70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers | Hacker News Reader

70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

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892 pointsjoiguru951 comments

I see a number of people here describing Parler as "unmoderated", but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity in their posts. Then the most active users were paid for their content too [2]. This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform.

[1] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 [2] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136

By that standard, Instagram is a propaganda weapon.

It both:

a. pays popular users

b. Puts warnings on political issues, like statements that Biden's crime bill contributed to mass incarceration [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/ben_awareness/status/1339293381625864195

That’s true but Instagram doesn’t claim to be a free speech platform

So that makes it permissible for private actors to publish 70TBs of private Parler users' messages?

I did not say anything like that

I guess I'm confused as to the relevance to this thread. This person claimed that two attributes made Parler a "propaganda weapon", I noted that other major platforms have those same properties, so you tacked on another condition.

Presumably this was all in an effort to say something along the lines of - "because of the unique situation Parler is in, these actions were permissible." No?

I’m one of the most right wing and pro free speech humans to ever set foot on this site. You are beating up the wrong person. I was merely replying to you regardless of what your parent comment said.

They're using this bad faith / fallacious argument all over the thread, so, at the least, it isn't personal.

I'm in perfectly fine faith, and I'd love for you to point out the fallacies.

it's a sensational title

they are doing bulk scrapping of Parler and they do many other sites like Reddit too, and particularly stuff that is being taken down for archival purposes

also there is nothing - and I mean nothing, but particularly threats of violence - in Parler you don't see in Twitter in more abundance, only it's more typically leftists on Twitter and rightists on Parler

I didn’t see anyone claim that.

Yes

Instagram doesn't claim to be a "free speech" platform. You have to only be mildly interested in it to see that it's all about "engagement" Parler explicitly claimed "free speech" as a goal

So because the owners claim the platform to be something other than it actually is, it is okay for this person to leak the Parler users' private images and videos?

Unfortunately you won't find much interesting commentary in a politically charged thread like this, best to just scan and pattern match the kind of exchanges occurring before moving swiftly along.

> best to just scan and pattern match the kind of exchanges occurring before moving swiftly along.

How do you do that? I've noticed lately that HN commentary (at least in threads like this) has trended increasingly pro-censorship[1] lately, and it's pretty disheartening to read.

Would rather do something like what you say, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

[1]: Which is a bit ironic, thinking about it.

> increasingly pro-censorship[1] lately

The US has always had limits on free speech.

> Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Incitement, sedition, public security and harm to others seem to be relevant to this discussion.

> [US limits on free speech] seem to be relevant to this discussion.

But not to my comment, and not just because I'm not from the USA.

I'm not speaking in favor of parler if that's what you assumed (for some reason). Specially if it is, like the top comment said, just a propaganda machine trying to enforce a single viewpoint. That's antithesis to free speech.

I was referring to the comment where you say HN is “bizarrely” more “pro-censorship”.

Where you see “pro-censorship”, many see speech that historically has never been protected in the US like calls to violence, or speech that insights others to violence.

Companies gave Trump et. al. the benefit of the doubt on the “inciting violence” part, until the violence actually materialized and the FBI warned of groups organizing online to coordinate future violent attacks.

> I was referring to the comment where you say HN is “bizarrely” more “pro-censorship”. Where you see “pro-censorship”, many see speech that historically has never been protected

I didn't use the word "bizarrely" and I'm not talking about condemnation of unprotected speech (and again, not just because I'm not from the USA). I've seen people arguing that the concept of free speech itself is "outdated" and that societies that hold it are "doomed to collapse", and that's just an example.

> [Trump]

Again, I wasn't talking about parler nor about Trump. I would appreciate it if you stopped trying to imply that I'm talking about stuff I'm not, or steering the conversation toward subjects I've never even alluded to.

> I didn't use the word "bizarrely"

Sorry, I meant "ironic".

> I've seen people arguing that the concept of free speech itself is "outdated" and that societies that hold it are "doomed to collapse", and that's just an example.

Maybe downvoted far down the thread, but the majority of the upvoted "censorship" discussions have been directly related to Big Tech's deplatforming of Trump & Parler in response to the capital attacks, and how the existing limits on US free speech apply to these decisions.

> Maybe downvoted far down the thread

No, and no. Please don't tell me what I have or have not seen myself.

> [Trump and parler again]

Okay, this is the third time so I won't try again to tell you I have no interest in talking about that. I'll just say that the first time I noticed generally well received[1] comments in favor of censorship was almost two years ago, in a thread that had nothing to do with Trump (and I'm not sure if parler even existed by then). According to what I've noticed, it has been growing in prominence since.

[1]: Which is to say, they weren't downvoted nor pushed downthread and even though they had several replies disputing them; they had just as many agreeing.

> Please don't tell me what I have or have not seen myself.

Can you link to these posts?

I've been following the threads, but haven't seen people arguing that the concept of free speech itself is "outdated" and that societies that hold it are "doomed to collapse".

The only "censorship" I've seen people supporting is against speech that has never been protected by the 1st amendment, which isn't being "pro-censorship" or "censorship" at all, it's just the same laws we've had here in the US for centuries.

Again, happy to take a look at what you're seeing on HN if you can link to a few threads.

Before I give you one of the recent examples I saw, I'm curious about why you're asking for examples in the first place. You already seem pretty disinclined to agree with me as evidenced by how you keep trying to suggest that I'm talking about condemnation of unprotected speech, which I haven't and have said so several times. My first comment was merely asking someone for clarification on how he parsed these threads; I didn't even talk about the subject at hand because I have no interest to and yet that's almost exclusively what you have tried to talk about. Not sure what exactly would be changed in this conversation by my giving you an example. You've been assuming bad faith on my part from the get go so I feel it would be just another fruitless exercise, or lead into another discussion on the merits of free speech I certainly don't want to get into, again.

By the way, you're completely free to defend these gigantic corporations deplatforming whoever they want; I wasn't talking about that in my original comment. That implication was already present in my first reply, but maybe my saying it outright will convince you that I don't mean anything bad with my comments.

> I'm curious about why you're asking for examples in the first place

Because you said: "I've noticed lately that HN commentary (at least in threads like this) has trended increasingly pro-censorship[1] lately", "[1]: Which is a bit ironic, thinking about it."

I haven't had that experience and don't understand the irony. Just trying to understand where you're coming from and thought links might help.

I think I misunderstood "lately" to mean the censorship / violent speech debate about the resulting Big Tech deplatformings, which is why I keep bringing those up. In the US, taking down violent, insightful speech is not considered censorship, which is why I was confused about who you're referring to that is "pro-censorship", but again maybe I crossed some wires there.

I care about free speech a lot and if there's a growing trend that speech that's always been protected by the 1st amendment is being targeted, it's a line we all need to be very sensitive to and vigilant in defending.

Just in case, the irony, for me, is that if I were in favor of censorship, I would be the first person I censor, instead of using an online forum to speak in favor of censorship. I feel that there's irony in using a widely accessed medium just to talk about how censorship is better.

And here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715809

(It bears noticing how the post whose thread that comment belongs to is certainly not about the banning of Trump or parler).

Ok, so that is a good example of protected speech that we might not like. I read through the thread and you did a good job explaining the perils of censoring viewpoints.

The US has long done a “controlled burn” in banning violent speech, but we do need to be vigilant that it doesn’t turn into a wild fire.

I don’t understand why they removed the tweet instead of labeling it if they really want to be in the fact checking business.

The use of the term “censorship” is itself a negative signal, as it preempts useful discussion by imposing a false dichotomy.

There’s no feasible zero-censorship scenario (see “yelling fire in a crowded theater”, etc.) so pretty much everyone is “pro-censorship” to some degree. But pretty much no one wants preapproval of every utterance either, so everyone is also “anti-censorship”.

If you see someone talking about “damping positive disinformation feedback loops” or something like that, rather than “censorship”, that’s one signal there’s a substantive discussion taking place.

(Zero censorship is kind of like absolute anarchy: an interesting thought experiment that may be useful to inform a practical debate.)

> But pretty much no one wants preapproval of every utterance either, so everyone is also “anti-censorship”.

I've seen people arguing that the concept of free speech is "outdated" and that societies that hold it are "doomed to collapse", just as an example of what I meant in my first comment.

> so pretty much everyone is “pro-censorship” to some degree

Please, don't. You're arguing against an extreme of my comment instead of what I actually meant[1] (which, of course, you're free to do, but I would also be just as free to dismiss it as a bad faith argument), but also you're extending something you might believe onto others. You're of course free to be "pro-censorship", but you don't know what everyone else thinks, and certainly not what I think.

> The use of the term “censorship” is itself a negative signal, as it preempts useful discussion by imposing a false dichotomy.

I completely disagree with this. The example I gave is absolutely an argument in favor of censorship.

> If you see someone talking about “damping positive disinformation feedback loops” or something like that, rather than “censorship”, that’s one signal there’s a substantive discussion taking place.

Excusing it by saying "dampening positive disinformation feedback loops" is excusing censorship. You might refuse to call it such, but I don't have a reason not to.

[1]: For starters, I'm aware that there's unprotected speech for a reason, and I never called condemnation of such speech "censorship".

Do you see how by using the word “censorship” as if it were a unitary concept with an agreed-upon meaning, you have made it difficult to continue this conversation?

I didn’t present any position at all other than saying that neither extreme is realistic — which I think you actually agree with. But you’re trying to argue with me anyway.

I was just trying to answer your question on how to recognize a more nuanced and productive discussion: look for people arguing about specific behaviors; avoid people arguing over the definition of the word “censorship”.

> Do you see how by using the word “censorship” [...], you have made it difficult to continue this conversation?

Not really, no, what makes it difficult for me to continue this conversation is that I had no interest in having this conversation in the first place. My first comment was just asking the other person how he dealt with these threads, as I wasn't sure what he meant exactly or if he had a trick or something.

I certainly didn't want to start arguing the merits of free speech again (I already said I found it disheartening to read).

> I didn’t present any position at all other than saying that neither extreme is realistic

And since I never spoke in favor of any extreme, I argued with you because your point about "everyone being pro-censorship" wasn't apropos... Something you seem to know too.

> look for people arguing about specific behaviors; avoid people arguing over the definition of the word “censorship”.

I've seen the same people arguing both in favor of the same "specific behavior" you mentioned and against free speech[1]. And no, those discussions were anything but productive or nuanced. With that in mind, I have no interest in looking for that.

[1]: Not that differentiating between that and censorship wasn't already a distinction without a difference (as I already implied in my previous comment), but I must say that those discussions did make it evident that they were ultimately arguing for the same thing.

Why is it ironic? Hacker news censors content more heavily than somewhere like twitter or facebook. If you call someone stupid you will likely get warned and eventually banned.

I replied this to someone else, but I think it works here too: The irony, for me, is that if I were in favor of censorship, I would be the first person I censor, instead of using an online forum to speak in favor of censorship. I feel that there's irony in using a widely accessed medium just to talk about how censorship is the way to go.

So, because the owners (a) claim that Parler is a free speech platform when (b) actually it engages in extensive moderation to ensure ideological conformity in their posts, then (c) Parler is more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform. That was the point that was being made in the context of a number of erroneous references to Parler being unmoderated. One can debate whether the data leak was ethical, but one should not base one's position on a false understanding of what Parler is.

Fair enough, although I'll note that this condition (a) was tacked on after the similarities to IG were pointed out.

I guess the point I was trying to make is whether or not Parler is moderated to me seems irrelevant to the permissibility of this action.

'Free speech platform' is a meaningless phrase, because it means different things to different people.

Almost anyone would agree that a platform which allows any speech at all is a 'free speech platform' even if they don't agree with allowing certain kinds of speech.

Most people would agree a platform that allows any speech outside of socially accepted exceptions (e.g. threats of violence, slander) is a 'free speech platform'.

But for people who are largely not allowed to share their views (rightly or wrongly) a platform which is heavily moderated for ideological conformity can also be a 'free speech platform' if they agree with the ideology, because they are free to speak all the speech they want to speak and are prevented from doing on other platforms. It's pretty clear that Parler falls into this category.

Whether you like him or not, Zuckerberg has gotten in a lot of trouble over the years for resisting censorship pressure. His actions suggest it’s something he values

Right. Facebook didn't remove Holocaust denial content until October 2020.

Zuckerberg: "Whether you like Facebook or not, we need to recognize what is at stake and come together to stand for free expression at this critical moment."

https://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/mark-zuckerberg-stands-for...

You've made an argument that Instagram engages in some form of advancing certain viewpoints. You have not demonstrated that this is extensive and that Instagram enforces ideological conformity or that Instagram actively pays people to engage in said advancement of political agendas.

There appears to be quite a difference between what Instagram does and what Parler does. The two do not appear to be comparable.

> Instagram actively pays people to engage in said advancement of political agendas.

I haven't seen evidence that Parler's payments are specifically tied to promoting certain political agendas versus just being an influential poster.

> You have not demonstrated that this is extensive

Well, I've demonstrated it as convincingly as the user above who linked to a twitter post of someone just saying they have "robust moderation."

I don't claim anything about the veracity of the post you responded to or about your claims either. Except that your claims aren't an apt comparison because your comparison is logically flawed. Instagram paying some users for their content isn't the same as Instagram paying people to advocate a certain political agenda. And having a moderation system in place isn't the same as having a moderation system in place that is designed to ensure only a certain political viewpoint is discussed. And you've made no claims about Instagram enforcing only one political viewpoint.

I was just pointing out that your statements, if true, still don't support your conclusion as they don't provide an apt comparison to the claims about Parler.

> And you've made no claims about Instagram enforcing only one political viewpoint.

I think I've made pretty explicit claims about political moderation by Instagram. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of racism/sexism/etc. so I find it hard to mind, but as I've shown, they also moderate contested political claims, like stuff about Biden's crime bill, Hunter Biden, etc.

Those are political issues, and I've provided evidence of them enforcing that viewpoint. The original comment provided no actual evidence of Parler enforcing a single viewpoint, but we all know what Parler is so it doesn't take (me at least) much convincing.

I've explained both why my comparisons are not logically flawed (no evidence that Parler pays for a "certain political agenda") and have stronger epistemic backing than the claims being made about Parler.

You haven't given any evidence that Instagram enforces only one viewpoint. And I'd be shocked if Instagram only pays for political posts from one side of the debate in American politics. That Instagram seeks to counter what it perceives of as false political claims has been convincingly made. That it does so to advance only one certain political agenda has not been made.

My evidence was attempting to show that "claims Instagram thinks are true" is an explicitly political category. By moderating away political claims that diverge from that category, IG is advancing a political agenda.

You're asking me to prove the much harder claim that IG has never taken moderation action against political beliefs on the other side of the political spectrum.

Of course, that is

a. an extremely hard claim to prove on an internet forum like this, because I'd have to have an index of all of IGs enforcement actions to prove that none of them met this criteria you've set up.

b. not even close to proven in the case of Parler by the original poster

From my perspective the proper response to OP is to either

1. point out how the claims made about Parler are false.

2. point out that this is done by other large social media websites and thus Parler should not be singled out.

Keep in mind that by "this" in 2 I mean specifically that there are large social media sites that are designed specifically to enforce a certain political viewpoint. As I see it neither of these were done by you.

I think though that we will not agree on these points and I accept that. Thank you for the engagement. I will read and consider any response you have and leave the discussion at that.

> designed specifically to enforce a certain political viewpoint

I'll try to break down my claim more simply. Saying something like "I don't really care about any political issues, but abortion is fundamentally wrong" is a political viewpoint. If IG took moderation action against people who were saying pro-abortion things, we would call that enforcing a certain political viewpoint.

Similarly, a statement like "all claims are fine except for those that tie Biden's crime bill to mass incarceration" is, again, a political viewpoint. It perhaps doesn't map cleanly onto left or right or pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump, but the set of claims that IG picks to dispute is political because the issues around Biden's crime bill (for instance) were political.

I'm neutral on whether Parler should be "singled out", my point was merely that the two conditions set up by OP are not sufficient to single out Parler, compared to the actions taken by other social media networks.

Likewise, thanks for engaging.

That claim about the Crime Bill is mostly accurate. The vast, vast, vast, majority of incarceration is the fault of states and not done at a federal level. While the bill was deplorable, it didn't really contribute all that much.

https://twitter.com/johnfpfaff/status/1128369019164200960?la...

The 1994 crime bill included a number of provisions that increased incarceration at the state level, such as:

> $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, [including] incentive grants to ... qualifying states that enforced mandatory sentencing of 85% of a person's sentence conviction,

> [eliminating federal grants for] lower-income prison inmates to receive college educations during their term of imprisonment,

and funding for 100,000 more police officers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law

I think this is a contested claim and you can find prominent academics on the other side talking about

a. how federal action modeled action for states, including substantial incentive schemes for incarceration (indeed that is how almost every Federal bill works)

b. how the rate of incarceration given the crime being committed increased post-crime bill.

I think it is a discussion to be had, not something to be a priori fact-checked as "False."

There's a legitimate debate to be had over the consequences of the 1994 crime bill and whether or not is was a good policy. The point is that Instagram (and every other social media platform that puts these disclaimers on their posts) is not merely moderating content any more. They're actively participating in politics and trying to persuade their users to feel a certain way about controversial topics. Which is to say, they're really no different than Parler or any of the big box media outlets.

> b. Puts warnings on political issues, like statements that Biden's crime bill contributed to mass incarceration

I assume that point was an extension of OP's comment of: "that they use to ensure ideological conformity in their posts."

For those interested, here is a link to the USA Today article from the screenshot evaluating whether "the crime bill brought mass incarceration to Black Americans": https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/03/fac...

> Stephen Ross Johnson, of Knoxville, Tennessee, a board member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and past president of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told USA TODAY that it is "over simplistic" to say the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration.

> Asked if the bill caused or largely contributed to it, Johnson says: “The bottom line answer to that is no. Was it a link in the chain? Yes. Is it the beginning of the chain? No.”

> Johnson argues that the roots of mass incarceration can be found in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with legislation that created, among other things, the RICO statute, which broadened the scope of federal law as the war on drugs began to take shape.

I'd say I agree with the points in the article over the non-contextual, anonyomous, blanket statement that the crime bill brought ("caused") mass incarceration of Black Americans.

> I'd say I agree with the points in the article over the non-contextual, anonyomous, blanket statement that the crime bill brought ("caused") mass incarceration of Black Americans.

Perhaps it is not an appropriately nuanced claim - I would be curious if there is equal enforcement of the "contextual" clarity of claims made in all political memes though. My guess is no, and it is also a quite common view among academics that the crime bill is a large link in the story behind mass incarceration.

I haven't, for instance, seen fact-checking of memes about Russia "stealing" the election or Donald Trump being a servant of Putin, despite those claims being potentially "non-contextual."

You may agree with the points. But does that make it beyond the pale of discussion and must be "fact-checked" away?

e: Rather than downvotes, I would be curious what others' thoughts are here.

> I haven't, for instance, seen fact-checking of memes about Russia "stealing" the election or Donald Trump being a servant of Putin, despite those claims being potentially "non-contextual."

Have you heard of the Mueller Report? There's been extensive fact-checking on this, and Trump obstructed the investigation.

> Have you heard of the Mueller Report? There's been extensive fact-checking on this, and Trump obstructed the investigation.

I have, of course. My claim is just that Russia "stealing" the election might be non-"contextual" if what's been shown is that Russia ran extensive misinformation campaigns, since the election was still ultimately decided by people voting, no evidence of extensive fraud, etc. , etc.

