do, as it's simply not true and this entire argument is just stupid, if not dishonest. It's just semantics.
Yes. If you want to be served by good companies who genuinely value you as a customer because they view doing business with you as beneficial, that's the easiest way to get there.
The alternative is bad companies providing the worst possible service they legally can to customers they don't really want because the law forces them to, which makes it more difficult for good companies to compete with them for market share.
But if the bad companies arbitrarily refuse to do business with anyone they dislike, the rejected customers will go to the good companies instead, which helps them grow and improve their service.
Note that this is exactly what happened with Parler: "bad" AWS refused them, so they went to a "good" hoster instead.
We are already here. Generally speaking this is most often true when the client is forced to use certain services, not the other way around. Like public healthcare or public institutions in general. On the other hand, in Europe my bank is legally obligated to provide me a basic service and they treated me very nicely whenever I had any problems, I can't complain. Also we can circle back to the Google example - they treat everyone like garbage precisely because they can arbitrarily shut down anyone, anytime, for no reason at all.
> Note that this is exactly what happened with Parler: "bad" AWS refused them, so they went to a "good" hoster instead.
Almost everyone, if not everyone, does the same thing. Parler will either have to become just a second Twitter or they will be kicked off their new hosting too.
Most likely you're not the kind of customer they'd rather not be doing business with.
> they treat everyone like garbage precisely because they can arbitrarily shut down anyone
Do you expect them to treat people they'd prefer to shut down better than garbage if they weren't allowed to shut them down?
> Parler will either have to become just a second Twitter or they will be kicked off their new hosting too.
Is there nobody among Parler's millions of users who'd be able and willing to host them so they don't have to worry about alignment of interests anymore?
Yes, because they would at least have to come up with a valid reason for refusing you a service. You won't just wake up one day to see everything completely gone, without any explanation.
> Is there nobody among Parler's millions of users who'd be able and willing to host them so they don't have to worry about alignment of interests anymore?
Maybe there is, I don't know. But it doesn't end on hosting. Even if you manage to successfully keep your hosting, someone else will come after you. Like the domain registrar, payment processor, DDOS protection and the final bosses - Visa and MasterCard.
Are banks the "tech" industry? No, of course not. So you move the goalposts back to "just the tech companies!" when you lose.
Your example is not "perfect", it's stupid. No, NFL doesn't count as a tech industry and it's not in scope of what I want to regulate. I told you what types of services should be regulated since the very beginning, but you just keep arguing semantics whether the banks are a part of tech industry or not. I'm not even talking about Twitter or Facebook here and these are the tech companies. No, banks aren't tech industry either. The definition of a "tech company" doesn't really matter in what I'm arguing for. It was to very roughly describe what I mean. And there is nothing else I can do if you're unable to argue in good faith.
Google is totally allowed to terminate your account for no reason, but it's still considered a dick move.
There you go. Signing up to their services means that you are aware of the terms and conditions and it includes termination of service for any reason. Tough.
> If you don't like google's behaviour, then you should either be self-hosting or at least diversify with other providers.
They didn't listen to us when GitHub kept going down nor did they listen when Google took Element and Mastodon's apps off the Play Store (The outrage was visible). Oh well, its their platform and they are private companies, blah blah blah.
I guess when rvz was screaming for self-hosting and having control over your own infrastructure as possible, others said AWS, GCP and Azure made it a point and click setup and 'It's just easier because someone else is the sys-admin and its not my server'.
We learn the hard way I guess.
it is not a free market as long as there is regulation. regulation creates these situations.
So actually they don't hate it, they haven't even thought about it, and in this one instance when they did they concluded that people are right.
They're just stopping short of considering that view any further because then they'd be like those people who are definitely wrong. Because they are.
People refusing to speak with you or buy things from you is not "being canceled". You do not have a right to force people to listen to you, or force people to do business with you.
You are protected from the -government- by the 1st amendment, and other laws prohibit you or your business from discriminating based on protected classes. You are not protected from the court of public opinion, and rightly so.
Of course you should be free to say "I agree with Nazi views", and of course I should be allowed to say "that's idiotic, goodbye".
I really don't understand how people seem to think that I -must- respect your opinion no matter what it is, and that I -must- continue to speak with you or do business with you. Where is -my- freedom? If you disagree, then don't give me money and maybe my business will fail! But I should be free to do that.
