Edit: I'll note that Parler banned the DevinNunesCow parody account. They are fully capable of moderating when they want to, they just don't want to moderate calls for violence.
This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.
For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ).
> Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback.
The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
Now... is that one post beyond what HN should allow? Probably not, and it's not my call, we'll see what dang says. But imagine a whole community of people like you warning constantly about imagined terrors and existential threats. And everyone gets to one-up each other.
That's what Parler is. Before long you get senior thought leaders like the President's former attorney (or whatever Lin Wood is) expressly calling for the Vice President to be executed to stop an imagined "steal" of the election. And then the mob attacks the VP and congress trying to do exactly that.
It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence. And it all starts with content moderation. The reason this seems so extreme is that it should have happened LONG ago.
Every bit of his comment is a valid concern and Matt Taibbi had a similar and sadly predictive post about this a few weeks ago on this subject [1].
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...
When The_Donald was on reddit, it was more easily monitored in one place. People who used it at least were forced to confront evidence daily that they weren't holding the majority opinion. And grownups from the platform could remove (and report to LE) the worst stuff.
When you ban those people from mainstream platforms, you do deny them some of an audience. But you also encourage them to make their own echo chambers and congregate elsewhere, which may be on the balance worse.
Now we see the same things happening with Twitter / Parler and Gab.
It's definitely hard to know where to draw the line. Karl Popper and all that.
I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since?
And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control.
But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).
It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.
e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.
I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?
Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
Can't be the only one. Reddit was a libertarian cesspool at the time, a crime for sure. RIP Mr.Swartz <3
Seems like a function of a democratic government, not Jeff Bezos. Because Jeff Bezos isn't the government. Well, maybe, but not officially right?
What more could the FBI want than to have every extremist in the country communicating from one centralized server on AWS? Sad. Now they'll probably adopt a secure decentralized communication strategy and form into cells that can't easily be tracked.. wait, this happened before didn't it
This is what Glen Greenwald was arguing that the left has been doing.
This isn’t a complex concept. The idea that a company can continually host people planning an insurrection and not get shown the door by the free market is actually a radical idea.
And that’s before we cover the fact that you are arguing that the government should force private companies to associate with people based on their political affiliations. That sounds authoritarian to me.
Either way, Apple selling a bunch of stuff gives you no right to access their equipment. Nor does it make giving the government the right to reach in and compel Apple to do business with people and entities they don’t want to. That’s authoritarian, and if you think that won’t be abused by a later administration, I’m not sure what you’ve been paying attention to for four years.
If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.
I agree. I was just taking issue with your analogy because your app getting banned from App Store isn't comparable to getting banned from the local Starbucks. On multiple levels. Acting like it is is misrepresenting the issue.
Pretending that anyone has a right to either is not only entitled nonsense, it's downright authoritarian. What is being advocated here is that the government should come in and force Apple to do business with fascists and terrorists against their will. Even if you imagine that this will encourage "free speech", and I promise you it will not, this is a power that will come to haunt us all if you give it to the government.
No one is stopping you from self-publishing your manifestos and selling them out of the trunk of your car, metaphorically speaking.
Or literally, in Josh Hawley’s case.
Should've thought of that before repealing net neutrality.
He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.
Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have.
The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.
The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect).
You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/
It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care.
But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.
although MeWe had quickly attracted racists and actual nazis too, though.
Every platform created for this reason that gains a large following does so specifically because it attracts people who recently got banned from some previous existing service for being terrible. See 8Chan post gamergate or Voat post-banning of r/fatpeoplehate. Not saying it's wrong to be pro-all-kinds-of-speech-allowed-on-platform-that-you-run, but those kinds of platforms usually only surge in popularity when a bunch of people get banned from a more mainstream platform where being a dick is against the rules.
Edit: don't want to make it sound like big tech companies like Twitter / FB and Amazon are "good" for doing this. They're only doing this because they feel pressure to do so. If the execs had a moral compass, they would treat every user the same, and ban people based on the same set of rules.
This does also mean that if it doesn’t die right now, eventually it will when the funders get tired of it.
> In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.”
> The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0]
Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users.
It seems to have worked out for Reddit.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...