Of course, perhaps it is still a "steal" simply because of the effect of that interference/influence campaign. And similarly, perhaps the 1994 crime bill had an influence on future downstream state actions around incarceration. There's a discussion to be had about the topic. Neither "fact-check"-ing seems non-ideological to me.

"a. pays popular users"

Source?

I don't see in either of those threads evidence that the moderation is one-sided.

And a social media company paying the users that create the most content? Dastardly!

The most murderous content, yay!

it's not surprising given that it's Mercer funded who basically make the Koch's look harmless.

People shouldn't be fooled and take this notion of 'free-speech' that is being advocated by these platforms at face value. They're not about genuine free exchange, they're funded by and organised by very well networked organisations who use them to further extremist political causes.

Libertarian vs neoreactionary.

Whereas the Kochs want to be in charge of government, the Mercers want to eliminate government.

Eliminating government will favor whoever is best equipped to become one.

Similar, generic libertarian: means handing over all power to the biggest corporation. Big corporations exercise so much power already that it is only where they disagree that any civil governance is even possible.

Principle is that a power vacuum is always immediately filled by the strongest party.

Utopian thinking is the great irony, isn't it? Your utopia is someone else's dystopia? TBH, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around these philosophical paradoxes.

Based on the screenshot you linked to, their "moderation" categories are "spam", "ads", "impersonation", "defamation", "nudity", "pornography", "illegal", "terrorism", "trademark" and "threat".

Can you please explain how they use that to "ensure ideological conformity in their posts"?

In the tweet text it says "all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators"

Did they provide any evidence of that, or was it just editorializing? It's not uncommon for new users to start out with limited privileges on some platforms for spam and fraud prevention reasons.

It might just be editorializing. Perhaps the community is self-selecting enough that censorship isn't needed. Regardless, it's not "moderation-free"

Hackernews starts you off shadowbanned too. It’s a way to ward off spammers and bots. I know because this account started off shadow banned for 1-2 weeks until I had made 5-10 posts. Edit: Why in earth is this getting downvoted so heavily? Every new account everyone I know ever made was shadow banned at first

HN doesn't start users shadow banned - just look for the green new-account usernames. Your account didn't start shadow banned either. Here's your first comment, visible to all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25410162

New accounts are more likely to get shadow banned, especially if they post many comments with links or post inflammatory remarks.

When you make a new account and view a thread You post in for the first week to so, gour comments are absent absent unless you are logged in. That’s what a shadow ban is. It can be removed and it happens to every new hn account I’ve ever seen. It gets removed after a week or so. That “inflammatory” post about a game prototype you linked was not visible for even a second in that thread until a week or two had passed

I never claimed your post was inflammatory. It does, however, contain a link. What the link is to doesn't matter, but accounts that post links in their first comments are likely to be automatically tagged as spam, which I'm guessing is what happened to you. It doesn't happen to all HN accounts, as you can see by all the brand-new green accounts posting in political threads lately.

Hacker News does start off many people with a shadowban–I know because I have vouched for many of these initial comments.

I believe that happens when HN suspects the account is from a person who was banned previously, based on IP's and/or some other heuristic. I've seen dang say something like "If you create new accounts to break the guidelines, eventually we just start banning your new accounts."

Perhaps! It might be that these people were unfortunate to share a network with someone malicious (maybe a university, or a company) and this dooms their initial comments.

I have vouched for dead initial comments too, but usually there was a clear reason they were like that, like a link.

Is it really a shadowban if you could vouch for them? Shadowban is when the poster sees their stuff looking normal and no-one else (modulo mods) sees it at all right?

By default, nobody sees those comments–you have to go to showdead in your profile to enable it. I keep it on because it gives me occasional insight into the dregs of the site and the effort that goes into moderating it, but also lets me save the insightful comments that get killed (or, very rarely, erroneously flagged.)

Right, I showdead for similar reasons. I figured that shadowbanning would prevent even showdead from revealing those comments, but apparently not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672

I don’t think there is an actual “shadowbanned” on Hacker News, I’ve just seen various stages of banned/flagged/dead users. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t know if there was, but I’ve never heard anyone mention it so…

That's what I thought too, that it was just regular banning. But 'dang says shadowban, and [1] implies he does mean the type where the user doesn't know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790627

Because it's wrong, new accounts absolutely do not get shadowbanned. People make burner accounts for 2-3 anonymous posts all the time.

Is there a legal reason to have defamation up there? It seems like a pretty funny one to have for a free speech platform - the others are more understandable.

Defamation is not free speech, it's illegal.

So it's just there to cover bases then? It's basically impossible to win a defamation case when the subject is a public person no?

A public person needs to prove it was malicious and caused damages, but the rule is likely to prevent harassment of private people on the platform.

Defamation posted to Parler by users was not illegal for Parler to host. Section 230 covers them there. I'd expect a "free speech" site to allow it.

Section 230 does not protect the network from illegal speech.

Edit: assuming there’s a federal law about it. Not sure how civil litigation is handled. Not a lawyer, etc.

This really is the rule, not the exception. Every time I've deigned to wade into conservative "free-speech" zones I've been booted out for ideological nonconformity.

Tolerance is a peace treaty: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...

You still cannot threaten physical violence. This imaginary prospect that 'free speech' includes threats is stupid. And of course any individual still can block you. It is literally the same as Twitter.

> It is literally the same as Twitter.

Pretty much.

What I find troubling is that despite containing the same cesspool of vile content, Twitter never got booted from Google and Apple App stores, and AWS.

> The same cesspool of vile content

You are troubling if you really find that

Took me less than 30 seconds to type in a racial slur into Twitter's search bar and find it.

And I don't even have a twitter account.

If you report them they don’t get removed on Twitter?

Without a Twitter account you claim that Twitter has the same vile content?

You can report, but it takes weeks sometimes for the content to get actioned.

Sometimes it takes more than 8 years for Twitter to kick someone off who Tweets racist conspiracy theories about Obama actually being born in Africa.

What is racist about claiming that Obama was born in Africa?

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We're trying to avoid descending further into hell here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please send me twitter links of people conspiring to commit violence so I can report them.

I've reported plenty of people saying awful things about killing black people & jews on Twitter. It's definitely there.

I've had a good experience with flagging bad posts and users: about 3/4 of the time the accounts I report get suspended. I only go after the really nasty accounts, though.

I have had poor experience with suspension, good experience with removal.

Twitter has a search feature.

Also this was the very reason Donald Trump's account was finally banned, despite YEARS of that rhetoric.

Here are some interesting ones:

https://twitter.com/MonkeyWrenchATX/status/13162253889059266...

https://twitter.com/MonkeyWrenchATX/status/13089834842880450...

https://twitter.com/Windstalker361/status/129150221759012044...

https://twitter.com/ScothSenpai/status/1311436929351790592

I agree Parler is/was shit and yay for its death, but there IS a non-trivial amount of extremist stuff on Twitter as well and IMO letting this stuff persist just creates further division.

The first two of those are non-violent opinions you clearly disagree with.

The second two are pro gun ownership - which would be perceived as appeals to violence in most of the world, but in the US is a perfectly common political position.

So this fails to support your false equivalence re: Parler and Twitter.

There's actually plenty of extremist hate filled bile on twitter, but these are terrible examples. Search "#killallmen" for some readily accessible examples.

Still, kind of absurd to suggest it represents the mainstay of content on the platform.

I just think, given the current milieu, that asserting that there is literally not such thing as a good cop (a hyperbolic and somewhat extremist statement by its very nature), and that stealing from corporations (I mean, there are lots of videos of people violently smashing into stores in recent months) that perhaps this is encouraging violence..

Yeah, you can twist the last 2 into a political position. But given the context, they seem to me to be appeals to violence.

I mean look at just a few tweets down on the same pro gun user:

https://twitter.com/Windstalker361/status/131033080427967283...

How is this not inciting violence? What else could "seizing the means of production" possibly mean in a tweet that literally shows off his/her set of assault weapons?

Or literally talking about killing pigs?

https://twitter.com/Windstalker361/status/130913405350173491...

I absolutely don't disagree that there are racial problems that we need to solve, or that the police need reforming. All I'm saying is that by not acknowledging that maybe this needs dealing with too, we are still going to have backlash by the other side.

Here's actual trying to incite to violence.

https://twitter.com/TipsyRose75/status/1347856358440398849

There is evidence that Parler is a russian operation looking to disrupt American Democracy...

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327271037847867395?s=20

> stealing from corporations > buying from small businesses

Why is this report worthy?

> reminder that there are no good cops and no bad protesters

Why is this report worthy?

> Every liberal and lefty needs to arm themselves like yesterday

Why is this report worthy?

> What I find troubling is that despite containing the same cesspool of vile content, Twitter never got booted from Google and Apple App stores, and AWS.

The difference being that on Parler the 'cesspool' as you call it is all there is, or at least it is the main attraction.

On Twitter it is easy enough to find, but an average user mostly does have to go looking for it, or at least be following someone who goes looking for it. Twitter also does make efforts to drain the cesspool, although it can certainly be debated whether those efforts are sufficient or even being made in good faith.

Okay, I see that POV--that Twitter is got a pass because it's worst content is just a by-product of their platform, and Parler didn't because it's worst content was the feature of their platform.

Agreed, the irony of /r/conservative complaining about censorship or their rights to free speech being restricted while making submitting posts and commenting "flaired users only" (AKA only the users who agree with us and think the same way) is completely lost on them...

I am slowly suspecting that being capable of tremendous levels of cognitive disoance, without realizing it, is one of the common denominators of radicals. Quite obvious in right wingers, but I wouldn't exclude others, I just saw it more at the right end of the political spectrum.

I think what you're looking for individuals that think "I believe" without any proof at all is a valid "reason" for doing whatever they like as long as they "believe" it. It is proof against any science or logical reasoning because "I believe" is the only level of verification they need to follow a group/tyrant/whatever.

To the contrary, many radicals, including the ones you’re referring to, are incapable of handling cognitive dissonance. Consider the destitute right-wing radical who fights against economic assistance programs because they conflict with his moral world view.

Is there something in reddit "bylaws" that says any post has to be accepted in a group that meant specifically for a certain group "/r/..." ? I thought moderators could allow/disallow whatever they wanted as long as it doesn't violate TOS or is illegal? I have seen the same thing in more left leaning, women's rights, or whatever. Am I missing something in your complaint? That said all that the_donald/conservative/etc is a dumpster fire.

I believe he was just noting the irony of someone claiming something, then openly not doing so, rather than any rules being broken.

I discovered this yesterday trying to respond to a post on r/conservative about the CCP enforcing ideological conformity. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

That strikes me as far more a function of being on reddit. There are no conservatives on reddit and from my own interactions with the people on r/conservative, I can assure you that they are not in fact what they say they are. You may as well go to Weibo looking to advocate against the repressive CCP regime, or you can try it a bit closer to home and advocate for free speech on reddit. Same outcome.

Have you ever been to /r/politics? It's a groupthink circle jerk. The difference, of course, is that /r/conservative is explicitly defined as a conservative community while /r/politics implies they are some sort of neutral community which they most certainly are not. At any rate, finding a diverse community of ideological people coming together to discuss politics with intellectual fervor is rather difficult these days. Part of the reason is the design of the software itself. HN does a better job of this than most because of very careful design choices and solid moderation. But if this could be accomplished for politics in general, I think it would be a good thing for society.

I think the difference is that r/politics doesnt actually ban you for posting something conservative, its just the users deciding they dont like it. I dont use it either way due to their horrible link rules, but there is definitely a difference in my opinion.

You're silenced by moderators or you're silenced by users. I don't see much difference in the end.

The difference is that the community observed your opinion and decided it provided no value. That could be a pro or con, based on many factors.

There's a huge difference. The freedom to disagree is a fundamental part of free speech. The very fact that you get a big response from the community means you are definitely being heard. They just don't agree with you. When moderators do it, nobody even sees what you are saying.

Comments "silenced" by users can generally still be found by sorting by "controversial".

Not being listened to is very different from being silenced.

If the first few people to see something downvotes you into oblivion before the majority arriving later get a chance to see your content, that's silencing, not merely not being listened to. This is doubly true when those first few people are likely to be regulars that refresh pages often. This means that a few people that are ideologically on the same page can drive the ideological view of an entire forum without actually being a moderator.

Then you are lost.

I think you’re commenting without having tried to post on r/conservative

Have you ever considered the notion that maybe your views are unpopular? Possibly even misinformed?

Maybe if everyone disagrees with something you say, it's not the rest of the world's fault?

Are you Principal Skinner going "Am I so out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong."

This can go both ways. A majority view may be held complacently without being challenged much or often. A minority view encounters constant resistance and reminders that it is not held by many, and may potentially be more robust because of that. Either way, a belief ought to be based on facts and sound reasoning rather than group pressure, and even the most strongly held position ought to be held provisionally and subject to revision in the light of human fallibility.

>a belief ought to be based on facts and sound reasoning

Sounds good but what happens when a loud group bases their beliefs on alternative facts (and select only alternative facts that specifically support their belief)?

> a belief ought to be based on facts and sound reasoning

What is the basis for this belief?

Tell that to the moderators of /r/anarchism, they are very ban happy and seem to relish the power.

Over the past 5 years r/politics has quietly banned users for thoughtful critical comments devoid of profanity (the proof has been shared elsewhere such as WatchRedditDie), and deleted inconvenient current event posts before they hit 100+ upvotes. The mods leave alone flippant casual unpersuasive conservative comments knowing they'll be downvoted and make conservatives look bad, and censor the thoughtful persuasive ones.

It hasn't been just the downvoting, but as the crowd is thinned, increasingly more bots inflate votes, and those who remain are more deeply steeped in their bias perhaps it will be mainly downvotes from here on out.

/r/moderatepolitics is pretty reasonable though the idea of "moderate" is more about speech than views.

Yep, it's one of the best subreddits around, commenters just need to keep in mind their rules of civil discourse.

Nobody has mentioned r/anime_titties yet. It's easily one of the best I was a part of when I was still on Reddit. Everyone had different opinions and viewpoints and things stayed very neutral. Even the mods preferred to comment on potentially shady links rather than delete them.

And no, this isn't a troll; it's one of those reverse-name subreddits.

r/NeutralPolitics/ used to be good for discussion as well due to heavy moderation including requiring sources for claims. I've not read it in quite a while though.

I think you're missing the point. /r/conservative censoring views or users is just fine. They can define the norms of their own community and enforce them.

Just don't hypocritically declare that other people can't also do the same. That's the point here. The hypocrisy.

If you read messages from the moderators, its normally not about censoring, it's more about keeping up with moderating content. That sub is heavily brigaded (I saw some based that was at 17% upvote). And any sub that has toxic comments on it will be removed by the admins. Going flare only makes their job way easier.

If the only thing it takes for censorship to not be censorship is that it'd make the lives of those in charge easier, then censorship doesn't exist.

Saying this implies that anyone can get a flair, so long as they are not brigading. This is not true, even according to the moderator comments. "Only mods can assign User Flair, and User Flair is only for conservatives"[0].

So no, going flair-only is explicitly to silence those of differing opinions.

Don't get me wrong, they are well within their rights to do so, it is _their_ subreddit, after all. However, if they're going to dance around and act like a bastion of free speech, maybe it's time for some introspection.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/wiki/index/flair_rules...

This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform.

That's what the OP was referring to. If everyone is going to call out Parler for being a propaganda channel, then apply the same standards to Democratic Underground, r/politics, r/antifa, etc.

How cute, you think antifa are democrats.

But sure call it propaganda if you wish. Perhaps it is. Many anarchists such as my self are well aware of the propaganda we proactively distribute on a daily basis.

What the ancestor is complaining about is that when the right wing does propaganda, it is not called propaganda, it is called free speech.

I think HN does better than most because they remain non political and heavily moderate on the basis of relevance. Also because Dang is so active and impartial.

HN is really well moderated IMO and I think you are right in giving credit for its success to this superb moderation.

However I think you are wrong in assuming HN has remained non-political. There is a lot of politics going on in most threads. While blatant partisan shoutouts are usually not voted to the top and remain at low impact. Participants regularly engage in heavy political discourse. This includes responsibility to security breaches, workers rights (especially those of tech workers; e.g. should remote working be encourage; is flexible vacation policy good actually), taxation policy (especially those around start-ups), housing policy, transportation policy, justification of international sanctions and their effects, etc.

There is a huge difference between a platform censoring/banning you and a community on the platform censoring/banning you. No irony involved. That subreddit is just trying to have discussion among like minded people without trolls and brigaders disrupting everything, they are a highly targeted subreddit for those acts. Reddit as a platform still exists for you and joining or making new communities is possible at the click of a button. Contrast that with having to create your own platform which is prohibitive, or migrating to another platform (if one even exists), which is also prohibitive.

And now we have a most recent grievance of a group getting removed from all platforms, creating their own platform, only for it to be removed from existence by mobile devices and web infrastructure dropping it.

Wasn't the_donald subreddit doing a lot of brigading and censoring not just the trolls but anyone with a differing opinion?

> That subreddit is just trying to have discussion among like minded people without trolls and brigaders disrupting everything

I love this incredibly sanitized version of what goes on in /r/conservative.

It's totally fine to create a closed group to talk amongst like-minded people, just don't try to make a claim that it's superior or pro-free-speech.

To the credit of the moderators of r/conservative, they don't really claim that, though some of their users try to. They're very open about their intentions. They absolutely do not welcome non-tribe members.

/r/conservative moderates their platform to accept all types of conservatives, including the authoritarian "let's spend all our money on the military and censor everything we don't like" types.

They also took in an massive influx of new users after the_donald was banned which permanently changed its discourse.

And as the biggest right-leaning political subreddit, r/conservative also took in an influx of people posting death threats and insults due to its visibility. Examples are occasionally screenshotted by the moderators, and I'm not surprised they moved to 'flaired users only' to keep up with moderation.

Smaller government, free-speech conservatives on Reddit tend to hang out in more libertarian subreddits.

Those "more libertarian subreddits" seem to have similar behaviors...

Examples? "Flaired users only" doesn't exist in any of the other subreddits I frequent, and all subreddits (even non-political ones) reserve the right to remove off-topic or uncivil comments.

/r/libertarian was famously unmoderated for years until the drama a couple of years when the head moderator finally resurfaced and decided to step in after alt-right mods took over the sub:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/ajg8ng/rlib...

Slashdot is the only major site that was unmoderated in this sense - during the 10+ years I read it the only post ever removed was one with links to Scientology materials that they'd been threatened with litigation over. They replaced it with an explanation of why they'd removed the comment followed by a bunch of links to anti-Scientology sites :)

It had a lot of crap posted there but mostly coped with it, simpler times I think. Their system allowing you to choose the vote threshold for visible posts helped a lot with that.

Slashdot's moderation system is quite unique. It's fairly hard to get mod points and they expire quickly, so brigading is almost impossible. Posts have a very low mod cap (5) as well so it stays fairly flat. There is also a meta-moderation system although it's never been clear to me how effective it is.

Probably the biggest thing keeping it in check is that they still a fully editor driven website. No article shows up that hasn't been seen by someone at Slashdot HQ, so it's nearly impossible for trolls to flood the zone with hate speech, and even if they try it's easy to filter out by just changing your post threshold. Also, the community is so small these days that nobody would even bother.

The best thing that I love about the Slashdot moderation system is that you can't moderate and post in the same discussion.

It keeps people from simultaneously expressing their opinion and downvoting other opposing opinions.