While access to the airwaves clearly bumps up against questions of First Amendment rights and protections thereof, the airwaves themselves are a finite national resource---at least the way the system was originally set up, two signals cannot share the same carrier frequency, so the FCC has the responsibility of allocating those resources.
The allocation criteria include responsible use of the resources by those to whom they've been allotted for the public good, because those resources have been de facto denied to other private citizens. What that "for the public good" clause means, though, is forever under scrutiny and up for debate.
For historical reasons, the FCC distinguishes obscene or profane material from the general category of material with a viewpoint. The FCC is constrained from sanctioning broadcasters for broadcasting a particular view, but does have general authority to sanction across the board for profanity broadcast within a certain time range (when children are assumed present) and from obscene material at all points in time. For more information: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-freedom-speech
The Internet did not grow up in an ecosystem of similar government constraints because it is not a resource with the physical finiteness of communication spectrum---we can always attach more computers. Plus, if I understand the philosophy correctly, a fundamental difference was understood between broadcast material---what's your user can receive whether or not they wish to but just leaving their receiver tuned to the relevant station---and online material, which the user only receives if they make an explicit request for.
All of that having been said, this is all muddy, and arguments can certainly be made that various aspects of it are incorrectly reasoned, outdated, or bad analogy.
People are speaking with the only thing companies give a damn about- money. They want people to be held accountable for things, and are actually willing to put money where their mouth is. If you disagree with that, then you disagree with free market capitalism.
It's not even really political, as people on both sides get "canceled"- I mean, occasionally get held accountable for their actions. There are dumb instances (like Al Franken, Aziz Ansari, Jeffrey Tambor) and others where people jump the gun, but overall I can't say it's really a bad thing. People need to be held accountable for their actions, end of story.
As the saying goes: if you see shit everywhere you go, check your shoe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/style/cancel-culture.html
Maybe it hasn't affected you or your circle, by name, but it's ridiculous to assert it "isn't really a thing"
People now realize that they can assert their opinions and hold people accountable, whereas in the past other people may have just shrugged and gone "well, that's just how it is".
In the case of the article you linked, the first example of "canceling" was someone walking out of a classroom after requesting a song to not be played. This is not unreasonable given the R.Kelly allegations and documentary.
The second example of "canceling" is literally just deciding to ignore someone, and make other people aware of it and reason behind it. How on earth is that a new phenomenon? She had a valid reason too!
The third example with James Charles is also not unreasonable, and by "canceled" they really mean "people got upset and didn't want to watch his videos anymore". Are you seriously going to argue that if I get upset with someone, I should continue to watch their videos? That's not canceling someone!
So I'm going to repeat it: Cancel "culture" is not really a thing. People from these last two generations are more vocal about their beliefs. And good for it.
But what you seem to be saying is "cancel culture exists, but is not a problem IMO", given that you quoted several instances of it existing, and literally said "People from these last two generations are more vocal about their beliefs" (and thus, in their own words, cancel people).
I'm not sure what you are imagining as the strawman of "cancel culture" which you are asserting doesn't exist?
I do not think what people recently have been referring to as "cancel culture" exists. They are prescribing their own view onto what humans have been doing for hundreds of years. The primary difference is that people are now holding others accountable more than they did before. So maybe one could refer to this as a new "accountability culture".
But walking out of a room because you did not like the content is not a new phenomenon. Giving someone the cold shoulder because you don't like them or they did something to you, is not a new phenomenon. Choosing to not listen to artists because of their controversial life is not a new phenomenon.
To reiterate. For that second example, she decided that she didn't want to engage with him because he used racial slurs. This is not "canceling" someone- it is calling them out for unacceptable behavior. Nobody was forced into agreeing with her. So to call this as "canceling someone" is patently ridiculous. She's free to point out he uses racial slurs, and others are free to continue to engage or disengage. This is not "cancel culture"!
I did not quote several instances of "cancel culture". That article had several examples of people putting their foot down about their beliefs. Nothing new here.
How can you be a fan of people being vocal about their beliefs, even when you disagree with them, while also being a fan of punishing people for being vocal about beliefs which you disagree with? (Assuming you're not a sadist)
Is the difference between supporting someone's right to free speech while not being in agreement with everything they say, not clear to you?
But he's actively endorsing a viewpoint which attempts to silence (through social coercion) dissenting views. This is at odds with his professed support for... dissenting views.