It also only awarded mod points to people who browsed the site on a regular basis but not all the time - so logging in every day or two for an hour would give you them fairly often, but if you spent all day on there you never had mod points. I don't think I got them until I started to use the site less and less which was years after signing up in 2000.

The +5 to -1 range was a great idea as it made it harder to suppress a controversial opinion by burying it in downvotes. It still stands out as one of the best systems I've seen although I'm not sure it would work on something like Reddit. It would probably work well here though.

I was active on kuro5hin around the same time and that had a story queue where anyone could submit stories and other users could approve, disapprove and suggest changes; when a story hit a positive or negative threshold of approves - disapproves it was posted or deleted, and if didn't hit either within a week it was also removed. Again the thresholds were higher to get a story posted and to get it rejected, and only users with enough positive karma could see the queue at all. That worked pretty well.

In the early 2000s I was active on the "hidden" sids such as trolltalk where people would troll Slashdot and share it with others. At one point one poster ran a dictionary attack on the first 10k accounts using some very simple password guesses and captured several hundred or so - and then built a system that had them log into Slashdot regularly in such a way that they were most likely to receive moderation points, which were given to users who browsed regularly but not frequently. He then wrote an interface that wrapped Slashdot and allowed anyone using it to be able to moderate any comment there as if you had mod points, but actually by using moderation points from one of the pool of accounts.

If you ever saw posts with (Score 30: Troll) on them, that would be why...

I get that it is a kind of contradiction to claim being about free-speech, but to see their point, when free=speech and they as the primary advocates for free-speech are under clear and direct and persistent and unrelenting assault of their speech and thought, I can see how they would take on practical positions to protect their community from infiltrators and subversives as they are struggling to survive under relentless abuse of power.

What you should realize, and this is a general fact, is that when any group is withering under constant barrage and assault by what is really objectively an evil agenda of oppression (freedom of expression is in fact a human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), regardless of what you believe or say, they do not have the luxury of high moral consistency while facing free-speech eradication by an evil regime hell bent on controlling all aspects of humanity.

And kid yourself not, what the tech companies are doing to suppress free speech is not only purely and objectively evil, it is a threat to the US Constitution, which is the lynchpin and capstone for freedom and liberties all over the world too. If the American Constitution/values of free speech falter as they seem to be, I pity all the poor souls around the world who have lived under an umbrella of the US Constitution who will suffer immensely more and in deafening silence of globe dominating regime censorship.

There will be no people to take up the cause, e.g., of the Uighurs if the US regime wants to make nice with the Chinese regime for whatever reason. There will be no reporting of atrocities or even knowledge of the lies that justified the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis defending their hime against an evil invasion. There will be what the party wants … ney, demands you believe. Please see the book 1984 for reference. Many say they have read it, I seriously wonder if that is true.

Citation Needed

Citation for what? What is it you want someone else to tell you to believe instead of using your own mental faculties and logic? Do you want a citation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I am sure you can find that on your own, my friend.

You proved my point.

> protect their community from infiltrators and subversives

They see anybody who doesn't toe the Trump line as a brigader from r/politics. Everything is a conspiracy. But there are a number of very moderate conservatives that (for whatever reason) continue to call r/conservative their home, and they respond positively when something sane gets posted. I've had a couple great conversations over there with those folks. I just avoid the endless meme threads and other trashy pointless tribal gunk.

I find it hard to ridicule conservatives for the members that do them significant disservice through all the rather unhealthy obsessive conspiracy stuff because no conspiracy nonsense has been likely more amplified over about 4 years total at a nonstop pace, day in and day out by the propaganda organs of state than the Russian collusion conspiracy used to try to cap Trump at his knees.

But let's also not forget that the government clearly does engage in rather evil conspiracies … Iraq WMD, anyone? And there are hundreds more proven conspiracies.

What we are ally seeing here is the onset of a dissolution and dissolving of our social and national cohesion. It was a clear and provable risk from immigration and diversity as shown for decades in research after research from evidence all over the globe and history, but her we are. Social cohesion has been replaced by not only disintegration, but also by a destruction of the methods and ideals that unified the USA before. All that I have read and studied on the topic over years, essentially condemns the USA to breaking up absent of increasing levels of control and repression and imposition of a fake kind of unification around hollow ideals and values not shared among the actual people and cultures that now inhabit the the territory of the former USA (a bit of foreshadowing there).

I would love to hear theories on how you keep what are essentially distinct colonies of foreign nationals (by ethnicity) across the country in a cohesive jurisdiction like the USA, especially when you have an increasingly and justifiably angered native population that is noticing that the promise of utopia through immigration was a con job to disenfranchise them of what all people of the world would perceive as their birth right, the right to keep what those before us created for those after them. I just don't see it happening without extreme repression, which of course will see escalating reaction that will either end in victory or vanquish, for one side or another.

I feel bad for normal conservatives. They clearly exist, but they're getting quiet because the brand is severely tarnished right now. Then the only people talking are the Trump supporters, and the loop is reinforced.

I think you are mistaking something. Conservatism is not a brand. But what you are referring to is actually the vilification of the people who insist on wanting to keep (something they see as a right) what they have and built or was built for them by people who freely gave it to them. I suspect your misunderstanding of what conservatism is, is also a driving force that will destabilize things further because it is such a fundamental misunderstanding that conservatism is not like the brand of the Democratic party.

You appear to think of it as some kind of opposing sports team. I know the following will incense a lot of people here, but reality though is that the basic dualism is those how have and built something wanting to keep that; while those who did not build or have, want to acquire and take what they did not contribute to, build, or have. A thief is a person that wants what he did not create, deserve, or earn; yet wants to benefit from (or he would not steal it).

Essentially a person with such a mindset is a "liberal" with other people's things, opposed to a conservative that wants to keep what he earned as well as you keep what you legitimately earned. It's really just age old conflict captured in Aesop's fable of the Ants and the Grasshopper. That model manifests itself in the real world through things like the "communists" who want to take over what they don't understand and did not build and yet think they can operate, let alone even maintain; the people that object to huge student loans they willingly agreed to and want to benefit from, while not wanting to pay the cost; or immigrants to anywhere who want to receive what is essentially a part of the wealth and what others of a country built, not only zero cost, but to immense benefit and profit at the cost of the local population.

Interesting, are there lots of people who see it in these terms? It's very favorable to conservatives, and not so much to liberals, which leads me to suspect it is more wishful thinking than an accurate depiction of partisan politics. It looks a lot like what I'd expect someone to write if they weren't arguing in good faith, but were in fact playing this discussion like a team sport.

I understand what you’re trying to say, but let’s remember, the position of many who want higher taxes is that a lot of things some of those conservatives “built” was actually built by someone else and they also heavily rely on a massive infrastructure that is built and maintained by all of us.

Those conservatives absolutely rely on other peoples stuff just as much as liberals.

It isn’t nearly as cut and dry as a couple small paragraphs in a forum may make it out to be.

>freedom of expression is in fact a human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

What are some other human rights?

It's not irony. It's pervasive and it's dishonesty plain and simple.

FWIW I've found that true on the left as well

Can you name any left-leaning communities that promote "unmoderated" free-speech? As someone who's in many left-leaning communities, this would be news to me and I'm genuinely curious to how it works.

I think the biggest difference between far-left and far-right communities is that far-left communities don't pretend to have free speech. And because they don't care about free speech they are more willing to shut down content that the host platform may object to, like calls to violence. See places like /r/latestagecapitalism.

The left understands the complexity of free speech, the right weaponizes free speech. Huge difference.

I don’t know about “communities”, but there were definitely many people calling for violence at BLM protests and marches in 2020.

The difference being that BLM movement actually has many decades (centuries?) of concrete evidence of racial injustice and oppression compared to the baseless claims of voter fraud and a supposed stolen election.

There are a lot of people that are unwilling to give an abused minority even the slightest leeway, and instead while holding the majority position holding power, claim they are the ones that are abused.

You cannot have both an open community on the internet and unmoderated content. The right says they do this, but it is a lie. Even cesspools like the chans have heavy moderation to keep them from turning into a porn distribution form.

/b/ is porn central. They do try to keep child porn off the site, but even that low bar is hard to achieve.

Can't reply to Kaze404's reply to this, but just wanted to say that I didn't intend to compare Parler to any left-wing social network or group I'm aware of. Just saying that from my experience with the left, there are condoned views and straying outside the lines isn't healthy for group inclusion. I'm also explicitly not equivocating the validity of the views themselves.

Thanks for the clarification. I agree, that's a phenomenon I see often as well, and while I think that there are some indefensible positions even on the left, I think some of the communities I'm part of would benefit from giving the benefit of the doubt more often.

Just look at reddit / r / conservative. You have to be proven to be conservative before you can post, yet, they preach about first amendment, freedom of speech and your rights all the time.

It is not possible for that page to be conservative, regardless of what the sub is called. The title is irrelevant, it is the nature of the thing that makes it such.

Going to /r/conservative is like a red cross visit of a communist labor camp and all the inmates have brand new clothes with creases in them. A facade of what the regime thinks a conservative subreddit should look like. Do you actually think that people can espouse "conservative", let alone even non-regime conformant beliefs anywhere on Reddit? The thousands of reddit accounts piled up in the digital mass graves would suggest not.

The No True Scotsman defense.

If the Republican Party isn't conservative you are going to have a tough time finding representation in government. Although I guess by global standards the Democrats are pretty conservative, maybe try there?

I made one very earnest and honest libertarian-leaning comment on the Redstate forums before I was banned (this was probably 15 years ago). Well, it was "fun" while it lasted.

Rule: everything is driven by someone's business model.

I have a feeling this is spreading a lot. People are becoming puritans.. too much negativity in the world makes one become too tense on what he considers the best solutions maybe.

It's not just conservatives. This is this how the internet works now, and it applies to liberal bubbles too. Maybe it's my rose-tinted glasses, but I don't remember the internet being this bad before social media. You could chat on a forum (that was neither hard left not hard right) and play the devil's advocate if you wished. People forget that the first person they should debate honestly is themselves. Online discussion was a great way to have conversations as the devil's advocate. It was a great way to explore a subject. As long as you argued in good faith, used logic and conceded points when they were fairly won, you could have a long (and possibly fruitless) discussion without getting blocked, banned, threatened or called a Nazi.

Nowadays, liberal isn't "how you act" or "what your values are", is an identity. People identify as liberal: kind, right and "definitely not nazis". If you disagree with them, then you must be evil, right?

I've given up trying to explore contentious issues online. It's impossible to take a different view on a hot topic without getting blocked and reported. You don't even have to take a polar opposite view or get snarky. Sometimes you only have to ask a valid question (now known as a dog-whistle). It doesn't matter if you've got science or logic to back it up.

Someone said it on HN yesterday - the old words are failing us. I no longer recognise this thing that they call "liberal" today. I see it as "woke" - a cult, with dogma, heresies and grand inquisitors.

I didn't know Parler before. I'm not American, and I'm definitely not a right-wing supporter. But that's not the same as Youtube/Facebook/Spotify tries to do? Good for ads and supporting their political agenda?

References:

- https://medium.com/swlh/youtube-algorithm-rigged-breadtube-e...

- https://theindustryobserver.thebrag.com/spotify-joe-rogan/

EDIT:

Wow: So many down-votes in less than a minute, without any comment.

interesting opinion from Glenn Greenwald:

"Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?

Zero.

The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start."

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293

His statements are not backed by any evidence, so I don't know what to make of them. Nonetheless an interesting opinion by someone that has done some great things that certainly tickeled my curiosity, +1

Mr Greenwald is an activist.

everyone in some level is an activist.

I don't agree with everything that he does or says. However I'm sure he would be the last one to take the side of Parler or any other similar project.

I'm not really following the issue, but there is any evidence of the people involved in the Capitol invasion being active users on Parler?

As far as I know there is no direct connection yet between anybody arrested for the insurrection and Parler. There is also no direct evidence that they did not. However, it is extremely unlikely that none of them use it.

The people who planned the Jan 6 coup attempt used Parler. So the only way this happens is if they spend months planning the assault but then don't show up for it and a completely different set of people just happen to follow the plan by accident. This includes stuff like preparing and bringing molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, handcuffs, and flying across the country to participate.

https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tall...

https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-f...

i was reading about it, and they are almost using more than one social network and cross-posting through them.. I don ´t see Twitter or Facebook less responsible for the invasion than Parler.

another thread here in HN about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25751218

CEO mentioned on Kara Swisher podcast that he felt he had zero responsibility for the content on this platform. So this moderation is mostly a PR point.

I wonder how he would feel about Sect 230 getting rolled back. Parler would be down and out (that said it's down and out right now).

For clarity I don't support changing 230.

Probably the same support had he for allowing companies to discriminate against gay couples. Its great until its used against him.

There is a difference between being deplatformed by AWS and being served thousands of lawsuits at once.

Maybe AWS wants to preempt those lawsuits by just ridding themselves of the headache? Don't blame them. Amazon is not in the "hosting controversial content for shits and giggles" business.

Right now Section 230 means that Parler end users would be sued, not Amazon or even Parler. If Section 230 were repealed then Amazon would be open for lawsuits.

Lawyers usually aren't going to go too hard after Parler end users, most of them don't have much money. Amazon however is a different story.

> This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform.

Which is not surprising, given how the term free speech is getting twisted these days. It seems the term is now used more often to whine about others who don't want to disseminate a faction's lies (without comment!) than to actually argue for the free exchange of ideas in good faith.

I doubt this. I'm on Parler and frequently see posts (I presume from left leaning folks) trashing the right side (e.g., Trump). Those posts are allowed with no issues. It is true that most opinions are right leaning (some viciously so), but that IMO reflects more on the members than on the moderation policy. Discussions on Twitter have a similar mix (left leaning to rabid Trump bashing), and I honestly don't find any difference in the fervor, except that Parler is right leaning and Twitter is left leaning.

The general tendency these days, fed by narratives from interested parties like the media, is to mash all right leaners (pretty much any one supporting the conservative ideas and opposing the Democrats) as clueless, racist, redneck, neo-Nazis (a bit of hyperbole here, but you see what I mean). Once you think that way (that "they're all nub jobs"), pretty much anything from leaking their user info to shutting them down to throwing them in jail would seem OK. Please, please don't fall into the trap and accept the "all right is nuts" narrative and decide for yourself.

Actions speak for themselves. The right isn't a unified block.

There are traditonal conservatives: god, guns, limited government. Mitch McConnell, David French, Mitt Romney, Charlotte Lawson. I fundamentally have different values from these people, but their perspectives are useful, enlightening, and reading their viewpoints causes me to better defend my own, or even occasionally change. They are staunch defenders of individual rights and traditional liberty.

There are libertarians on the right. Rand Paul, Spike Cohen, Justin Amash. These people I share a surprising number of values with, but fundamentally disagree with on the conclusion. Due to an inherent argumentativeness, it's hard to get a good faith debate, but I acknowledge their opinions that the government uses its power poorly, that both political parties are primarily concerned with remaining in power, and so on.

And then there's the group who wear t-shirts with "Camp Auschwitz 2021", "6 million wasn't enough". Signs that say "Q Sent Me". Hats with "Make America Great Again". These people are absolutely racist neo-nazis. These people are pretending to believe that Italians stole the election. There's no true belief here, no fundamentally held tenant other than "my side is better". This is not a small group - a YouGov poll puts it at 18% of Republicans. And this is Parler's user base, self-selected. The reasonable ones are still on Twitter.

Yep. I was just trying to discuss with another user on this site who seriously claimed all conservatives have been banned from Twitter. I proposed a smorgasbord of conservatives who haven’t been banned—George Bush (mainstream neoconservative), the Koch brothers (business libertarians or paleoconservatives), Ron Paul (moderate libertarian).

Their response was that none of these were “true conservatives”. Their proof was an article by the Cato Institute (brainchild of the Koch brothers, ironically) saying Bush was not a conservative. Well, duh, that’s my point. A wide variety of conservatives with distinct ideologies have not been banned.

None of these people have been banned. Why? Well they aren’t creating mobs who storm the Capitol chanting that they want to lynch Mike Pence.

Claiming Twitter is banning conservatives is flat out wrong. Twitter is banning terrorists who assaulted our Capitol.

> but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity

Am I missing something? What are you referring to exactly? The mod tools screenshot doesn't support that assertion.

Agreed. Maybe the problem is that everyone uses badly organized and ambiguous Twitter threads as citation sources lately. It’s not a good platform for that, you literally don’t have the character counts to explain something

It makes so much sense when you think of Parler as a propaganda network and recruitment tool and not a "free speech" social network which is exactly how I described my experience with it in the mega thread yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25712762

A propaganda weapon whose founder was just back from a trip to Russia with his Russian wife and whose parent company was incorporated by Giuliani's firm while he was traveling in Russia... https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327253991936454663.html

It’s not that what you said is untrue, but those posts are just screenshots of moderation and reward tools, not necessarily ideological conformity tools. It reminds me of quora [1] and some other sites that used to pay too posters as a way of driving site-wide engagement (sort of a way to buy users to get network effects going, like Uber eats offering free deliveries during Covid to get more users)

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742484

> It’s not that what you said is untrue, but those posts are just screenshots of moderation and reward tools, not necessarily ideological conformity tools.

What do ideological conformity tools look like to you?

As opposed to what? Twitter? All social media platforms are ideologically moderated.

Freedom Speeches™ is only for the in-group.

How did you get from knowing about existing of moderation system to conclusion about using it to ensure ideological conformity? I don't see a "Wrong ideology" button on screenshot you've linked to.

One of the founders (with big money) was Rebekah Mercer, owner of the Breitbart News.

This story truly terrifies me: my team owns my company's sign up page. (I speak for myself and not them, of course).

Sounds like Parler, fearing that their OTP provider might go down, decided to fail-open, ie: if the dependency throws an exception, presume there's something wrong with the dependency and that the code provided is acceptable. It never occurred to them that the dependency could be down permanently, or that malicious actors[0] would be able to realize it and exploit to quickly.

Lesson learned: do not fail open where security matters, where authentication matters. Failing closed prevents new users/customers from signing up, but it protects your existing users/customers.

[0]From a security standpoint, these are malicious actors. I would also probably buy said malicious actors a beer if I met them, accompanied by a high five.

Edit: this is a hypothesis of course. Maybe the bug was somewhere else in the system- it could be in Twilio's provided integration library where the fail-open occurred.

Pretty clear where their priorities lay, huh. Breaking the security of their users is less important than getting new users.

Extreme growth hacking

Yeah, just open the flood gates to bots. Twitter would be 100x as large now.

Wasn't it something like 99% of e-mail was spam? The downsides of an open / decentralized platform.

Maybe we should stop idolizing free speech, and instead work towards inexpensive speech :)

Of course, they couldn't compete in the competently run micro blogging market because mastodon instances are free and have no ads. Instead they competed with twitter in the incompetently run micro blogging market.

Nah man, I won't criticize too hard. There but for the grace of god goes I, you know?

I've had flakey dependencies. I've thought "maybe fail open is okay in this one case". You're growth hacking your company and you don't want to be held back because a dependency can't handle your scale. And hey, if a few fraudulent accounts get in, we'll just clean them up later. Cost benefit analysis here, right?

But the road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.

Isn't that exactly what the above comment is saying?

So, you agree with what I said.

Yeah, but you said it with what looked like a lot of sarcasm and criticism.

I said it with a tone of "Oh shit, I could have done exactly the same thing". Empathy.

But it's a fun point of the nuances of language, isn't it? Maybe I misunderstood you.

Well, having empathy with growth hackers is reprehensible and worth critiquing. The idea of growing a business for the sake of having a big business is horrifying; it's the desire to explicitly build a large social institution and use it to damage and oppress people.

From that perspective, you're the one lacking in empathy; you would like us to have our sympathies lie with the few who build businesses, rather than the many who are harmed by the business.

I think you are allowed to have empathy for both.

But only one was displayed here.

Maybe your takeaway there should be, "oh shit, I would have exactly the same thing, I need to rearrange my priorities so that I don't hurt people".

It sounds like that was his takeaway, except that for him it was coming from a place of empathy and not anger.

I did not hear that.

You're exactly right. I love your attitude. But for the grace of God there go I.

Well, here's the thing. I don't go there. I do my best to have morals and principles that stop me from putting users at risk. I would push back at anyone telling me to do this.

If you go there but for the grace of God, that is a bad thing. You should not. You should figure out how not to do that.

“The road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.”

A thousand engineers just got PTSD from reading that!

Agreed that the problem looks like 'fail open', but there is the additional possibility that they had no plan for this failure mode at all beyond timing out.

In that context, and with folks with no regard for consequences in charge, an emergency decision to allow everything seems plausible.

That seems the most likely scenario. This was their make or break opportunity. They should have disabled password resets as soon as twillio deplatformed them.

There's a surprising amount of insecure code in the wild; and naive engineers who are willingly ignorant in their security practices.

I'd assume that Parler's engineers motivations had more to do with politics than providing a secure platform for protecting dissidents under duress.

(Or, if we look at the history of a recent major war, the mediocre engineers working for the other side thought they were the good guys.)

>and naive engineers who are willingly ignorant in their security practices.

Fairly sure we could replace algorithm and data structure whiteboard interviews with security interviews and we'd all be better off

I am certain most software engineers would abysmally fail the Security+ exam, which is the entry level for security practice.

But a far more expedient process is to just give candidates an essay exam to see if they are functionally literate in their profession.

Can you outline what you might expect in an essay exam for a software engineer position?

Would it take the form of a standard interview question:

"Write a few paragraphs on what happens when you press a key on the keyboard"

Or would it use the medium to ask a question less appropriate in an oral interview process?

Genuinely curious what you envision with this format.

The goal is to assess a candidate’s ability to communicate technical matters quickly with structure, organization, and planning. Secondary considerations include the ability to follow simple instructions, command of written language, and accurate descriptions of technical subjects.

My go to question for interviewing candidates is "What trends do you see in web development now or you see being important in the next few years?". There's no right answer there, I'm just looking for something relevant that shows they've got some knowledge of the field outside of being able to bash out code to order. For juniors I don't really expect much while seniors should at least be able to talk a bit about a couple of things, but having interviewed prospective head of development candidates I was amazed that two out of four just tanked on the question, one just couldn't answer at all.

Candidates who know there are things they don't know about I don't mind, but candidates who are unaware of these things at all are typically uninterested in broadening their knowledge, and not someone I'd like on my team.

I'm all in favor of getting rid of the leetcode interviews, but it's not an either-or one, coding competency is still the primary concern, security a secondary one.

And I don't think an individual developer would have prevented this; this is an issue with the general security and monitoring policies at Parler. I mean how could they create millions of admin accounts and extract 70 TB of data without any alarm bells, flood control and circuit breakers engaging?

I saw a tweet regarding it that the IP rate limiting fell over due to X-forwarded-for header not being correctly handled allowing the bypass of that circuit breaker.

When I interview candidates and their solution encounters an unexpected condition I typically park the original question to temporarily discuss how to handle this exception.

This and more generally their thoughts on how to handle other types of unexpected scenarios is an important part of delivering real world solutions. I'm shocked by the amount of engineers that don't have any thoughts on this topic.

It is an important part of delivering real world solutions. How often is it a part of being hired to deliver real world solutions?

I'm not sure I understand the question. In my mind, if you cannot reason through how to handle non-expected things in your code, I'm going to think twice about hiring you. Code being able to account for erroneous situations is as important as your golden path because as we know software should be predictable but regularly is not. Especially so in the world of micro-services where so many integration paths are changing and in flux.

Are you suggesting we should only interview candidates to code the happy case and not consider how they will reason through what to do when the input isn't what they expected or a dependency fails to produce results?

I think you should hire for that skill.

In practice, I do not think candidates are hired for that skill. I have never been asked about error handling in an interview.

Generalizing things because you've never experienced them on an individual level seems like a bit of a stretch. Anyway, it may not be asked in interviews but I've interviewed ~300 engineers for a FAANG company and its something I cover in interviews for the reasons described.

The popular way of quizing developers during the interview has more about throwaway leetcode than experience.

What you're digging for is about their experience. To me, what you're finding comes at no shock. The industry has been punishing people with experience and willing to show it for years.

I think it depends on level you're interviewing at. New college hires rarely have much a clue about this but engineers and senior engineers should be able to have a conversation about it. To be fair because of time constraint, I don't have candidates code this but do want to entertain the discussion. For example, what happens if i pass "illegalValue" to your method, or what do you think your solution should do when the service dependency you call fails to return.

The sentiment is important because it shows how a candidate ties the requirements to the customer use case that it is serving. Not being able to connect these two is a concern in my mind especially for those who are not new college hires with little real world experiemnce.

Replace fizz buzz with spotting SQL injection issues.

There is plenty of use for coders who can't spot SQL injection issues. I can't think of much use for a coder who can't do fizzbuzz.

How?

Sql injection is so basic, that if you can't spot it, you probably can't do fizzbuzz.

It more likely means that you just aren't familiar with SQL.

If you’re referring to world war 2, axis engineers were in no way “mediocre”.

it seems unlikely anyone would be describing WW 2 as recent.

But it is, as is WW I. The latter ended 102 years ago and set in motion many of the technological developments which define our current world, WW II refined these to a level which is recognisable and often still useable today. Electronic warfare, programmable computers, jet-powered aircraft, nuclear weapons - all of these were used in WW II. Modern computers are faster, modern jets are more reliable and more fuel efficient, modern nuclear weapons are more compact and modern electronic warfare has kept up with the development of computers and electronics but as wars go WW I and WW II were the first - and possibly last [1] - "modern" large wars.

[1] - modern weaponry makes large-scale land war difficult to survive, e.g. the average survival time of a main battlefield tank is counted in minutes.

On a tangent: This hacking of parler might be the reason a more recent WW does not come into fruiton.

Systems can be complicated and even the smallest detail can be dangerously revealing to a scrutinizing eye.

"Allied intelligence noticed each captured tank had a unique serial number. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production. They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942."

One source of many: https://www.wired.com/2010/10/how-the-allies-used-math-again...

This information was used to estimate force size and thus counter it, and it turns out this method was surprisingly accurate.

Nice, I hadn't heard that one. I did hear that they always ended encoded messages with "heil hitler", giving the decoders a solid lead and verification that the key used was correct.

On that note, using UUIDs would be more 'secure' than auto incremented numbers, wouldn't it? I don't like how much space they take up in my URLs though.

That, and always beginning them with a weather report (at least for U-Boats).

> On that note, using UUIDs would be more 'secure' than auto incremented numbers, wouldn't it? I don't like how much space they take up in my URLs though.

Or just assign them in blocks that are out of order. Any intelligence gained from the leakage of such blocks would be misleading. Misleading is often even better than non-existent.

Indeed. If you look at any report/book/etc about the strategic production of war goods in WW2, you'll quickly realize that the Germans over-engineered most of their equipment. This resulted in fewer weapons and more maintenance for said weapons. The famous Tiger II tank (and most of their other planes/tanks) took longer to make, required more maintenance, consumed more fuel (a precious commodity for Germany at the time), and required more one-off spare parts (even the tracks were designed for one specific side of the tank). On top of this, Germany had more tank models than the rest of the allies combined. The allied tanks were simpler and could be mass-produced at insane quantities, parts were interchangeable, and could more easily be taken from disabled machines.

The Russians even went further, specifically engineering their tanks to only pass QA to last a very short amount of time (as little as a few dozen KM of use) during the first half of their involvement in the war because they'd be destroyed before then on average anyways.

It should be noted however that the Axis could never compete with the Allies in terms of quantity - America alone had over 5 times the industrial capacity of the entire Axis in 1944, and Germany was critically limited in resources like oil. Germany needed weapons that could get 10+:1 kill ratios. Further most of the late war German equipment was designed during the early war when they were doing well: it looked like their industrial base was expanding and they mostly needed equipment for well supported offensive actions. If germany had spammed tanks like the Russians did, they'ed just run out of fuel sooner. It was a gamble to go for over-engineered equipment, but it was rational even if it ultimately didn't pan out.

This and similar stories should really be interpreted more as british intelligence being brilliant than the germans being dumb. It's almost scary how many times the allies produced paradigm-shifting hacks in record time throughout the war.

And many smart Germans (engineers) left when they figured out what was going on.

To be fair, it's probably hard for a network like Parler to attract top talent. I mean, they explicitly advertised themselves as the "free speech social network" (i.e. "all hate speech welcome, we won't censor anyone except maybe Trump parody accounts") - would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?

> would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future

And even if you did want to work for such a company, the impact on your resume in the future along might be enough to deter you.

Jack Dorsey: "We are the free speech wing of the free speech party"

Mark Zuckerberg: "Trump says Facebook is against him, liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like. That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”

Matt Cutts: "We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up"

Yes? I wouldn't work for Parler, but I fail to see how the phrase "free speech social network" should elicit some negative emotion. Parler sucks because they are a haven to right wing extremists, not because of their marketing.

Its like being angry at Signal because their encryption allows terrorists communicate securely.

The description "free speech social network" is very heavily associated with far right extremists.

Much like, for example, the gadsden flag.

The yellow field, "don't tread on me" banner.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag

if free speech is only for the enemy, I fear what victory looks like.

Someone recommends you some games, about one they say "it has a simulated theme park with intricate rollercoaster building engine and you compete with other theme parks for customers", about another they say "you're trying to build a rocket to the moon but it's really challenging", and about another they say "the interface responds to mouse clicks".

"if a working interface is only for bad games, I fear what good games look like"

Good games have working interfaces too, but they have a lot more worth talking about.

> I fail to see how the phrase "free speech social network" should elicit some negative emotion.

Can you name a "free speech social network" that isn't overrun by white supremacists and Nazis?

It turns out that if you prioritize free speech, then the people who congregate on your site are mostly those with beliefs that are sufficiently repugnant that decent humans don't want to be associated with them.

Well, free speech is a good thing, if done responsibly. In practice though, "free speech" as used by Parler means no moderation at all, so the most blatant lies and the craziest conspiracy theories can run unchecked. And since mainstream platforms are cracking down on extremists, your platform will inevitably become a haven (and echo chamber) for them, even if you didn't intend to be one.

As others have pointed out, yes they did moderate, just for different things.

There was/is extremely heavy moderation on Parler.

Yeah I checked it out for a bit a few days after it launched, scrolled around for 10-20 min to see if it'd turn out like twitter, 8chan, or the_donald in terms of discussion and it was really weird. IDK how to even describe it other than that it seemed to have that MLM esque or truman show vibe where everything seemed strangely personal but also really shallow and performative? None of the discussions I saw felt natural. It was all super identity focused with very little policy discussion let alone material disagreement.

Everywhere I go, I feel like I have free speech by default. I suppose it's my privilege that I feel like that, but I digress. When free speech is explicitly advertised, it smells.

Yes, this, exactly. It's sad that "free speech" currently feels like a dog whistle for the alt right, but it's disingenuous to ignore the reality that social media sites and forums that have sprung up in the last few years explicitly advertising this have very much been going after an explicitly far right audience. The explicit promise is "we won't suppress your speech like those other platforms do," but Twitter, Facebook, et. al., demonstrably suppress very little speech: there are high-profile cases of people who have been kicked off after repeated warnings, but that's not actually the same claim. The real promise of Parler and friends is "you'll be surrounded by people who agree with you, unlike those other platforms."

(There are lots of anecdotes of individual users who get temporary bans on Twitter for political speech, but I have heard those anecdotes across the political spectrum. I suspect conservatives grumpy at Twitter would be very surprised how much left-wing discourse there is about how Twitter protects TERFs, how they pay lip service to banning Nazis but don't really do it, how Jack Dorsey is probably a crypto-fascist, and so on. The parallel -- "I know of people who agree with me who have been moderated and people who disagree with me who have not, ergo Twitter is obviously biased in favor of The Other Side" -- is kind of fascinating.)

I agree the “free speech” label has been taken over by these content-outcasts and turned into a dog whistle. Today, if a platform markets itself as “The Free Speech version of X” it seems to always mean “The platform that hosts only content so bad it’s banned from X”.

Almost everything on Parler and similar sites that is not explicit calls to violence against specific targets and does not call describe black people using the n-word and does not talk about things like how the Nazis were right when it comes to Jews could be posted on Reddit in /r/conservative without violating any rules of the subreddit or of Reddit itself.

Most of it could also be posted on Twitter and Facebook, although there it might get labeled as misinformation.

It's actually fairly difficult for the overwhelming majority of people to get legitimately kicked off of most mainstream social media. By "legitimately" I mean by actually violating the site's published rules. At the scale of these sites there are occasional mistakes made where someone gets banned who shouldn't, and it can be difficult to get that reviewed, but nevertheless for most people those sites are "free speech social networks".

Because of this, when you start a site like Parler you get almost all of your initial membership from those people who got kicked off of Reddit, Twitter, etc., or who are having to work at not getting kicked off because they want to post calls to violence, etc.

That sets the tone for the site from then on. Hence, when a site is specifically selling itself as a "free speech social network" it almost always can correctly be interpreted as "a social network for <X> extremists who could not follow basic norms for civilized discourse" for some X.

> would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?

Does top talent only work for giant ad networks that thrive through undermining privacy (and hence, free speech) while manipulating public discourse to the point where these companies hardly have any defenders left? I suppose so, money will easily trump other considerations, especially among the naive, ignorant or just plain venal.

The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step.

Free speech is one thing, building an echo chamber for lunatics is something completely different, at least in my book. In principle, we probably also agree that all people should be equal, but if you follow that principle to the end, you get Communism. That's why there is a need for supreme courts to interpret each country's constitution, which are basically just a list of simple principles that are acceptable to everyone, but the devil's always in the details...

> building an echo chamber for lunatics is something completely different,

Perhaps it would've been better for Twitter to support free speech then and they'd (the Parler users in question) have remained a fringe voice completely overwhelmed by opposition on a mainstream platform.

Even then, the main problem I see driving all of this is the lack of competition, so I fully support building "echo chambers" if that means competition for platforms like Twitter that are actively working to create echo chambers that they control.

Edit: clarity

> In principle, we probably also agree that all people should be equal, but if you follow that principle to the end, you get Communism.

That's a caricature. The actual principle is "equal justice before the law" (there are variations). Justice is an important part of the principle since otherwise "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread". Not to mention such evils as selective enforcement and prosecutorial discretion.

Few people these days would insist that equality of outcomes is a legitimate goal, though the extent to which disparity of outcomes is treated as a "code smell" at least potentially indicating a societal problem worth examining does vary fairly predictably across the US political spectrum. The appetite for instituting solutions when a systemic problem is demonstrably found also varies fairly predictably.

I think we have all unfortunately seen what unbridled free speech on the internet looks like.

I think we have reached a good balance (for now). Government has to be hands off, and platforms can censor as they wish.

It’s hard to say whether this will work long term, though.

Have you compared the unbridled free speech on the internet, which is (or was) available to US citizens, with that of bridled speech available to citizens of other places around the world?

Which place has more violence as a result?

Have you used an email with no spam filter?

I still get to see what's in my spam folder.

And you can still go to dark corners of the internet and view all sorts of hate speech.

You're stepping well outside the bounds of your analogy. Incoming email is like a social media feed, hence the comparison. It fails when you compare things like shadowbanning with spam, as I pointed out.

Going out onto the "dark corners" of the internet though, that would be equivalent, perhaps, to signing up for an equivalent email provider without a spam filter?

Nope, that doesn't work. Hard to tell what you could mean other than "my initial analogy didn't work so I'm going to move the goalposts".

Promoting hate speech to be published in the same spots as not hate speech because "free speech" is similar to putting the spam in with the regular mail. You're causing damage and actually preventing "free speech" because your speech incites action against those who they are speaking against. It also simply drowns out regular speech. Nobody wants to use a platform that has child porn or white supremacists plotting murder.

> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing

Twitter occasionally labels disputed/debunked political claims as such (but still lets them be published) and, after literally years of doing little more than that, finally took actions to ban a half-dozen high-profile accounts that kept pushing such claims after they arguably literally lead to an armed insurrection. Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. It should be crystal clear which of those networks "values free speech" to a higher degree.

So, no, your implicit claim that it's sad that top talent wouldn't work for Parler because that would demonstrate their commitment to free speech is silly at best and disingenuous at worst. Parler has demonstrably less commitment to free speech than Twitter does.

I'll be blunt: my sincere conviction is that "if you moderate anything it means you are not for free speech" is not a viable operational principle. It's a rhetorical device. Trolls -- alt-right or otherwise -- have always claimed that moderation suppresses their free speech. If you listen to them, you are running a forum for trolls, whether or not that is your intent. It is not Parler's publicly claimed intent to be doing so, but -- even based on the content on their site, let alone their ideologically-driven moderation which, again, goes far beyond anything Twitter, Facebook, et. al, have actually done -- it is painfully obvious it is their actual intent.

> Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start.

"We're a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship... If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler."

That's a quote from the CEO I just grabbed from CNBC[1] and there are others floating around about the lack of censorship.

How does that lead to suppression of opposing political viewpoints?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-...

This is just talk. You can scroll up to the head of the thread and see how the platform was designed to censor in order to maintain a certain ideology.

> This is just talk

If you can't construct a proper response don't denigrate mine, thanks.

> You can scroll up to the head of the thread

Again, if it's too much effort for you to construct proper responses then you shouldn't respond at all.

> see how the platform was designed to censor in order to maintain a certain ideology

That is not what the tweets show. They show that there are moderation tools. There is no proof that any view was censored, you, along with the tweeter, have inferred that. If you have a statement sent out to mods about what should be allowed, or you have something that shows certain types of speech were suppressed then you can make the claim. "Social network has moderation tools and mods" does not cut it.

Now, if you're going to reply again I'd ask that you try harder to maintain some civility and up the quality, probably through greater effort.

> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step.

Free speech is a good thing. And if algorithmic ranking weren't involved, I would probably still hold to the notion that the appropriate cure for bad speech is usually more speech.

But I've come to understand that even when some of a thing is good, more of it is not always better.

By all means we need vigorous debate and principled stances arguing about where the line should be drawn, and what are the appropriate consequences for stepping over it, but "fire in a crowded theater" is just the obvious case when we have people nattering on about how it's stupid to prevent people from walking around with spare cans of cans of gasoline, just in case and ... "hey, did you know that if the fuel-to-air mixture is rich enough, gasoline actually won't catch fire? Here is your complimentary box of matches BTW."

We desperately need better models and mechanisms for regulating speech that don't require heavy handed censorship by the government or outright bans by private parties, and it would be great if these mechanisms can be meaningfully exercised at the edge of the network (or social graph) rather than centrally deployed, but I'm not sure how to get there from here without the various failure modes bringing everything crashing down around us anyway.