One is fundamental to freedom of expression, the other is antithetical.
Censoring/banning/deplatforming and getting someone fired from their job is punishment.
It's effectively the same as the transitive verb "to punish", but it avoids having a subject entirely.
The implicit subject becomes some universal morality, which we might personify as God. People who use it assert that they act on behalf of God -- or, perhaps, that they themselves are God. "Deus vult!"
It's very similar to what I've heard described as a "fact-shaped" phrase. For example: "Time's up." Here you transform the imperative sentence "Comply now!" into a declarative sentence. You make your own will sound like an irresistible law of nature.
A person who observes the frequent abuse of this rhetorical device might conclude that facts do not exist at all, but are merely expressions of Power. An alternative to that cynicism is to maintain belief in Fact, while recognizing "fact-shaped" rhetorical tricks for what they are.
Returning to the original topic: When we say "People need to be held accountable for their actions", we are really saying "It is good that people punish one another." That is probably still true. But now we see more honestly the interaction of multiple parties. And we can consider the structure of those interactions.
For example: Do we still get the good things that come from repeated games, when the punisher cannot themselves be punished?
While I don't disagree with making things more explicit, I believe the intent in the original phrasing was clear enough.
"Do we still get the good things that come from repeated games, when the punisher cannot themselves be punished?"
A lot of times, celebrities don't even get "canceled". They lie low for a bit, and come back. While it's true that sometimes the public is unfair and jumps the gun, the only thing we can do is be vocal about well... not jumping the gun on allegations.
While the populace at large can't get punished, the punishments are also much softer. Louis CK didn't go to jail- he just had his comedy career ended (rightly so). He's mostly free to do other things, especially around now that people are starting to forget. Which is also an issue of the populace at large- it has a bad memory for most people.
Was Parler really loosely moderated? I never used it, but I heard stories about some pretty heavy handed moderation. They were famously quick to ban people for perceived trolling.
What makes you believe it then? Anyway, that sub bans people only for violent threats and such, but opposing viewpoints are downvoted a lot. They even have some pro-Trump mods on their team who can see and reverse mod actions including bans.
Anyway you can try an experiment if you care, post on there (with a new account if needed) very partisan stuff, but don't advocate for violence, and you'll find yourself not banned.
Ha! I regularly see posts from people who were banned for saying perfectly benign things on /r/politics, and what they were banned for.
"Do not violate the Mission Statement. (We provide a place on Reddit for conservatives, both fiscal and social, to read and discuss political and cultural issues from a distinctly conservative point of view.)"
This is obviously flawed, because juries would vote innocent comments not supporting the mainline parler views to be extremely rulebreaking, and vote death threats (+doxxings, etc) that aligned with mainline parler views to be OK. In some ways it’s a great example of why pure community-led moderation doesn’t really work.
So the moderation was either extreme or near nonexistent depending on what political views were being expressed.
He might be wrong about a great many things, but he was right about this. Intolerance (under the guise of "cancel culture") is a result of growing tribalism. Two parallel cultures fighting for supremacy.
That jury is fundamentally a great idea (that's why we use juries today). The only problem is the culture of intolerance.
Parler's jury is just a representation of that intolerance just like their users being kicked off Twitter was a representation of intolerance from the other side.
Unfortunately, this intolerance has become a part of culture and inevitably flows downstream into intolerant politics. If the intolerance doesn't stop, separation or war has always been the result. I fear that people on both sides won't see this until it is too late to prevent.
Trump only gained a following because of resistance to the progressive movement.
Sounds like here.
SkySilk appears to specialize in VPCs and cloud hosting, not colocation. Their AUP doesn't appear to give Parler much relief either[1]:
> We specifically reserve the right to refuse to provide the Service to customers or End Users engaged in the dissemination of material that may cause us to be subject to attacks on our network, or that while technically legal, run counter to our corporate principles.
I can't imagine this arrangement lasts too long.
[1]: https://www.skysilk.com/aup/
It is plain silly to require phone number verification as a 'security mechanism'
https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social/-/blob/develop/RE...
https://blog.alexgleason.me/gab-block/
At a more technical level, do we need a 4xx code for "memory holed"? Was this an oversight of the IETF, or should Medium and other discerning and socially responsible content providers use the other available 4xx codes?
Here, 404 "not found" is a pretty lie.