Speech is not gasoline, and ignoring the fact that "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" is not the correct quote (it's falsely shouting it, and I only know one case of it happening[1]), you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself.

Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU

> Speech is not gasoline

It's a metaphor. Let me extend it a bit: Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent.

Speech gathers the tinder of a crowd committed to "stop the steal".

Speech is the accelerant convincing those so predisposed that violence or the threat of violence is acceptable and even to be admired.

And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation).

> you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself.

To be clear, I find algorithmic ranking to largely be the cause of mostly the 'widespread discontent based on repeated lies' part, although there are clearly also various 'automated radicalization' effects happening as well.

> Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things.

I don't think we get to unring that particular bell (especially since such ranking efforts predate both Twitter and Facebook). Applying ranking techniques to the prioritization and selection of a subset of items from a variety of sources is one of those ideas that was inevitable because it was obvious to a sufficiently large number of people, whether the result is a live feed, an automatically arranged 'front page', a playlist, or some other format. It doesn't even matter which specific techniques happened to be used, they were all going to be tried by a lot of folks until somebody got the results they wanted (more engagement / time on screen). Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are going to continue to try to mitigate the toxic side effects on public discourse, but I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely). For that matter, I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked based on engagement+recency with editorial decisions being made to nuke certain types of posts/topics for being attractive nuisances.

> It's a metaphor.

Clearly, here's a better beginning:

“Let me extend the metaphor a bit".

> Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent.

Did you mean hate speech? A drought is usually a negative. Sorry, I just can't make sense of that.

> And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation).

All very poetic but, again, I'm sorry but I can't find any substance to it.

> I don't think we get to unring that particular bell

I wasn't the one suggesting we do. You presented two causes - algos and lies, the negative outcome of the latter being magnified by the former - and then chose to suppress one. I think that's a false choice as I can think of other possible ways to remedy the situation and would pursue them instead, but even if I only had the false choice then I wouldn't pick suppression of speech. I can manage with a chronological feed, I was on Twitter and Facebook pretty early, it wasn't bad enough for me to give up the foundation of liberal society. I even remember a time before the internet, it really wasn't that bad.

> I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely)

What's likelihood got to do with it? You're just shrugging your shoulders and choosing to support the suppression of speech instead. It's not as if you've made the argument that you care about free speech but the alternatives are unlikely. I don't even see any evidence as to why it's unlikely. Making a decision based on the likelihood makes little sense, it's not a horse race.

> I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked…

I agree. Why would legislation of algorithms mean no algorithms? It doesn't and it wouldn't. Here are some viable alternatives:

- Social media sites give users control over the algorithms that decide their feed - Users get access to the tools for blocking et al, and the scoring of users. Why can't I know that the person replying to me is likely to be a bot? Or has scored highly for trolling? Why can't I know my own score? Why can't I choose my own shadowbanning? No good reason other than the centralisation of power. - Companies over a certain size lose section 230 protections. This will encourage greater moderation on the large sites and foster competition from smaller ones.

I'm sure there are more.

> No good reason other than the centralisation of power.

Hiding some implementation details from bad actors isn't necessarily a bad idea, though of course you have to figure out whether you're doing the security equivalent of hiding a proprietary algorithm (bad idea) or hiding your secret key (good idea).

It'd be interesting, in any case. I recall tales of former colleagues who used to work for a dodgy online casino; fancy office or mansion on an island, extravagant parties, etc.

And online I think I read something about porn sites, who were working on large scale video streaming well before Youtube and Netflix (as streaming service) were a thing.

For the very reasons people work in ad tech, Facebook, et. al. Not everyone is a wannabe politician or a wannabe future founder/leader/influencer/celebrity with the accompanying delusions of grandeur.

A lot of people just want to lead normal lives with their friends and family. I envy them. Truly.

There are many talented engineers all across the political spectrum.

This isn’t untrue but the distribution matters. Most of the conservative-leaning engineers I’ve known tended to be libertarian and/or rule of law types who wouldn’t work for a place like Parler. If you’re a devoted capitalist, you might favor larger companies with better pay. And, of course, if you’re not all of white, straight, Christian, and male you might reasonably have concerns which would not have stopped you from taking a job from, say, Mitt Romney.

Each degree you move to an extreme has a fair impact on your ability to hire the best in a very competitive market. Even if you’re a movement conservative a prudent question is how something on your resume might affect your future earning potential.

> would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?

How much are they paying, again? If they pay on par with FAANG, I'm sure they would have no problem attracting top tier talent. If they are paying multiples of FAANG, they would attract top of the FAANG talent. Of course if they are paying a fraction of FAANG, they are going to get a very mediocre talent.

So it’s now just a given that all of HN objects to the phrase “free speech” without limits?

Seems like a pretty radical assumption and a pretty sad sign of the times if true.

Note: this message has nothing to do with Parler and being right or left. Just about the phrase “free speech” and what it now connotes.

Free speech has always had limits...

Well maybe in the eyes of US law, but what that's not a given for, well, me or perhaps others on HN. Take "the US highway network" for example. It can just as easily be used to transport black-market items, child porn, weapons, drugs, etc as it can transport ice cream bars. I support it. Tor just as easily supports drug sales as it does star-trek reviews. I support it.

Can't say for sure, but I think it's hazardous to assume we all prescribe to the exact same notion of the limits on free speech.

Oh, it's not just the US. Other countries have restrictions as well. Societal norms impose restrictions too. Unless you're an anarchist, there have always been (and probably always will) be restrictions on speech and free speech is typically meant in the domain of political speech.

Even anarchists believe there should be restrictions on speech. Just not that the power to restrict speech should be concentrated.

The way humans socially operate inherently restricts speech.

The only reason you can even post here is because HN stops spam and DDOS attacks. Your entire post is only possible because there are limits on free speech.

Top talent works at PornHub so I imagine Parler would have done all right. Perhaps not in the area of security, but we can point at plenty of other companies that were discovered to be lacking in this area at relatively early stages of their lifecycles (e.g., Zoom), not to mention a few very mature organisations (e.g., Intel!).

One of the things that's incredibly unhelpful in our current political debates is that there exists a very noisy (at least) minority on both sides of every one of those debates that assumes all the people on the other side are idiots. In general this is not true[0] and so, yes, even though Parler was a social network explicitly for conservatives, they would still have been able to hire smart people.

I don't say that Parler was for extremists, although an extremist contingent was certainly present, but it's worth remembering that even those that are unequivocally and uncontroversially agreed to be extremists by the vast majority of people (Bin Laden, Stalin, Hitler[1], et al) were always able to "hire", or perhaps disciple, very smart people.

Being smart is not the same thing as being ethical, by which what I really mean in this context is sharing the same set of ethics that you or I have.

(On a tangentially related note to both my first and last paragraphs, Boeing employ a very large number of very smart people and yet, as the 737 Max debacle clearly illustrates, they were nursing some absolutely horrendous culturual issues that led to a situation where that airliner was certified and sold even though it contained systems that incorporated severe safety failings.)

[0] And the culture of endless cheap shots, snobbish intellectualism, and disrespectful dismissiveness that surrounds political debate these days is not a force for good in the world.

[1] At the risk of invoking Godwin's law.

"Cool, I found a package for this"

Scariest comment so far!

Hello fellow follower of the cult of cargo!

Or how about a system where pretty much the entire thing is built upon packages? Even for the most minute things like left-padding..

> I'd assume that Parler's engineers motivations had more to do with politics than providing a secure platform for protecting dissidents under duress.

If one is to look at the LinkedIn for the tech leadership of Parler it would not be a stretch to say that they are way outside of their depth technologically speaking.

Bingo. They most likely didn’t care. It was all a means to an end. I would be combing this data to see if any active users that were inciting a call to violence are employees or contractors of say: Epoch Times, Members of Congress or their staff, members of law enforcement (especially capital police), select corporations or donors.

I would also be checking to see if they were employees or contractors of NY Times, CNN, known agents of China/Russia/Iran.

There are too many groups that are enjoying seeing the division of the American people.

The old age question with fail-closed is then not locking yourself out when things go wrong

Everything has/should have a "break window" escape, and yes, that's a security weakness, but I don't see many alternatives to that.

The platform operator should have such a mechanism, yes. Not randos on the Internet the moment a critical dependency fails.

When you own the platform and source code, then you always have a "break window" escape of updating the code. You can also have it fail open only when requests are coming from the internal network, or have a fail-safe authentication mechanism that allows authentication with a super-admin password that can be used "in case of emergencies."

More speculation on my part: I wonder if rather than a fail-open decision, it’s just how they designed local dev to work and the failure of the provider caused the app to behave as if in local dev mode.

That's a really good theory.

I've seen similar setups to allow testing suites/local/lower environments to allow less restricted access. You have to be sufficiently careful how they work to prevent misconfiguring the real thing which may have happened here

Example: In production, a load balancer or other proxy handles authentication and passes a signed JWT to the application but running locally the application will take a JWT directly and signature verification is disabled. In this case, the application has multiple checks in place to make sure it's running locally and in production environments it has network policies to only allow traffic from the authentication infrastructure.

>I would also probably buy said malicious actors a beer if I met them, accompanied by a high five.

You would, would you? Thousands of individuals who by and large wanted to try out a competitor to Facebook ended up getting their personal details downloaded and leaked (and we're talking about very sensitive details here), and you're going to buy a beer for the criminals who did this? I assume before you turn them into the authorities for their 10-20 year sentences?

> Thousands of individuals who by and large wanted to try out a competitor to Facebook

That is a very, very generous take. And if that's all users were doing then their data being breached is regrettable but not world ending.

It is an appropriate take. For years Parler was shared person to person as an alternative to Facebook, and even liberals who were upset at Facebook tried it out.

That's a very, very callous take.

I was told that if twitter wouldn't have me I should join Parler. But now I learn you are all cheering for Parler being hacked? I don't understand, should I use Parler or not?

>In a press release announcing the decision, Twilio revealed which services Parler was using. This information allowed hackers to deduct that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without actual verification.

>With this type of access, newly minted users were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery. That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.

So these 'security researchers' are random hackers that illegally gained access to accounts and servers are actively doxxing people and this behaviour's now being praised?

Apart from being illegal, I seem to recall severe backlash against several instances of doxxing in the past, which is exactly what these people have done.

I wonder if people would still be cheering this on if 70TB worth of twitter information had been leaked instead.

Yea, there's no reason 70TB of downloaded data and millions of user accts (with each requiring an additional attack iteration) were needed to prove a security weakness.

Let alone the creation of a coordinated, decentralized network of machines to exploit the attack and maximize data extraction.

"Security Researchers"

The doublespeak is getting maddening.

Curious as to how you would define this as doxxing? The information contained in this "hack" is just an archival of all publicly-posted information on Parler, it is comparable to someone archiving my LinkedIn page and calling it doxxing.

Private messages are public?

Also, it's hard to tell from the article, but it seems like there's phone.numbers and id involved as well.

I have not seen any indication that private messages are included in this. As the person indicates, phone numbers are only included if they were posted on Parler by the users themselves, but yes from what I can tell the IDs are the most "private" part of the leak. Although one could argue that they are still "public" given that Parler publicly exposed the information.

I have to point out. Messages being leaked is actually in the title of the article.

>70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

The article itself never defines "messages" and, from context, it seems like they referred to users' [public] posts as "users' messages" -- not DMs/PMs.

EDIT: A clarification on Twitter from ~9h ago:

"since a lot of people seem confused about this detail and there is a bullshit reddit post going around:

only things that were available publicly via the web were archived. i don't have you e-mail address, phone or credit card number. unless you posted it yourself on parler."

https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

This is in the twitter post in the article

>I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total: https://donk.sh/06d639b2-0252-4b1e-883b-f275eff7e792/

>This may include things from deleted/private posts.

"Private" posts are posts shared to specific circles AFAIK, not the classic definition of 1:1 DMs. They're still semi-public, a bit like Google+ Circles.

By "messages" they mean public posts directed at other people, like I'm 'messaging' you right now. It's a misleading title that was meant to sensationalize the 'hack'. It seems like all this amounted to was a simpler way to scrape public posts.

When you purposefully leak private data, you no longer get to hide behind the title "Security Researcher".

Would it be any better if it was sent to Wikileaks and published there?

Only if it the data was government / private sector data, not citizen messages

What exactly the difference between "private sector data" and "citizen messages"? Wikileaks published a ton of data from personal sources. Famously, the Podesta leak was from a private account and absolutely contained personal communication (about, again famously, a favored pizza joint).

>What exactly the difference between "private sector data" and "citizen messages"?

That "fuck businesses", while "leave actual people ok".

I think where most people would reasonably draw the line is in the level of political power a person has over matters which impact the public interest. While I personally disagree with the leaking of Podesta's emails, the amount of political power and relevance he has makes him somewhat of a public figure. He is not in anyway comparable to your average person.

I do see a public good in providing this data to law enforcement, so that they can obtain evidence to build a case against the people who were involved. I however can not see any public good in potentially exposing random people to identity theft and criminal harassment for simply registering an account on a website.

While people could make the argument that the site has culpability for what happened so this data must be exposed, to hold that position in good faith you would then also have to say that a leak of Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube users is also justifiable. Seeing as those platforms have held worse calls for violence than any other platforms.

Parler isn't a website where all the users who register are guilty of espousing harmful rhetoric. I would agree that there are some websites that exist like Stormfront where that would definitely be the case, but ultimately Parler is simply an alternative social media site with more lax moderation than Twitter. That lax moderation unfortunately will attract a large number of bad actors who have been banned from other sites. However this still doesn't change that this site isn't anything but a social media site with a different philosophical opinion on how moderated speech on their platform should be. Which means a lot of innocent people with no political power will be harmed.

Huh? Wikileaks is where people go to publish evidence of government crimes, not Granddad's chats with his friends.

Wikileaks leaked John Podesta's emails, including such criminal activity as his recipe for risotto.

It's generally a good idea for leakers to be selective about their releases (Snowden did a better job than Manning in that area IMO). I guess Wikileaks is between a rock and a hard place, because if they started editorializing then that would lead to political bias.

Political bias? Like when Wikileaks supported researching the Pizzagate conspiracy during the 2016 US election and posted links to /r/The_Donald "investigation" threads?

They sided against the US government (and with Russia) years ago.

Has anyone leaked something about Russia that was then denied by Wikileaks? It could be that the US has a more active community of investigative journalists.

Apparently, yes: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...

Except the over 70,000 documents and leaks about the Russian government on Wikileaks right now. This argument is absolute nonsense given that fact.

Well, since it was years ago, it's possible that they have reversed course since then. They disappointed me a lot, and I didn't keep up with them after that...

And that was widely criticized as improper behavior.

Parler is not good, but stealing and publishing this information is also not traditionally ethical.

At this point, we've become so polarized that good and bad as abstract principles are irrelevant. What's good is what's bad for the "other side".

Both widely criticized and widely lauded. Similar to what's happening here.

If the data was public, is it stealing?

(Not 100% sure if private data was released.)

CFAA doesn't care about that. There's problems with that law, but I really wouldn't want to push on it here.

The point is that finding a vuln and investigating it to the extent required to prove it works is security researcher behavior. Actually exploiting it and dumping all of a site's user data is malicious. If he had leaked stuff relevant to the capitol riots or something, maybe understandable, though using the vuln to do so would still have been wrong.

Just as a friendly heads up, @donk_enby used she/her pronouns.

Wow. Downvoted to negative for politely correcting pronoun usage.

Not sure what I should've expected given the average user of HN.

FWIW my guess is there probably wouldn't be any downvotes if you just wrote "is a girl/woman".

Personally I don't care about the difference but just mentioning "pronouns" seems to be enough to trigger the downvote reflex - "pronouns" has been abused to create so much drama the last few years that I can kind of see why people react even if I don't do.

Here's the recipe for risotto:

https://thetab.com/us/bucknell/2016/10/18/john-podestas-crea...

Yes, because WikiLeaks is very diligent in scrubbing sensitive private information from leaks.

They aren't, or did they get much better at it in recent years?

Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

IIRC, that was the Guardian, who was provided the key in trust in order to help publish the data.

> Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

No.

> WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange phoned the White House to warn lives would be put at risk by the publication of cables online, a court has heard.

> On 25 August, 2011, German news outlet Der Freitag revealed that it was possible to access the unredacted database of cables by using a mirror site and a 58-key password that had been published in a book by The Guardian earlier in the year.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/wikileaks-...

https://wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html

No. Wikileaks did indeed accidentally give out the decryption key to the encrypted trove they published from the Manning leaks. There is probably still a torrent available of the full, unredacted scrape of Secret data from the SIPR network.

I can think of one benefit of going through Wikileaks (or WaPo): there would be a review by experts of what is legal/responsible to share, redacting for example driver's license uploads.

Wikileaks doesn't vet anything, their policy is to publish whatever they're given. That's why Snowden specifically didn't take the NSA leaks to them.

One of the interesting things to come out in Dec 2020 is evidence that Wikileaks offered the State Department advance warning when the encryption keys for the Iraq War Logs were about to be published by their collaborators at the Guardian. Prior to that, publication of the Iraq War Logs had been piecemeal as they redacted PII.

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/12/16/recording-proves-assange...

https://www.britannica.com/topic/WikiLeaks

>> WikiLeaks had originally followed a policy of redacting personal or sensitive information from documents prior to release,...

If you hack a source and send it to Wikileaks, do you qualify as "security researcher"? This is what we're taking about.

Wikileaks would never publish anything that hurts authoritarian cause, so it's highly hypothetical.

> Would it be any better if it was sent to Wikileaks and published there?

Not really. If they had sent it to a journalistic organisation à la the Panama Papers, where e.g. curious peoples’ government IDs could be stripped and criminal activity highlighted, that would have be been different.

Parler was ground zero for the community that announced and executed the attack on the capitol. Thought leaders there were routinely evoking, imagining, and outright calling for violence, and the crowd was a feedback loop. Fundamentally the Parler community existed to provide a platform for people who had been already banned from Twitter. Frankly the peaceful use of the site was mostly incidental.

I think there's a real argument that this data is in the public interest.

I generally agree that information from here related to the attack is in the public interest. But this is going to also reveal people who had no part of it. I don't think it's fair to justify revealing innocent peoples data.

The rules are different when the democracy is at stake, as this country's history should have taught you.

Yeahhh... No.

A good half the problems in the world are created when we try to force oversized round pegs through undersized square holes. Besides which, was Parler not the site that required excessive amounts of personal info just to sign up?

That means if authentication failed open, that could mean that this researcher has obtained access to reams of PII. Which they'll deny or state that of courae they didn't collect or look at, but the potential breach is large enough that doing something like this is so unconscionably reckless and stupid, it ranks right up there with the event that even has this site in the public eye in the first place.

Another brick through the stained glass windows of American civil discourse. We don't even need other country's help to push us to the brink because of reckless moves like this.

Yeah, yes. Look at literally any time the democracy was seriously threatened and what happened to domestic liberty during that time.

Was it okay to place Japanese in internment camps? Not going to wait for an answer, because the answer should clearly be no. Curtailing domestic liberties is not okay regardless the circumstances.

Never OK but sometimes necessary. I'm sure you can at least imagine a scenario where it's appropriate to curtail speech to save lives, e.g. taking away an enemy combatant's comms, even if they're American.

Liberty is always opposed to security. How free we are depends on how worried we are. That's always the case.

Ah, a Schneck apologist. Such a bore.

By the way, lets look at some other circumstances:

Suspension of habeas corpus. Abraham Lincoln, Civil War. Half of country wants to clock the other half. Total existential threat.

WWI. Schneck v. United States. Cornerstone and terrible case for limiting free speech in order to silence opposition to the bloody draft.

WWII:Japanese internment camps. Labor cracked down on for striking and shutting down most of the wartime manufacturing supply chain. Existential threat.

2001: 3 buildings hit with aircraft. All liberties around airtravel basically cancelled. Heavy intensification of SIGINT intensifies, birth of widespread dragnet surveillance programs.

2020: A bunch of people waltz into the Capitol pissed as all hell because their concerns were not taken seriously. Rest of country is just fine. Suggestions to yeet civil liberties because think of the Congresspeople who had to continue their meeting elsewhere!

One of these is not like the others. Further, Congress is getting what it deserved. With the way they've spent years delegating increasing chunks of lawmaking to the Executive branch, ain't it grand the way they get reminded of why checks and balances were there in the first place?

He means Schenck, not Schneck for anyone googling.

Obviously we disagree on what it means when an angry mob chants about hanging the VP, breaches one of the most secure buildings in the country, and swears to try again.

This is obviously not an existential threat to you, but it is to the majority of the country, and certainly to our institutions.

The personal data of everyone who has used the site is in the public interest? Are you high?

Do you have evidence that more violent activity was planned on Parler than Facebook or Twitter, or even a disproportionate amount?

Edit: I suppose not.

Lin Wood called for Pence to be executed. This got shared a ton (like tens of thousands of times). A few days later there was a mob in the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!".

Lin Wood didn't say that on Twitter, because he had been previously banned on Twitter for similar rhetoric. Not sure about his status on Facebook, but Parler was absolutely where this stuff was happening.

The denial here is just wild. Like... this is all over the news.

Edit: some collated examples that just went by on my twitter feed, including the Wood threat: https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/1348463074295107585

"Hang Mike Pence" was trending on Twitter.

Was it really? Where can I see proof of this?

Well, there's this from Glenn Greenwald:

> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?

> Zero.

> The planning was largely done on Facebook.

[0] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293?s=...

edit: bad formatting

Well, there’s this by me:

> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?

No, and neither does Greenwald, because its not like Parler has a real-name-to-account lookup function he has access to, or authorities have compiled and released breakdowns of all the social media accounts of arrestees, etc.

At best, Greenwald is fallaciously treating absence of information about their Parler use as information of absence of such use, at worst he's just making stuff up.

> The planning was largely done on Facebook.

Planning, including for the violence, was done on Parler among a wide variety of different sites. Actual journalists who are interested in investigating and reporting facts, and who haven’t abandoned actual journalism for pure ideological propaganda like Greenwald, have covered this, including the content of specific posts:

https://theconversation.com/far-right-activists-on-social-me...

https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-f...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/01/07/capitol...

https://www.vox.com/recode/22221285/trump-online-capitol-rio...

Where did he get his data from to assert that with confidence? Also, how many people had been arrested in total at the time of Glenn's tweet - I have a feeling the number is going to go way up, and with Parler data becoming public, it will be easy to disprove his assertion (which may be technically true, but has low information density)

AFAIK, they have not publicly released any data dumps from this (yet? Maybe they're planing to).

If I were sitting on a dataset like this, I'd probably try to share it with the authorities like the FBI and selected journalists who I feel would behave responsibly.

Sorry but no 'security researcher' is supposed to be gathering such a massive dataset in the first place. The moment you use a vulnerability to download any private information, even as proof of concept, you are on very thin ice - both legally and (in my view) ethically.

If I were twitter user @donk_enby I would be very worried about an imminent visit by law enforcement.

It's also likely doing this as screwed up active investigations. Someone might have felt safe "deleting" messages on Parlor. Now that this is public, they're going to burn everything connected to it and it may ruin ongoing investigations. There's a reason Twitter keeps a lot of accounts active, they act as honey pots for law enforcement who can watch them.

These hackers aren't the heroes they pretend to be.

Apparently Parler collects phone numbers and scans of government-issued ID. I suspect most people in a Western country would find it difficult to "burn" their legal name and birthdate.

Really? Parler requires an image of an ID? I've heard this claim elsewhere but I just assumed it was misinformation. I can't imagine so many people sending in photos of their ID to have access to Parler. Even the ones who didn't know that openly planning murders is wrong there are many users who would know to hide their identity, right?

I've never used Parler but credible articles I've seen claimed that you could create an account and read/follow without uploading your ID, but you had to provide ID in order to be "verified" and allowed to post/share photos and video (and maybe text? Not sure on that).

> Now that this is public, they're going to burn everything connected to it and it may ruin ongoing investigations.

There is no way a non-tech savvy person can foil the federal government agency in this way - an agency which will likely have all the logs from Amazon (in addition to the data dump from this particular hack, and cached data from Parler follower's devices which will be duly imaged). In reality, any such amateur cleanup activity will be brought forward as further evidence of guilt (or as an additional charge).

I am tech savvy, and I am not foolish enough to think can possibly hide information from a nation-state, should one choose to turn it's Sauron's-eye-like gaze on me. Hell, I don't even stand a chance against a VC-funded security firm with <10 people that's worth its salt.

A more obvious criterion would be that there's no implication the people who compromised Parler actually do any kind of research on computer security. The article indicates this was a script-kiddie level vulnerability.

On the other hand if an actual researcher leaks data they're still a researcher; they might be a bad person, but that's orthogonal.

> On the other hand if an actual researcher leaks data they're still a researcher; they might be a bad person, but that's orthogonal.

I would disagree. To me at least, the difference between researcher and hacker is what you do with the knowledge you have.

Those aren't exclusive, hacker doesn't necessarily have a bad connotation (see "white hat").

In my original post I didn't want to use the word "hacker" to mean "breaker-into of systems" while posting on a site called Hacker News.

But my point wasn't that people can't have their credentials revoked for doing bad things, my point was that if actual security researchers -- say, a team from some university or prominent firm -- had done this, we would be having a very different conversation right now. We might stop calling them researchers next week, but history matters.

As far as I can tell, the people who broke into Parler are not far beyond script kiddies, if at all.

Ok, sorry for being pedantic.

Hacker and researcher are not mutually exclusive.

A researcher seeks knowledge, a hacker seeks ways to apply knowledge to overcome obstacles, which includes seeking required knowledge and is knowledge itself.

The more interesting question is in what capacity someone was acting, if it wasn't both.

Anything else is like trying to find the difference between an employee and a pilot, as if they're mutually exclusive things.

malicious hacker/researcher

The person who did this calls themselves a hacker. It's just whoever wrote this article that decided to call them a "security researcher".

I research what's behind your security, ergo, I'm a security researcher

In other words, the media really is as liberal as is claimed by some?

How does that change things? The article calls them security researchers. In the title! Isn't that an example of something that HN is tacitly acknowledging to be true by leaving the title alone?

Things have changed in the last few days. I think what we're seeing is a form of information warfare specifically designed to trigger a strong response in people, either positive or negative.

Additional interesting things: the DOSing of Tor v3, suppression of all Trumpian sites, the blackout of Pakistan, the massive volatility of monero.

The article is essentially a copy/paste of a chain of screenshotted messages that'd been going around for a while.

This sentence specifically:

> With this type of access, newly minted users were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery. That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.

Compare to this comment[1] (linked from MeFi) posted this morning:

> Well, because of that access, it gave them access to the behind the login box API that is used to deliver content (...)

Subsequent posts also seem to indicate that post is incredibly inaccurate[2].

So it looks like someone mixed up "scraping a public API" with some breathless tale of hackers doing hacker things, and HN ate it up.

[1]https://m.alpha.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/1016...

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kv0jo6/psa_the...

I will never be able to trust the liberal cybernews.com again! If only I had ever heard of it.

I find this euphemistic renaming amusing. It’s like calling a state backed hitman a ‘termination consultant’

more like a judicium Dei[0] verification specialist..

[0] trial by ordeal

OK, call them hackers then. I'm sure they'll be okay with that appellation, and won't really care about your dithering over the distinction.

The vast majority of this data was posted publicly. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Vast majority? OK..... So what about the stuff that was from private posts? You're really going to justify this?

It wasn't from private posts, it was from deleted posts. Parler left them accessible and so they happened to be caught when scraping.

The hacker specifically mentioned on Twitter both deleted and private data.

And you believed it.

what private data was leaked? From what I can see its just public content that was archived.

I read that photos of drivers licenses and other "official" cards were leaked. I believe these were used for proving who you were on the app. I'm not sure if these were publicly shared, or shared with admins who then verified the user.

The source of the "leak" is claiming its ONLY publicly [1] available content. The fact it is being called a leak rather than an archive is just misleading.

[1] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

The term is also being used in Wikipedia's reference to this event.

It sounds like Parler is responsible for the leaking, if they truly had no authentication requirements on their API endpoints.

Where are the comments about how awful it is for people's private messages to be leaked? Or is this okay because the media told me these guys are the bad guys.

Just call everyone a terrorist and absolve your soul of any uneasiness you have with this. Surely this hyperbole hasn't been used in recent history to push authoritarian and unethical measures by state and private actors paving a golden road to hell.

Umm I'm not sure which group you're referring to!

Are they distinguishable by their terroristic activities alone?

Its also complete accident that there is now a 20000 page "Patriot Act 2.0" being pushed as a solution.

The US Political class is just that good!

Links or is this FUD.

Perhaps GlobalProtect was referring to HR 4192?

https://www.aclu.org/letter/aclu-statement-opposing-hr-4192-...

darned auto-expansion. meant GP

A bunch of assholes on here are trying to destabilize the country. what are you even on about?

What I love about this comment is how politically ambiguous it is. You cant tell which “side” it’s arguing for which is exactly the point - the same argument can be used by both sides. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

It's trying to equate calling out actual terrorist acts carried by self-identified insurrectionists, with calling "Everyone" a terrorist.

No, we're not calling everyone a terrorist. Not even everyone on Parler, though clearly some were, and the service rules were set up to facilitate them planning their atrocities. We're calling these terrorists what they are. Pipe bombs and a dead policeman for goodness sake.

Where do we draw the line?

Yeah, this precedent is very troubling to say the least. If or when things swing the other way, this will not go well for everybody.

Well what is your suggested response? I think the lack of calling out terrorism and fascism in this country have already resulted four years of "pushing authoritarian and unethical measures" by the US executive.

'"pushing authoritarian and unethical measures" by the US executive' has gone on _much_ longer than 4 years.

>Well what is your suggested response?

If someone is committing crimes, then arrest and prosecute them.

The response should be to pass $2k relief checks.

...these people are the authoritarians. They want to usher in some sort of bizarre "law and order" where they define what those things mean. They were literally beating police offers and saying "we're on your side" at the same time.

The amount of victimization through projection currently taking place is kind of shocking. I don't know of a single person that has been called a Terrorist for anything other than calling for violence against others. Why self-proclaimed "peaceful" conservatives continue to lump themselves in with white-supremacists and domestic terrorists is beyond me.

You can pretend that people are being persecuted for being a Republican but 30 seconds of fact checking will disprove that. In fact the only ones calling for violence against Republicans are those very same white supremacists and domestic terrorists because it seems that anyone that doesn't align with Donald Trump is somehow not a conservative. Mike Pence isn't a Republican? Really? I can't think of a politician much further right, and somehow he's no longer acceptable.

If your political belief system is "whatever Trump thinks this week" then maybe it's time to re-evaluate what you really stand for.

Don't worry, the "hacked material" rule on twitter will prevent anything derived from this being posted on twitter.

Right???

Applying the rules uniformly means Twitter should wait 4 yrs and then ban them. I am sure you will agree to that.

You're referring to 2024 when twitter will ban the NY Times for posting materials derived from the orange clown's taxes and the NY Post for posting materials derived from the President-elect's son's laptop?

Ah. Wait. They took one of these actions within an hour of it going up. :P I suppose it'll be no time at all until they take down the account of the person hacking Parler and live tweeting the content being discussed in this article... which they've been doing for that past ... 48 hours.

Since it's WARC and is going to end up on archive.org (archive.org is going to host it, but a different org 'archive team' are the ones who downloaded it), twitter isn't going to stop it from being posted since it's just going to show up as a link to web.archive.org. Arguably this isn't 'hacked data' since it's stuff that was wget'd and no security measure circumvention took place.

> no security measure circumvention took place

You don't consider exploiting 2fa fail-open being triggered by deplatforming by their 2fa provider being used to mass password reset accounts and vacuum up their private messages not a security circumvention?

What about using a arbitrary content type upload on their video subdomain to implement an XSS attack to allow them to download all videos, including ones sent privately between users?

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/parler-grab/blob/master/parle...

There might have been other attacks in the way you describe, but it doesn't seem to be used by the team behind archiving the content.

https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_neparlepas

Why can't I download these files from archive.org? All of the interesting files are marked as "not available for download"

Maybe because it's still being imported, but the archive.org team probably needs to review it and make it more widely available (ie. on web.archive.org).

If "the team needs to review it", I guess we're going to have another gatekeeper?

I'm looking at one now.

You’re right: Parler’s negligence led to user data being taken. Parler should be punished for this.

People the "good people" disagree with politically and culturally are equivalent to nazis, and it's ok for them to have anything bad happen to them

Ermm, people who are trying to violently and undemocratically install an authoritarian government while using slogans like “6 million was not enough” are literally nazis.

You’re gonna have to find another hyperbolically bad thing to accuse your opponents of fear mongering about.

>hyperbolically bad thing

You mean like that these group was "violently and undemocratically install an authoritarian government"? Did you feel much scared of the possibility of some dictatorship (as opposed to an act of protest in the congress)?

Second, even if they did seriously try to do that, heck, even if they succeeded in establishing an "authoritarian government", that wouldn't be enough to qualify them as "literally nazis".

We don't call all authoritarian government nazis. Just the ones that actually are nazist.

In fact, the most succesful ones we call "business as usual", with the Patriot Act, surveillance, several global wars, torture, etc...

Do you, like, not get the “6 million...” reference?

They also had functioning gallows, and a guy with a taser and zip ties running around in the Senate chamber just minutes after it was evacuated, and lots of “kill Mike Pence” shouting.

Some people were there to take selfies. Others were there to take hostages.

> that wouldn't be enough to qualify them as "literally nazis"

Yes but the whole wishing to extend the holocaust and kill more jews thing makes them nazis

> Did you feel much scared of the possibility of some dictatorship

Why are you pretending this about some abstract threat of some vague unspecified dictatorship? If Trump had succeeded in his attempts at gaining a second term, when he lost by a landslide in the democratic and fair election, that would make him a dictator. And it was their goal to try to make that happen.

Peacefully assembling outside the capital with signs would be a protest. Breaking into the capital armed with guns and pipe bombs and zipties looking to take members of congress hostage, killing police that stood in the way, bringing a working gallows and chanting to hang the VP who presides over the senate, during the vote in which they are certifying the election, is an insurrection attempt.

> that wouldn't be enough to qualify them as "literally nazis"

How about SS tattoos?

"6MWE" - "6 Million Wasn't Enough"

"1488"

"Camp Auschwitz"

All things seen in the group.

But I get it, still not nazis, neonazi, or other. I guess unless they were card-carrying, dues-paying members of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei?

>All things seen in the group.

Yeah, so? If a group of "neo-nazi" tags along, that makes everybody a neo-nazi (much less so, a nazi danger, as neonazi is more like a kind of "edgelord" archetype for far-right leaning people).

If a group had the hammer and sickle or Mao or whatever on their t-shirts on a democratic side protest would it make the people there "communists"?

Or would mean anything about some "danger" to the US of communism becoming installed?

US was, is, and will remain corporatist and capitalist. Democrats, Republicans, and Liberalists all agree on that, and even if they didn't, tough luck, it's not them that have the power, the corporatist elites do.

There is as much "danger" of a fascist coup as there is of a communist overtaking, or as there was of Obama being a radical pro-Black president or Trump "draining the swamp": zero.

The rest are talking points for masses with nothing better to do (and pundits that make money of it) to hit each other with.

My european 2 cents.

The ramifications of this will absolutely set a record for the future as the inevitable reverse will happen.

People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now, it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior when their opposites are in control.

They are betting everything on the belief that they will win permanently this time, and their opponents will never get control again.

It reminds me of Pascal's wager. How confident can one be that one's chosen political team will definitely win out in the long run? 90%? That seems very high, but even if you're 99% sure, are you willing to act in a way that will surely warrant retribution in the unlikely adverse scenario? Seems like a pretty dumb wager to make.

Under the assumption people are remotely ingenuous I'd agree, but in recent years I think that ship has sailed. The means always justify the ends, and ideological consistency is apparently chalked up to a loser's game.

>The ramifications of this will absolutely set a record for the future as the inevitable reverse will happen.

Will happen? Try has happened. Partisan hacking has been a thing for a decade. Remember the DNC emails? Remember weev?

>People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now

What does it matter if I'm okay with it? Nobody consulted me before breaking into Parler. In fact, they didn't take my opinion into account at all. Sure, grey-hats are somewhat motivated by public opinion, but even Mitch McConnell gave a floor speech on Wednesday angry enough to incite a few keyboard taps.

>it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior

Because American politics consistently punishes hypocrisy, right?

I think it’s actually a part of the plan. When the opposite party gains power in 4 years and does the same thing, you get to call them tyrants then, too. Clearly no one cares about being hypocritical anymore. All that matters is winning the media outrage battle of the moment.

Unfortunately it won’t be the same. The precedent will have been set and they’ll be able to ratchet it up to a new level. It’s going to be bad and I’m disgusted by how many people in here are cheering it on when it’s their side doing the kicking. Doxing, canceling, Twitter hate mobs, riot-protests, attacks on journalists, politically motivated violence. All becoming standard practice. Nobody cares as long as it’s their team scoring a goal. You’d have to be blind not to see where this is leading.

I am very, very concerned where it is heading. Trump is a temporary disaster that will be gone soon. Dangerous new precedents won’t be.

>People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now, it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior when their opposites are in control.

I'd argue the opposite: As the rank rhetorical hypocrisy on BLM-related protests vs. Trump protests shows, the marketplace of ideas has broken down and all that really matters is power. We're only a couple steps away from tech/media being able to dictate that we've always been at war with Eastasia, with a horde of willing partisans being eager to punish any sort of dissent on the matter. Being hypocritical is unimportant if you have the ability to mess with the lives of those who are too vocal in pointing out whatever hypocrisy. Most people are perfectly rational in not being willing to risk cancellation by speaking up.

Feel free to doxx all the antifa message boards where we one-up each other with fun new ways to execute our foes.

The ramifications for pursuing and persecuting traitors to the United States of American are going to be what, exactly?

Please tell me how rooting out seditionists is a bad thing.

Ramification is Parler is going to be first company to see how effective CCPA is in punishing companies that have inadequate security.

Within 20m of this post being made, this <7d account is complaining about other people not complaining about the leak of private messages, without actually complaining about that specific problem.

I arrived at that conclusion all on my own. Something a disappointingly large portion of Trump supporters seem to be unable to do. And last I checked, the truth is that conservative media is a much larger slice of "the media" than it would have you believe, I mean, except when it touts its ratings to anyone who will listen.

There are several comments top level saying exactly that. I’m not sure what else you want from HN.

Honestly, the speculative and proactive accusations of hypocrisy are getting really tiresome. I wish people would stop.

"the media told me these guys are the bad guys"

and what do you think they are?