We could start off with the basic 400 "bad request". This is closer to the truth. In fact, it is too close to the truth because it means "client error". (Is it a crime yet to click on "not found" articles?)
So, ok, let's try 401 "unauthorized". This is still better than "not found" but, again, just a bit too honest.
But, really, Medium.com should be responding with 403 "Forbidden". This is the unvarnished truth from the mouth of the server.
403 - Forbidden: "The request contained valid data and was understood by the server, but the server is refusing action. This may be due to the user not having the necessary permissions for a resource or needing an account of some sort, or attempting a prohibited action e.g. creating a duplicate record where only one is allowed)."
why?
who ever said that "security" meant yours? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pretty much every service does this. Try signing up for a Google, Facebook, or Twitter account without providing a real phone number. Usually if it works at all, the account created will be rapidly blocked until you do provide one.
A captcha is more than enough.
Is a captcha enough? I've never worked in bot/spam mitigation for a large public platform before, so I don't really know. Based on how universal phone number requirements are for these services, and how much trouble they seem to have gone to in order to block using easily purchased numbers, I'm going to guess that captchas aren't enough.
The only time they request additional PII is for verification.
(As a security & privacy advocate with a job in the space, I dug into this last summer and again just before the January shutdown. It was never true just for signing up.)
> Why is that?
IIRC, it's even more extreme (e.g. full of outspoken and unapologetic racists talking about racist things in racist terms).
But to me, free speech means anyone can speak their mind, no matter how ghastly others find it.
And on Gab, I have encountered some pretty unsavoury speech - however, copious use of the Block feature on those I find especially distasteful means that I encounter less of those I find as such.
I'd rather have a platform based on free speech and be able to filter 'undesirables' out myself, than have the platform itself choose the speech it prefers me to see/hear/read.
> And on Gab, I have encountered some pretty unsavoury speech - however, copious use of the Block feature on those I find especially distasteful means that I encounter less of those I find as such.
As I understand, being on Gab is pretty much seeking out "ghastly" and "unsavoury" speech. For instance, this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145412) described it as:
> I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.
So I guess the question is: what content do you see after your "copious use of the Block feature."?
That's interesting. Gab.com's timeline is public and is visible to everyone (there is no need to create an account). I just took a peek at it right now and I don't see anything misogynistic, etc. As you quote this particular as a supporting reference, would you be able to share some of Gab's specific timeline content that made that comment writer think that?
You might want to ask them.
This is clearly not true and easily shown to be so.
There's either free speech, which will include a lot of unsavory, horrible or downright evil content, or there is censorship. It's one or the other. And while censorship might be considered a reasonable trade-off, it immediately turns the platform into a mouthpiece for the politics of the people who run it. And once someone has that kind of power, its abuse is inevitable.
Free Speech and censorship resistant platforms tend to attract users in waves. The first wave is the most extreme, as those users get kicked off mainstream platforms first. Then subsequent waves of users join as less extreme views become problematic. While those waves are less radical, they still have to contend with being in the same pool as the others. Ordinary folks join for idealistic reasons and then see a bunch of radical content. I’m sure that puts a ton of people off. Parler, it seems, wants to be free speech but not that free speech, if you get what I’m saying.
> Free Speech and censorship resistant platforms tend to attract users in waves. The first wave is the most extreme, as those users get kicked off mainstream platforms first. Then subsequent waves...
I don't think that's true of social networks. Take Gab for instance: its "first wave" has solidly given it a reputation as a place for extreme racists, which repels everyone else (except maybe a handful of civil libertarians with questionable judgement). That reputation prevents "subsequent waves" of more moderate folks, who would rather go to a different platform.
Also Gab, Parler, et al are really reactions against moderation, not censorship. However, most users actually welcome some level of moderation.
For example when that at&t network center was bombed there was a fake image going around that it "wasn't the van that exploded". I had someone try to "prove to me" it was true by linking me to parlor and it's users creating conspiracies on top of conspiracies. The users there will accept disinformation and made up conspiracies if it benefits their team.
That's sadly the reality of it. People that don't understand tech should not be on the internet. They don't understand the concept of people can and will lie freeley behind a camera or keyboard.
A classical example of "my ignorance is just as good as your education because I don't know any better."
Do you understand the physics and engineering of all the tech you use?
Also, one could say that there's a stark difference between saying people who do not understand how misinformation works on a platform should not use that platform, and for example saying people who don't understand toasters shouldn't use toasters.
For the record, I don't understand the low level physics of toasters. As far as I know, they're magic bagel browning devices.
Your elitist, anti-inclusive rhetoric is unnecessary.
> They don't understand the concept of people can and will lie freeley behind a camera or keyboard.
If one of the main claims is "the media lies" then obviously they understand that.
There are valid criticisms but these are not them.
The average person trusts what others say and does not have a basic understanding of what constitutes facts and evidence. Therefore they cannot navigate truth through the internet.
The same thing was plastered all over Twitter and Facebook... your argument doesn't hold water.
Fact is people whom want to believe these things heavily gravitated to Parlor and call Facebook and Twitter bad/evil.
You're saying that one side's lies are worse than the other side's lies. There is at least as much misinformation on Facebook and Twitter as there was on Parler. What you're really complaining about is that Parler doesn't censor the people you want to see censored.
You're under the mistaken impression that people who "understand tech" are never taken in by these conspiracy theories but I've seen plenty of comments on HN supporting QAnon, "stop the steal", pizzagate, COVID conspiracies and anti-vax, scientific racism, anti-semitism, UFO woo and the paranormal, you name it someone on Hacker News believes it.
The evidence that being able to use a computer and being able to think critically or even maintain a rational grasp on the nature of reality are orthogonal skillsets is all around you.
This is a silly statement. Do you (whoever first said this) think widespread misinformation started with the internet? It has nothing to do with tech and everything to do with people.
People who don't understand people should not be on the internet. Their knowledge of tech is completely orthogonal.
What can you do if you don't want an echo chamber?
The narrative that reasonable points of view are being censored out of existence is part of a narrative constructed to leverage the right-wing persecution complex. There are plenty of right wingers all over social media; it's chock full of them. But that persecution complex has turned into violence, and that complex is perfectly positioned to pretend that trying to stem violence is censorship. (They didn't seem to mind when it was being used to fight anti-American terrorism.)
If you don't want an echo chamber, don't make one. Seek out sensible people with different points of view, which is no harder than taking up an interest in ballet dancing or Malaysian cuisine. They weren't being excluded from your non-ballet-mee-goreng-free circle.
You're not required to give equal time to conspiracy theorists -- and there do exist non-conspiracy-theorist right wingers to talk to, if that's what you want. Social media isn't banning them. The ones who are being banned are using that language to pretend that there's a different reason.
Also, that's a very standard provider clause. No company is going to promise to serve anyone, anywhere, even if they don't want to.
This feels like saying "The Tor network will keep you online". You still need someone providing hardware and electricity. Unless I'm missing something about these offerings.
Nobody but you knows that you're hosting hidden tor service. One need to perform a sophisticated attack to discover its location. You can buy VPS from Amazon and host your hidden tor service there and Amazon guys won't have a clue until NSA guys will come to them.
Nodes are made up from a ‘Safe’ (previously called ‘Vault’) executable file and some spare space on disk of everyday computers. Nodes first go through a short PoW resource proof so the network knows the nodes capabilities and how to place them. Sybil attacks are prevented in many ways including random placement in sections and random relocation, and node ageing, which is a way of incremental responsibility when a node behaves all the way into the next relocation event and that is halved if misbehaving or offline. You would have to control a significant portion of the network to cause a problem and would be cost prohibitive in most cases. In a young network the highest risk comes from a ‘Google attack’ where they deliberately allocate their resources early on and either try to control the consensus or rug pull their resources which would cause massive data loss.
Safe Network also has Safe Network Token (SN) as an digital payment/incentive layer for providing or purchasing network resources (bandwidth/cpu/storage).
If you think CRDT’s or Asynchronous Trutworthy Transfers (AT2) are neat innovations you should definitely check it out as Maidsafe is really pushing the envelope there. safenetforum.org https://primer.safenetwork.org/
If you have a lot of sleeper nodes coordinate a google attack the network is unrecoverable though...
Amazon can monitor what runs on their servers.
It could have been hosted anywhere. TOR isn’t a hosting service but a means to access them.
It’s a server running on their hypervisor. Their hypervisor can see every single process.
> Acting in any manner that might subject us to unfavorable regulatory action, subject us to any liability for any reason, or adversely affect our public image, reputation or goodwill, as determined by us in our sole and exclusive discretion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/technology/parler-back-on...