Most of the top level comments are mentioning that.

I'm not gonna lie: I find it very difficult to be upset by this when the site was a haven for people who want to mass executions for people like me. For me, the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs." It's hard to decide where to draw the line.

I would set the line at "following due process".

Talk about hyperbole. In no way did even 1% of the population on Parler want mass executions for people like you.

How do you know?

There's no hyperbole in the comment. It can still be a safe haven for extremists even if most of the users are not.

An even if they didn't agree with the sentiment, many or even most of those on the platform were perfectly happy to fraternise with those that did.

Should we still have due process in the external world? After all, the United States is a "safe haven" for people who talk about killing pretty much every minority group under the sun.

> the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs."

The line doesn't have to do with the infringement of privacy, it's about whether that infringement is being done by publicly sanctioned power, or the whim of the arbitrary, domineering power of private (tech) actors. Elizabeth Anderson has written quite well on this topic in "Private Government."

That applies equally to the rest of the internet.

So let's start by looking at Hacker News. Where on HN can we see people plotting mass executions like that?

In the initial post about the Capitol being shut down,t here were people saying that everyone who broke into the capitol building needed to be tried for treason and executed, or saying that the police should have opened fire and killed anyone who broke in. The mods removed the comments, but HN isn't some paragon of virtue that isn't susceptible to the same calls for violence as any other site.

Mods removing those comments sort of proves that HN isn't a safe haven for the calls for violence.

Those comments and posts are removed from Parler as well: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/parler-lin-wood-...

No, not really. It comes down to how you define "safe haven" - if violent groups are actively moderated and banned, then I don't think it can be called a safe haven. How does the rest of the internet equate to Parler in this respect?

Data, evidence? The threat is in giving the fascist terrorist 1% a microphone not that the other 99% happen to be listening. Parler was lax in policing that 1%.

And thus the private messages/videos of all should be leaked by vigilantes?

I am equally concerned about what happened about the Capitol, but the actions taken by tech in response are unacceptable to me.

You just jumped to a conclusion. In another comment in this article I specifically said only messages that are related to the commission of a crime should be released and everything else should be deleted.

> The threat is in giving the fascist terrorist 1% a microphone

The problem with fascist terrorists is not their rhetoric, it's their violence. Allow them to speak their mind and you lower their need for violent action and everyone else gets to show that their ideas are horribly flawed.

It's amusing to think that people seriously believe there are huge swathes of people just ripe to become neo-nazis because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote some tweets - how do you manage not to succumb to these rhetorical titans?

>It's amusing to think that people seriously believe there are huge swathes of people just ripe to become neo-nazis because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote some tweets - how do you manage not to succumb to these rhetorical titans?

Given that exactly this happened 90 years ago and caused the deaths of tens of millions, people are needless to say cautious.

I'm going to side with the interpretations of history that are a tad more complex than "he gave a rousing speech, hence, genocide", and there are plenty of them.

Yet you seem to side with the less complex interpretation of current event being "he gave a rousing speech"

That's my opponent's position, not mine. When creating an opposing argument it's almost certain you will have to state their argument (in whole or in part) to produce a refutation.

You can't have Hitler without the Treaty of Versailles. He was just a catalyst to an incredibly punitive and emasculating treaty that scarred the psychology of the German people.

If it hadn't been Hitler, it would have eventually been someone else.

War, maybe. Genocide of the Jews? Seems less likely as an inevitability.

You're purposefully being reductionist about this. People having their brains hit with racist or violent rhetoric over a long period of time will be changed by that. They human brain adapts to it's environment, expecting certain inputs and if it's receiving /pol light on Twitter then it starts to expect it.

On top of that, it's only a matter of time before they're linked to one of the many .win site that sprang up after Twitter purged the_donald and the Qanon people.

And again, people have been moved to violence and facism in human history, that's not difficult to find.

> You're purposefully being reductionist about this.

I'm really not, and I'd prefer if you started off responding to me by not (mis)characterising my intentions. I'm 100% sincere in my support of free speech and stand 100% behind my comment.

> People having their brains hit with racist or violent rhetoric over a long period of time will be changed by that

Yes, they will, which is why it's good to allow every voice and every kind of viewpoint a chance to be expressed and hence challenged. Unless you think that echo chambers are a good thing?

> people have been moved to violence and facism in human history, that's not difficult to find

Did they occur in places with high amounts of censorship or free speech? The Holocaust wasn't caused simply by one of Hitler's speeches, for example, it was also (among other things) primed by the rampant anti-semitic prejudice that came from the pulpit every Sunday for hundreds of years - which was unchallengable due to blasphemy laws.

Another "win" for the repression of speech someone in power doesn't like, eh?

Parler was an echo chamber.

> which was unchallengable due to blasphemy laws

There's basically no support for this claim in any literature I can find. Care to cite a historian?

Parler was not an echo chamber by design.

> There's basically no support for this claim in any literature I can find. Care to cite a historian?

Tell me the literature you looked in first, because I want to know which books can miss such basic facts, and hence what I should avoid. The history of Europe is soaked in blood provoked by differences over what can be said by religious people, to religious people, and of them and their views. Entire wars have been fought over it - are you going to tell me there are historians that are credible who'll claim Europe was a land of toleration? Locke wrote his letter of toleration specifically because of the widespread intolerance and bloodshed.

If you use the word heresy instead of blasphemy and your search may prove more fruitful. It was effect in Europe from the Edict of Thessalonica, which brought the first execution, and in some countries hasn't been repealed from law. If you look up the last people executed under these laws you may even find what they said to deserve execution.

You appear to no longer be claiming that blasphemy laws were a direct contributor to the holocaust.

Yes, widespread antisemitism was a contributor to the holocaust, but that wasn't primarily or even really particularly due to blasphemy laws. Taking anti-Semitism in pre WWII Europe and blaming it, in any significant part, on a lack of free speech, is not something that has any mainstream historic support. It's weird historical revisionism that's honestly a bit uncomfortable. (for example, Germany blasphemy laws pre-WWII, as written, actually protected Judaism)

> You appear to no longer be claiming that blasphemy laws were a direct contributor to the holocaust.

I'm claiming that they were a necessary condition. Am I changing my position? No. I've no idea how you came to that.

> Yes, widespread antisemitism was a contributor to the holocaust

We agree.

> but that wasn't primarily or even really particularly due to blasphemy laws

In which free speech zone did a similar situation occur? Your statement is pure speculation. At least try attribute things to conditions that are present or have something to compare with to show the contrast.

> blaming it, in any significant part, on a lack of free speech, is not something that has any mainstream historic support.

I'd like to know what these mysterious "mainstream" historians think was behind the anti-semitism that was so rife in Christian Europe for so long. Where did Nazis get the idea of blood libel from? What ever could be the reason…?

On a less sarcastic note, I hope they don't blame the Jews for their predicament, as the only other explanation would be that the hatred arose from nothing but some rousing speeches by Hitler. That to me would seem incredibly childish a notion and not in the slightest supported by the accounts of prominent Nazi party members of the time but at least it's better than victim blaming.

Of course, we could rely again on looking at the conditions present and what effects correlate - what happens when blasphemy laws are present, and what happens when freedom of conscience (free speech + freedom of religion) is present - does support for Christianity go down? Does anti-semitism rise or fall? Is this consistent across the world? Is the same true for Europe?

> for example, Germany blasphemy laws pre-WWII, as written, actually protected Judaism

On the one hand there are the hate speech laws that were in place for a few years, and on the other is the rampant anti-semitism for at least hundreds of years prior (supported by blasphemy laws), and to top it all off the hate speech laws didn't even work! On the contrary, they contributed to the rise of the National Socialists.

In both cases a lack of free speech resulted in a negative outcome. Yet, you seem to be against free speech. Maybe it's your comfort levels, and I agree, that really is a problem with free speech.

I'll take it over the alternatives though.

We got damn close here in the US with the Japanese internment. So speech suppression it clearly isn't necessary to imprison an entire ethnic group for political reasons.

> Your statement is pure speculation.

So is yours.

> and to top it all off the hate speech laws didn't even work!

I'm not talking about hate speech laws. I'm talking about blasphemy laws. Like I said you seem to not have a particularly strong knowledge of the actual history here, hence my request for a historian who supports your position.

> blood libel from

Funny you bring that up. Guess who propogates blood libel conspiracies today? Q-anon, a conspiracy theory group that overlaps with the people who stormed the capitol building. So you see, even with free speech you can have large groups of people believing absolute nonsense.

> I'm not talking about hate speech laws.

You also wrote this:

> for example, Germany blasphemy laws pre-WWII, as written, actually protected Judaism

You'll have to forgive my assumption that you were referring to hate speech laws, though I'm not sure what else you would be referring to in the context of this debate. I'm sure you're also clear that the Weimar's hate speech laws protected Judaism and were used against prominent National Socialists.[1]

> > Your statement is pure speculation.

> So is yours.

No, pure speculation occurs when you invoke an alternate timeline. I've speculated based on the existent timeline and factors therein. Yours is akin to fantasy, mine is a deduction. Mine is an answer to "how did that happen?" whereas yours is a "what would happen if…?"

There's no would in my speculation.

> We got damn close here in the US with the Japanese internment. So speech suppression it clearly isn't necessary to imprison an entire ethnic group for political reasons.

Speech was suppressed during wartime. From[2]:

> The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover emergency authority to censor all news and control all communications in and out of the country.

The Supreme Court also upheld the government's right to the internment (among other things) because SCOTUS has previously and consistently ruled that things are different at wartime, which I largely disagree with, along with the internment.

Not that free speech ultimately protects anyone like a magic amulet, it simply increases the likelihood of protection. You and I will no doubt both wear a seatbelt when driving but neither of us will claim it will definitely stop us flying out of our seats, there are more conditions to consider to make that claim.

Which makes this all the more amusing to me:

> Like I said you seem to not have a particularly strong knowledge of the actual history here, hence my request for a historian who supports your position.

Well, I guess I'll have to wait for you to bring forth the materials you say you checked, and perhaps for you to find out what was actually happening during WWII in the US.

> > blood libel from

> Funny you bring that up.

The only source of possible irony relies on misconception and tribalism so we'll have to disagree on its amusing quality. I brought up the blood libel because these are the consequence of competing Abrahamic religions that took hold over large areas and disallow speech that contradicts doctrine, doctrine that includes anti-semitism. Where's the Jew hatred in groups with no religious affiliation - do you find much anti-semitism among Buddhists and Hindus?

> So you see, even with free speech you can have large groups of people believing absolute nonsense.

When did I claim otherwise? Free speech only makes discernment of truth more likely, it does not guarantee it. Rather like having the best lab with the best scientists and best practice methods for your procedures, it will not guarantee you discoveries but it increases the likelihood versus a garage with a self taught scientist who is making it up as they go along, but some discoveries may still happen there too. To think that freedom of speech is the medicine for all ill would be to engage in fallacious thinking.[3]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...

[2] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1597/free-speech-du...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

There's a huge degree of just outright horseshit here.

I've been browsing /pol/ for years, hell almost decades. Its a great place to go to get an idea of just how fringe certain elements of society are becoming. I was actually actively browsing when QAnon was making his posts there.

I thought they were just as ridiculous and far-fetched then as I do now. People become radicalized largely because some condition in their life is lacking. For every single successful mechanical engineer that joins ISIS, there's 99 out-of-work coal miners and factory workers who storm the American capital.

Most people who have everything in their life going great don't end up extremists.

I doubt most of the people who stormed the Capitol were out of work coal miners and factory workers. Which is not to say they didn’t have things going badly in their lives, that describes a lot of people.

To quote a violent rioter screaming at the police on January 6th, "We're the business owners of America, and we don't have your back anymore!"

I watched lawyers, doctors and owners of IT companies attack the Capitol.

There are very few struggling coal miners who can afford to fly into DC during the week along with hundreds of dollars in riot gear in order to spend a few days rioting.

> Allow them to speak their mind and you lower their need for violent action

That may be true, or that may not be true. Has there been any research on this?

History is replete with examples

I think this is relevent a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

This is often brought up, mistakenly, as support for restricting speech based on speech alone when it says no such thing.

Popper draws a clear distinction between those who will have intolerant views but do not engage in violence, and those who do engage in violence. It is only the latter, in Popper's view, that must be restricted.

I'm not the one making the positive claim: if people are so certain there were calls for mass executions on Parler, they should demonstrate it.

According to Wikipedia, there are 4,000,000 active Parler users.

You think you can assert with confidence that there are not 40,000 people with Parler accounts who want mass executions?

I'd like to think you're right, but I'm not as confident as you are.

Not after watching someone beat a Capitol Police officer to death with a flag pole flying the American Flag. People think they are defending their country against evil. Like me, apparently.

How many QAnon followers are there? How many believe the most outrageous claims? I would not be surprised if 40,000 do. Would you?

FWIW Wikipedia lists that number of users as of November 2020. It had a huge influx of users in December and obviously January, to the point that it was number 1 in the App Store before it got pulled. So the 4MM user number is probably very off.

The data is public now—if you're so certain, go find me a single post on Parler calling for mass executions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/arkansas-police-resign...

These are not credible death threats.

The following was requested and provided, please stop changing the goal post when you're called out.

> single post

> on Parler

> calling for mass executions

You’re replying to someone else.

I still think these are not legit death threats by the content of it. Saying things like “a good commie is a dead a commie” might be tasteless but it’s far from being a serious thing. No one is killing communists in the US.

I'm not sure if you saw my reply on a separate part of this thread:

https://imgur.com/gallery/nHb2lO8

Those are legit death threats. Including from a lawyer associated with the President.

> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to D.C. and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in this coup?” [Marshall, Arkansas Police] Chief Lang Holland posted Friday on Parler, a right-wing messaging site. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist B.L.M. and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”

> “Death to all Marxist Democrats. Take no prisoners leave no survivors!!” Chief Holland added.

How would this have to be modified to become a "legitimate death threat"?

For anybody reasonable? Not at all.

Since a "single post" has been provided by someone now, it would be nice to see you give them the decency and acknowledge it. There are so many comments here, and they all read in the same way, "well, what about..." and "show me proof" — only for someone to actually go and spend the time to respond, and then be ignored quietly. Discussions here (political ones) feel so childish, I wish we'd be better as a community on those.

Personally, when I discuss politics online I don't expect the other person to acknowledge anything. My audience is all the people on the fence lurking and reading and forming opinions on the topic.

Agreed.

I will admit that it's draining, talking to one user who keeps moving the goal-posts.

And I will then say that I think it's their intention to drain people like me.

So I try to shrug it off and keep refuting arguments with the evidence they pretend they will be convinced by.

As one (non-American) lurker who is reading this thread to try and get a handle on just what the hell is going on over there, thank you for putting the energy in, and please don't give up.

It's clear that you are arguing in good faith and the other person who keeps moving the goalposts and demanding more proof is not, and moreover it's very enlightening to see this scenarios played out nearly identically whenever I lurk and follow a discussion between the left and right in US politics.

Unfortunately, irrational behavior applies to both sides but on different issues. I saw it first hand in terms of COVID and my liberal friends. They took the most negative possible outlook and then called you an unscientific idiot if you didn't think it was the only possible outcome. COVID has a 5% mortality rate (even when reasonable data indicated 0.5%). A vaccine is impossible (even when multiple companies said they had promising candidates). Immunity doesn't exist (even when everything except a few reports said it did). And so on.

Yes. In many cases, the only "winning" move is to say what you have to say and then step back.

You can't usually "win" the argument, just your own time.

I have. I don't typically sit on HN and refresh my own comments to see people responding in real time.

> The data is public now—if you're so certain, go find me a single post on Parler calling for mass executions.

Easily done:

https://imgur.com/gallery/nHb2lO8

Some of these are Verified users - Parler has their Drivers License and Social Security number, and yet they still felt secure in brazenly violating the law like this.

Hey, spoiler alert for people regarding that link -- there's some very strong, graphically violent language. Don't click if you're not in a good head space at the moment.

i think its good to see it so people understand that there are literally millions of other americans that actively want them dead

I pushed back in one direction, and now I'll push back in the other.

I do not think "literally millions" do. That is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.

I am saddened by extremists like this, on all sides.

I want to win a tough but fair political fight, and I think that's what almost everyone in America wants, too. I'm sorry some people think 60 court cases were simultaneously wrongly decided, but I don't feel sympathy for anyone who thinks the next step is to storm the Capitol.

I didn't say it shouldn't be posted; just a warning to be prepared for what you're going to see.

Sorry, I should have clarified: find me a post that wasn't moderated away. Lin Wood's post was: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/parler-lin-wood-...

Unfortunately the service is down, but I would imagine that other post was removed as well.

No, I do not accept that you are "clarifying." You are intentionally moving the goal-posts.

The question we were discussing was whether or not many of the USERS are calling for mass executions.

I provided ample evidence, despite your "find me a single post" challenge.

Now we might want to engage in a different discussion, about whether Parler was correctly moderating that content. But that is not a "clarification," that's a new topic.

I do not have access to information about how long content was allowed to remain before it was removed. Do you?

But for the people that did, it was absolutely a haven.

I don't know what people think, we can't read their minds. All I know is if you wanted to find people who want mass executions in the US, Parler would be a safe place to find them, based on what we do know about them.

What are "people like you"?

Facebook and Twitter have millions of people who want mass executions for all kinds of groups, a quick trip into Muslim areas of both services and you'll find moderate and right-wing versions that want execution for LGBTQ+ people. You can find the same desire for marginalization and extermination of other groups. Not every language and dialect has a huge team of moderators that review content and take the appropriate punitive action against malicious users.

I have a Parler account. I have a GAB account. I make accounts on all new social media platforms and communications services. Everyone should. Because you have no idea what platform might be the next Facebook, or which one is going to be the next MySpace.

Parler will not be the next Twitter.

I hear this a lot, but it makes no logical sense to me. I see a site that is (in)famous for being full of self-proclaimed right-wing "patriots" who are calling for violence against people due to political beliefs.

Someone then decide to associate with these people by joining the site. They may not personally post messages calling for violence, but are now associated with them. And the response is: well sure I'm in the group but I don't actually agree with any of this.

Then my question is: why did you join in the first place? If you don't agree with the most vocal 1% (I SERIOUSLY doubt that number after spending time perusing the site), and you don't denounce what they're saying, what do you expect others to think? We're supposed to read your mind that you're part of a "silent dissent" and just joined the site because...?

People were banned from facebook and twitter for calling for violence, if you switched sites specifically to follow that person I have a REAL tough time believing you don't support them.

Have to been on Reddit, specifically /r/politics? There are calls to violence all the time. Nobody bats an eye because it's calls to violence against the "bad guys."

I assume you've got some citations for that, right? I have been to r/politics and people get banned pretty quickly for calling for violence. I just went through the top 20 threads, and there isn't a single call for violence to be found.

Indeed. When evaluating reddit threads and content, its important to distinguish between highly upvoted and visible content, and content that was downvoted or deleted to oblivion. A -1000 call for violence in one subreddit is not equivalent to a +1000 call for violence in another.

I am not going to go through and find some examples but there have been calls for violence there. I remember the entire Sandman period of time with many people saying he "what a punchable face"....

Edit to add: Also what happens behind doors on invite only subreddits?

Edit to add further: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/bmtdqb/ch...

CHapoTrapHouse got banned but....CTH is invite only.

Parler is banning those posts as well: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/parler-lin-wood-... The point is that there are bad actors and bad voices across these platforms, including those that are "okay" like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.