Wondering how they reached this conclusion and based on what the report didn't even mention the company name.
They just can't give it up.
I'm honestly not sure what I expected to be honest. I signed in once, scrolled a bit, recoiled in disgust and haven't been back.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
That's interesting. The public timeline on Gab is visible to everyone (there is no need to sign in). I just took a peek at it right now and I don't see anything misogynistic, etc. Would you mind sharing some of its specific timeline content that made you think that?
It very much was exactly as the gp describes, though I've been told that the platform has become more tolerable as its community has expanded. I haven't check back however.
Gab's public feed shows a subset of the top and hot posts, most of them look pretty tame.
I try to tread carefully but even still, everything I have ever posted can be taken wildly out of context and used against me by some activist in the future.
In a 2008 interview, Obama said he wasn't in favor of gay marriage. Today, that would be cancelable offense for a random liberal person, and retroactivity is a thing in that culture. Brendan Eich was forced to resign in 2014 over an anti-gay-marriage donation from the same year of 2008.
I understand and respect that people's views can change and I'm more than willing to allow them to change their positions. Eich never changed, that is why he was "canceled". Also it's important to note this wasn't just an internet "mob" that "canceled" him, people who worked under him didn't want him in that position and spoke out about it.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/may/11/barack-oba...
As long as I understand what you're saying.
I think the real difference is that when Obama said it in 2008, no one actually believed him.
Fortunately, I am not a public figure.
Online and with the general risk that your entire diary gets opened up - folks are cautious about their actions with that in mind. Also I think it’s that the judges are not local/personal entities. So they are difficult to reason with or explain context.
That and a curiosity about the world and history (particularly the cold war) means just the stuff I look at on wikipedia would look awful out of context.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-targets-linux-journal-as-e...
That's the problem when you lower the floor with dragnets, you drown in your own noise.
Could pivot to an “auto-cancel” saas if you will. You could even cancel people in bulk.
Jokes aside I’m sure there would be appetite for such a thing. Under the guise of “employee safety”.
And one of the first lists to check would be Parler.
Look at any authoritarian regime. Once they decide that a particular person has to be destroyed, they dig through their entire history to compile a dossier of Evil Things that person has said and done. You need searchable history for that, though. Or a lot of manpower. But databases are better for that purpose.
Similarly, if you can show that (unwanted person) said the N-word in 2004, you can probably get them destroyed today i the U.S. The hit piece just writes itself.
Everything we do or say, everywhere we go, is being tracked somewhere, unless you are extremely vigilant. And even if you are extremely vigilant, I'm sure you will slip up somewhere along the line.
You can even get fired for having an account there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922486
> Colleen Oefelein, who identified herself on Twitter as an associate literary agent with the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, appeared to confirm her termination in a tweet on Monday morning.
> "Well thanks Twitter and @JDLitAgency," Oefelein wrote. "I just got fired because I'm a Christian and a conservative."
According to (https://reclaimthenet.org/literary-agent-fired-gab-parler/) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924637) her Gab and Parler posts were mirrored from Twitter.
Newsweek's story on the firing (https://www.newsweek.com/literary-agents-firing-over-parler-...) doesn't mention any offensive posts on Gab.
None of the Reddit discussions I have looked at mention any offensive posts either; I would expect Reddit to find such posts if they had existed.
Trust but verify.
For a one man show in a garage (or a very early stage startup), it's probably okay to focus on features and not backend resiliency. But by the time you have a board of directors, someone should have asked how they would handle losing a core service. Especially in this case someone should have seen that their business was high risk- either explicitly because of their plan/model, or incidentally because of the crowd they attracted.
Maybe Parler had a plan for some things, but they clearly weren't ready for a setback at this level. I wonder how prepared other companies are for losses/denial of service like this. Could Ford's supply chain weather a vendor dropping out? Could Kellogg's cereal?
The outcries over freedom of speech were just pathetic from a technological standpoint, it's a bunch of web 4.0 developers and users who felt entitled to services that even a 90s computer enthusiast would be able to provide.
On some level it's not just Parler's fault, the internet has become more complex, and maybe some ISPs and modems provide some roadblocks like shared IPs and obnoxious firewalls, but after months they are still unable to lift a physical building place computers on property they control. It's like they are either incompetent or purposely looking for refusal of service so they can martyrize themselves.
As far as I am aware, they are still just moving around their horrendously cobbled together Wordpress monstrosity to whatever giant benefactor that has a couch they can crash on. It's clearly other peoples' fault that they are so dependent on other's technology!
And while I am very receptive towards conservative ideals as well as criticisms of tech and mainstream media, this is a bit like watching someone starve to death because Blue Apron stopped delivering to them.
Sure, they run an unpopular business, but I would not predicted the convergence of (1) the Capitol Hill riots would have taken place and (2) that the media would characterize it as a coup attempt or similar and argue that Parler was responsible (as opposed to Facebook where the planning seems to have taken place) and (3) that this would result in AWS kicking them off of their platform overnight. It's really hard to predict where the mob will focus it's wrath or in what proportion.
To be clear, AWS had been giving them warnings for months.
Interesting. I guess I don't feel sorry for poor people anymore. They have poor skills, so they don't deserve to earn a lot of money. (Same logic).
Of course, such a thing would be inconceivable today, and ACLU itself would be canceled and deserted if it tried.
https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...
They represented a white supremacist denied a permit by the city of Charlottesville in 2017 (for the rally where a Nazi sympathizer killed a protester). They were criticized; they weren't canceled or deserted.
While I don't agree with its content, I don't believe in people like hosting providers applying moral tests to their users. The Government/law should be the only people shutting them down.
Cancel culture is spreading fast.
I fear that there is definitely something brewing in our online habits these days, and it may be significantly damaging to society.
The problem however, is that removing these groups will not inherently solve them. I would support removing of these extremists if i thought it would do good. It however, won't. It will further build the fire of self-victim identification and extremist views which fuel them.
We need another approach at solving this problem. Of which i think is two fold:
1. Groups (both the left and right) struggle to stand up against the undesirable extremists within.
2. Our ingestion of information is not filtered enough by our own brains. We consume freely, and largely due to extremists and bubbles we end up consuming garbage.
All of this said, i feel like attempts at dealing with Parler is vastly different than the "cancel culture" which attempted to rename the https://rubocop.org/ tool. One is a misguided answer to extremists - the other is an attempt at protecting hurt feelings over bad words. Very different.
If they're not, as your question seems to imply, then "all" conservatives are racist/etc. But i'm not saying that, i'm saying the racist ones are the extremists.
Likewise the people who mean well, but are incorrect, on the left who tried to rename Rubocop are extremists.
>A person who advocates or resorts to measures beyond the norm, especially in politics.
Someone calling for UBI five years ago could be called an extremist. Though it does need someone to define 'the norm'.
Over the span of about the prior 10-12 years in China the authorities there decided to crack down on speech online increasingly. For a time, in the early 10-15 years of the Internet there, China actually had a modicum of loose (not free) speech online, where you had a bit of room to talk about subjects that were close to taboo. That's all gone now and has been for years. That process of erosion, crack down, is what it feels like is happening in the US, merely under a different mechanism; instead of a central government authority implementing the oppression, it's mob platforms like Twitter and Facebook where the platforms openly allow hyper aggressive and concerted attacks to take place as a matter of routine. And even though it's not the government doing it, the effect is similar: they go after your life, your job, your friends, your character, your home, your family, your safety, anything they can.
The only solution is to abandon services like Twitter and Facebook, deplete their power. About 15-20% of my Facebook friends (quite normal people, not extremist types, not privacy advocates, etc.) are abandoned ghost accounts now, deleted, paused, etc. In talking to some of them, they got a taste of the horrible nature of how FB can be used as an attack mob platform, how ugly and or toxic it can be, and they wanted no part of it. Hopefully that process keeps spreading.
This decade we'll see a massive rise of walled encrypted communities, where outsiders will largely be kept out for the safety and health of the community. Outsiders will be treated with intense scrutiny, like we were back to living in tribal times (intellectually we're back to living in tribal times). People will begin to live in intellectual silos online to protect themselves from the attack mobs. They won't be decentralized as techies would hope, they'll still be centralized and hosted in the cloud. Interestingly this process will make the divisions in the US worse, the bubbles will become worse; and it will also be considered a big problem by authorities as extremists will begin very commonly using these walled-off encrypted groups/communities to organize out of sight (Parler / Gab will end up as a public fluke, most of those people will end up in hidden-away silo'd communities as the scrutiny continues to get worse on their bad ideas). Authorities will use this process as another argument to go after encryption.
Now would be a good time to build a new version of a social groups platform. Ning as a concept will end up being a $50-$100 billion product, although not quite as they envisioned the concept (they flubbed the entire thing). You want to lean in to selling to tribal intellectual isolation, intellectual bubbles, bet on that not against it, for that's the direction and there is absolutely nothing that's going to stop it. Public Facebook will shrink, public Twitter will shrink, private isolated social groups will dramatically expand. Whoever makes this easy and safe (encrypted, no data leaks, no hacks, top focus on security), in the cloud in a centralized manner, will win and win very very big.
edit: To the downvoters. I know you don't like it, I understand. That doesn't matter, it's the fut...
It’s literally illegal in America to incited and plot murder and insurrection against the government of the USA. Not joking, not boasting, but actually plotting and then executing the plan for real.
There’s a perfectly reasonable argument that while merely disseminating such messages as a platform may not be criminal, that knowingly disseminating or facilitating such discourse while being fully aware of it is reckless and irresponsible. I think if Amazon doesn’t want to behave recklessly and irresponsibly in that way, that’s a reasonable position for them to take.
There’s clearly a cultural blind spot here. If these were Islamic terrorists plotting a repeat of 9/11 nobody here would have any concerns about this.
The First Amendment does not prohibit private entities from limiting speech, we don't have to imagine.
What's your solution to the problem above? The government forcing the bank to retain the customer?
Vendors have every right to not want to host people they don't support.
If you really cared about free speech, you would demand that the government run their own hosting platform in which no one could be deplatformed. But I'm pretty sure no one actually wants that.
True. But I don't want to work with a vendor who makes use of that right.
And, outsourcing unconstitutional restrictions to private companies who have achieved near monopoly control of the space is almost worse.
Not always.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
> If you really cared about free speech, you would demand that the government run their own hosting platform in which no one could be deplatformed. But I'm pretty sure no one actually wants that.
Some people did argued that. I personally have no opinion on nationalizing the hosting platforms or social media.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable conclusion and not a thought-terminating cliche at all. I guess we can all just pack it in and go home, no point in even debating this issue anymore. Everyone is a Stalinist.
At least, me and my fellow kids had that naive belief. Maybe the older folks online already knew better.
By this standard Chomsky would argue Parler "prefers Stalinist standards." Do you believe they do?
Centralised communication platforms all eventually trend towards echo chambers.
Decentralisation is the key to restoring unfettered free speech.
I don't believe a site focused on anti-Semitism is a "Christian" site or full of people practicing the teachings of Jesus.
The core problem is that anybody can call themself a Christian. Anybody can say that they're following Christ's teaching, living a Christian life, etc - regardless of how closely it tracks with the things that Christ did or said.
(By "can", here, I mean can in a practical sense. I mean that these things occur. I do not mean that any of these things are approved of by any particular natural or supernatural being(s).)
By extension, anybody can hang up a shingle and call themselves a Christian church. As a result, you have thousands of Christian sects. These sects exist within a spectrum ranging from somewhat pro-semitic to rabidly anti-semitic.
Even within sects - especially the largest - you will find that adherents are scattered over a pretty broad range of that spectrum.
So, yes - there are a fair number of anti-semitic Christians. Their existence should not come as a surprise to anyone.
And that's before we consider eschatology...
Hate cultivator sites like Parler should be shut down by the government however, I do think that should be enshrined in law.
After seeing it was back online I figured I would log in and post communist memes until they banned me, but it seems I am unable to login. Looks like their technical problems continue.
I really doubt that would happen.
Funny note, Parler did a copy-pasta of our motto in their re-launch.
I imagine they enjoy messing with people at arms length, the would want their safe haven torn down with Parler.
It is all but assured that there have been several different authors of the identity 'Q Anon'.
Parler smells like honey
If this is the case, why don't we just packet sniff the backbone and block internet to any home that is perceived to be engaging in anti-American or violence?
What objective standard are you using here? Is it just ok to punish people you don't think you like?
Seems like in a post truth world its more important for lefties to ensure they are controlling narrative then seeking truth. And many lefties fear free speech as they fear it will hurt them. Ironically, they are creating precedents which will hurt us all. Censorship is a double edged sword.