But they aren't. You can go there right now and find posts calling for violence. They have no automated system and have no plans to implement one which is why they were kicked off AWS. From the AWS letter they were kind enough to post:

>Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.” This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.

Except you can't go there now, because it's been pulled from AWS.

There is a German saying that goes something like "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you've got a table with 11 Nazis.”

here's nearly 1% of (4mm estimated active) upvoting something similar though: /r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is_the_type_of_free_speech_parler_accepts/

That statement—while absolutely and undeniably abhorrent—is not even remotely calling for mass executions, or even mass violence, against anybody.

We have the data. That would be easy to prove what percentage of active users called for violence both in public and private messages.

My impressions is that everyone whinging about privacy with regards to giving seditionists and terrorists a space to coordinate and share misinformation after the biggest attack on the US since 9/11 are just being contrarian or are absolutist to a fault in their libertarian ideals (which I mostly share).

People minimizing this attack and not treating it like a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis for the US are not considering the propaganda win this is for extremist groups domestically and autocratic regimes internationally. Could this be a slippery slope? Sure, but it's not as slippery as the other side of the slope which goes right off a cliff.

There is still plenty of time/space to have debates about how to move forward from here with moderation and privacy on social networks, but for now we are in the middle of an insurrection that needs to be put down.

Also, should another attack take place couldn't platforms knowingly providing services to the capitol attackers find themselves liable for providing material support for terrorists? If I were managing risk at AWS that definitely be a major concern.

My POV, if we wouldn't have a problem doing it to ISIS after an attack on our Capitol, then we shouldn't have problem doing the same to QAnon and these "patriots".

Where you are going wrong is that none of what you say demands a hack or a data dump.

Get warrants, subpoenas, etc., and go after those inciting riots/sedition.

> the biggest attack on the US since 9/11

This is an absolutely disgusting and disgraceful thing to say.

So you can name a bigger attack on the US that has happened in the last 20 years?

Far fewer lives were lost, but the impact and implications of this are on par.

They're just not even remotely the same thing.

Nothing like 9/11 or the OKC bombing has happened in the last 19 years; full stop.

I have lived in DC my whole life, I hate to see this happening in my city, but we can be honest with ourselves.

This could have led to the public execution of the Vice President and speaker of the house. This came close to being a dramatically worse event.

> This could have led to the public execution of the Vice President and speaker of the house. This came close to being a dramatically worse event.

I remain unconvinced about how close that actually was, nor have I seen a compelling case that it was that close actually made.

Further, before it becomes close to "executing the Vice President", you can bet shots are going to actually be fired. Crowds of rioters behave very differently when gunshots start ringing out.

A single, fatal shot was fired for precisely that reason. And even then, I don't think it was anywhere near "executing the VP" but more like getting too close to the area where the politicians were being kept safe.

> A single, fatal shot was fired for precisely that reason.

The people most imminently in danger in that case, as I understand it, were staff in the Speakers Lobby, not members or the Vice President, who were in the chambers.

But as I understand the timeline, the attack, with defenders just on the other side with guns drawn and prepared to fire, on the doors to at least one of the chambers also were ongoing before members had been evacuated from the floor by another exit, so the incident at the Speakers Lobby came very close to being repeated where members were more immediately at risk.

> the attack, with defenders just on the other side with guns drawn and prepared to fire, on the doors to at least one of the chambers also were ongoing before members had been evacuated from the floor by another exit,

Do you have a source for this? I understand you to be saying that the picture we all saw (of the guns being drawn at a door within one of the chambers) occurred while there were still elected representatives in that chamber?

>Do you have a source for this?

I’ll try to dig up something; I’ve seen a couple accounts from people in the chamber or galleries that seemed to suggest that (I think specifically the House chamber).

They were minutes from the Senate floor while Senators were still there.

And until such a thing occurs, most Trump adjacent HN members with continue to play "no true scotsman" with the extremists amongst them.

I am hardly Trump adjacent except, unfortunately, geographically.

If the statement is false, it should be easy to come up with a counter-example...?

No, it is factually correct. They said 'since', not larger than. In the meantime, since 9/11 there have as far as I know it not been any larger attacks within the US on the United States itself. If you know of any then please correct me.

> on the United States itself.

What does "on the United States itself" mean and why does 9/11 meet that standard but not, say, the Pulse nightclub shooting?

The Pulse nightclub is not typically associated with being a seat of government, though I don't doubt that people in government have been seated there.

On 9/11 there was a plan set in motion to crash a plane in to the Capitol, which only failed because of the bravery of the passengers in that plane. Incidentally, the very same Capitol self described 'patriots' broke into and vandalized last week.

> a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis

So what made 9/11 have large scale was the (thwarted) plot to crash into the Capitol and the successful attack on the Pentagon? Not the 2600 killed in the WTC?

This seems like a very twisted reading to compare two not-actually-that-similar events.

I think you have a reading comprehension problem, but I don't think I'm capable of fixing it. Hint: it revolves around the word 'since'. Best of luck.

The poster claimed this was a "9/11 scale crisis", I think it is not.

Rather than engaging in the reasons for why it might be, you choose to insult my reading comprehension. Take care, and hopefully you can be more charitable to those you encounter in-person.

It literally says "the biggest attack on the US since 9/11" in your quote. And it was. That's the part you had a problem with.

Around 4,000 people in the United States died prematurely yesterday due to COVID. 9/11 was a big deal because it attacked America's symbols. It altered the skyline of New York City, took down a side of the Pentagon and almost was able to crash into DC. The attack on January 6th acted in the same way. Yes, they killed fewer people but they attacked heart of America and the symbols of America.

Perhaps the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting where 24 members were attacked and one nearly died?

Yes, that was definitely bad.

>People minimizing this attack and not treating it like a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis

We're still getting groped by the TSA and wrapping up a war from the last time we had a 9/11 scale crisis. We were tricked into spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives invading a nation that had nothing to do with it and we gave some of the less savory government agencies a lot of power which they still have not returned.

I think the public is right to be hesitant to play the knee-jerk reaction game this time around considering how well it turned out last time.

I think there is a big difference between invading two countries and passing the PATRIOT act and the reaction we're seeing here.

All this "hold on and let's make sure we're not being too unfair to far-right extremists" while they actively recruit and plan more attacks sounds like an under-reaction from a fear of over-reacting.

> All this "hold on and let's make sure we're not being too unfair to far-right extremists" while they actively recruit and plan more attacks sounds like an under-reaction from a fear of over-reacting.

I think it is right to be worried about the ascendant tech industry being able to quash certain ideas before they have a chance to influence voters at the ballot box.

Just this past 3 months, we've seen true stories about Joe Biden's son banned from posting on social media, anti-Biden news outlets banned from posting, and now the president banned.

I vote straight democrat pretty much every time, so that is where my leanings lie, but I'm not going to shut my eyes as wealth inequality goes over the moon in the past 20 years and consolidated platforms owned by the hyper-wealthy increasingly control what news people even see.

To me, it is entirely inappropriate to be blasé about this point.

Twitter is a haven for the "kill all white people" and "Republicans all deserve to die" supporters.

I also fall in the category of parler "was a haven for people who want mass executions for people like me."

I still think it's wrong to leak the data.

Many of these people use twitter and gmail too - does that justify a leak from those services? If not, why not?

There were and are legal means for law enforcement to access that data if they need to.

For what it's worth, I don't think that it is ok. I'm just acknowledging the conflict of feeling bad for innocents caught up in this and being glad that some real bad actors might be exposed.

I don't think it's fair to lump everyone into a pile like that. I agree with the decision of tech companies not to host Parler and disagree with leaking its contents. The comments section on any forum is made of a variety of people with a variety of views. You shouldn't be looking at a web forum for consistency.

The find the whole narrative of dehumanising Trump supporters to be sick.

The memory of all the pathological mob like violence that occurred during the BLM movement which occurred worldwide should still be fresh in all of our memories. If only the actors who incited that violence were held to this same standard.

>The find the whole narrative of dehumanising Trump supporters to be sick.

And I find you comparing BLM movement to Trump's supporters "election fraud" bullshit to be absolutely sickening.

Trump's lawyer was asking the rioters to execute Mike Pence first.

If I label him a terrorist, that doesn't mean I label all Trump followers terrorists.

Stop thinking so black and white. It's that way of thinking that lead to all of this.

I do feel terrible for those people. Parler needs to be held civilly liable for what they've done.

The real crime here is that Parler was collecting sensitive information above and beyond what most social providers were asking for and still made shoddy security decisions.

No. These guys ARE the bad guys. Not "because the media said so". They are objectively the bad guys.

Parler's members are the rejects that couldn't survive on mainstream platforms due to their poor conduct. That userbase just planned and executed an attempt at insurrection against the US government.

The market overwhelmingly has agreed that Parler violated ethical standards egregiously enough that severing business ties is appropriate.

I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.

Leaking this information sends a clear message: Extremism and violence are intolerable, and every possible means is at our disposal to fight back against it. That includes exposing violent extremists to the light of day.

> I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.

Then I fail to have any sympathy and solidarity with you. You're just another violent extremist in my eyes, and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend by a long shot.

> You're just another violent extremist in my eyes,

Can you explain how not caring that a bunch of people got their data leaked makes you a "violent extremist"?

I responded to someone who didn't even attempt to make the case how all users of Parler are "violent extremists", they just pulled out that broad brush to justify a transgression. That's intellectually so dishonest I see no functional difference between that and what one would criticize extremists for, and I don't see a meaningful difference between "not minding" a breach of someone's rights and committing it, so that's the violent bit.

> He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

But if you don't mind their use of "violent extremists" apropos nothing, no, I don't particularly "care to" explain myself to you for using the same phrase in response to them -- I just do it because I can. You could simply remove or ignore my re-using that phrase and my point would stand unchanged. Address the core of an argument, don't just play "gotcha" while ignoring the context and the woods for the trees.

Where does it say private messages are being leaked?

Just to update, no private messages were leaked: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

Sure they are bad guys.

This was also a bad thing to do, since, presumably - some of it was intended to be private or hidden.

It will be interesting to see what the results of the content are. There have been many arguments implying that parler was "pretty normal". We can now empirically find out.

As others have noted, this is also a lesson in design and code priorities.

most of us are trying to reflect on whether this is 'private messages' or 'evidence of crimes'

I doubt anyone on HN would take seriously any other service turning over evidence of a crime to authorities because its 'private messages'. We might not like that it is there policy but we damn well would know it is their policy and not use services where it is technically possible to plan crimes?

> the media told me these guys are the bad guys.

They sacked the capitol and cheered it on (yes, almost exclusively as far as the people on Parler are concerned).

They are indeed the bad guys.

I'm surprised to see how many people can not think for themselves but follow what media is telling them. I hope I don't do that myself but try to understand the matter and follow principles rather than sides.

What I'm surprised the most is that with these complex and not obvious questions (at least to me) people without any shadow of a doubt are certain that it is right for big tech to censor Trump, shut down parler and take political sides like it happened.

Maybe Trump is bad but at least i want to see his stupidity or his wrongdoing rather than other people to chew the news and feed me like im an infant.

To me these questions require philosophical debates and dialogue (even with myself) to understand f it is right for a company to impose their political worldview on their clients - I don't feel it is right.

But if others take these positions very easily, to me that is an indication that they got these ideas from somebody else rather than thought them through.

You are currently witnessing the result of defunding humanities in favor of technical education.

I have a feeling most of the professors in the Humanities departments would be not at all sympathetic to Parler or all the deplatforming happening around Donald Trump and his supporters. If anything they'd be broadcasting the Karl Popper "Paradox of Tolerance" as justification for everything that's been happening this week.

Humanities students do not and should not merely repeat their professors’ opinions. To do so almost entirely misses the point of being educated.

The humanities departments are where the cheering of this is the loudest.

I think "citation needed" is appropriate here. If we are bringing US education system into this conversation, the sheer number of humanities ( and the people they apparently teach ) suggests the opposite of what your post suggests.

Dare I say, if more technical education was required, some of the issues in US could be, at least, ameliorated.

> media told me

I create a Parler account myself out of curiosity's sake. The platform had basically no moderation, and was rife with open calls to violence. It was absolutely serving as a recruitment & coordination site for domestic terrorism.

Didn't we learn from 4/8chan that letting people post whatever they want (semi-)anonymously leads to disgusting behavior?

I think it's also that unmoderated forums become a magnet for people who want to spew hate, rather than anonymity inherently leading regular people into such behavior (though maybe the former causes some of the latter).

Older than that, here’s a take from 2004: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

reddit is the same thing. not all of 4chan is bad. not all of reddit is bad. but there is bad on both. it has nothing to do with the website it’s the format

The difference is that reddit at least tries to moderate calls to violence and hate speech.

They don't always do a good job of it, though.

4chan is moderated

AFAIK 4chan is also moderated to an extent, which is what lead to 8chan/others.

People cannot post whatever they want on 4chan. On boards such as /g/, and /sci/, any off topic discussion is banned, including blatantly racist content. Other than that, there is free discussion that can be quite enlightening. And just because you choose to use a website does not mean you agree with the fringes. Just because you're a reddit user, and reddit has gore subreddits, are you into gore?

You make 4chan sounds like a utopia. Clearly you've never seen the revenge porn, gore, doxxing, etc that happens (or at least used to happen, havent been there in years) on b/.

This thread is talking about an example of doxxing on a much larger scale than anything that has ever happened on 4chan. What's your point?

My point is what my original comment says.

why the hell would anyone go on /b/? Same reason no one goes to reddit/r/nsfl

And honestly, 4chan really is a utopia compared to orange reddit. Removing identities makes conversations less about how the individual appears and more about the substance of the topic.

So you agree that unmoderated communities result in cesspools? We took the scenic route, but I'm glad we arrived at my point eventually.

The whole reason 8chan was created was because they were kicked off of 4chan for disgusting behavior (specifically doxing/harassing game journalists)

And now information about your account has been leaked, and will be lumped in with more nefarious accounts. I have a feeling that a significant number of people have similarly made accounts out of curiosity. I've had my parents and some less technically inclined friends recently ask me what Parler is because it's been in the news. These aren't people that fall under the alt-right categorization in the slightest, and they're also not people who would think to use fake information if they were signing up for something to see what it is like.

Even if the platform had terrible and dangerous content on it, we should avoid assuming that everybody on it supported that content, and we shouldn't celebrate their personal information being leaked.

I don't care if my personal information was leaked. I followed discussions, posted a comment or two like, "What evidence do you have for that?" There seemed to be tons of other accounts that did the same, along with accounts by obvious Lefts who were there to troll. I highly doubt there will be blowback for the kind of participation I did.

I am absolutely a privacy advocate. However, in the case where the continued existence of our democracy hinges on rooting out violent domestic terrorists, I am willing to make tradeoffs. At this point, you should think about Parler as a jihadi forum for rednecks.

I don't understand your claim that terrorists are a threat to our democracy. As long as most of the people in the country believe in democracy, the country will continue to have democracy.

The real threat to democracy is allowing leaders to stop following the democratic process. For example, on 02021-01-06, 147 congresspeople voted to throw out the votes from an entire state, even after their party had pursued the appropriate legal remedies [0]. Next time, they may succeed in throwing out votes. At that point, USA will be an oligarchy. This is the real threat to democracy.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/07/us/elections/...

Those Congresspeople were responding to, and enabling, the same terrorists. These are not two separate discussions.

Can you please explain how they were enabling the terrorists? Did the congresspeople get the Capitol Police to stand down? Even if they did, that is a separate thing from throwing out votes.

The country could have terrorist acts every day and still have democracy. Our congresspeople could have their meetings in an underground bunker, wear body armor all the time, and travel in armored vehicles, and it would still be democracy. Democracy means the people decide who has power.

Terrorists can use violence and may change some people minds, but they cannot destroy our democracy. Democracy exists in the minds of US voters.

Lauren Boebert was livetweeting the location of Pence and Pelosi so that the mob could "get her".

That crime is separate from trying to throw out votes.

At this time, it's becoming clear that the GOP establishment is in favor of de facto one-party rule. They are seeking to overturn the results of a democratic election, and many of them are encouraging voter disenfranchisement and even stochastic terrorism to retain their grip on power.

if the mass killings that right wing people want, come to pass, that for me would be a loss equal to "threat to democracy"

>>147 congresspeople voted to throw out the votes from an entire state, even after their party had pursued the appropriate legal remedies

Hey wait, they had the opportunity to vote their conscience on it? Does that mean they were Constitutionally empowered to raise and decide the question?

The USA is a republic, and explicitly not a democracy, said status having been debated early on and pure democracy was found seriously wanting in the qualities needed for a just and lasting society of free people.

No. The constitution does not allow them to throw out votes.

A republic is a form of democracy. Arguing semantics has no place in HN.

And "vote their conscience" is a weasel phrase. They had a duty to tally the votes, a procedure to follow. Some of them didn't want to follow the procedure. Changing the procedure requires a constitutional amendment, agreement from a supermajority of states. Regardless of their individual thoughts on the matter, the laws of the land do not allow them to vote to disregard the law.

>>And "vote their conscience" is a weasel phrase. They had a duty to tally the votes, a procedure to follow. Some of them didn't want to follow the procedure.

So are you neglecting the Electoral Count Act of 1887? If the law and procedure requires they must vote when a proper objection is raised, it is not against the law to vote as they see fit, aka vote freely. This is the generally accepted meaning of "voting their conscience", not vague or misleading and thus not a weaselly phrase.

Perhaps you should cite the Constitutional support for the premise that Congress must vote a particular way when a vote is taken in this case. Especially when actual law and rule allows for the particular question to be raised and put to a vote.

>>A republic is a form of democracy. Arguing semantics has no place in HN.

There is a distinction, as described in Federalists no. 10, Madison proposes that representatives are elected to protect us from the failings of democracy. It is my understanding this is the generally accepted distinction of why we don't vote directly or bind our Senators and Representatives to vote a particular way. I feel it is germane because it means the actions taken were consistent with the specific republican form of government in the USA and to imply they were un-democratic or a threat to democracy is to imply the government is a different form.

In other words there is nothing wrong or unlawful with contesting the electors the way they did. Their only risk in Congress is if Nancy Pelosi (or whomever is Speaker) can gin up a ⅔ majority of members present for a quorum and win a vote to expel the objectors. And of course that can be for any reason she pleases, just like the impeachment. Which is why we may interpret the stated reason as partisanship.

You imply that I am ignoring some important point of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 [0], but you do not state the point or how it makes the behavior of the Republican voters OK and not an attack on democracy. Please behave in a more respectful way.

I reviewed the act. It contains rules for handling the situation when a state has not properly selected its electors or certified its votes. Pennsylvania did properly select its electors and did certify its results before the deadline.

The act allows congresspeople to submit written objections, with grounds. The objections submitted on 02021-01-06 were the same lies that were rejected by Republican judges in Pennsylvania and the US Supreme Court. You can read them in [1]. Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey eloquently explained the situation to the Senate [2].

I see nothing in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that would allow Congress to throw out a state's votes. If you can find it, please reply.

Throwing out a state's votes is unacceptable. And it is unconstitutional, regardless of any acts passed by Congress short of constitutional amendments. Our nation has democracy written into its core. No party can throw it away with a vote.

[0] https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/24/ST...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2021/01/06/hou...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2021/01/06/sen...

You should look at your cites: Electoral votes may be discarded lawfully if they are not found to be "regular", as specified in 3 U.S. Code § 15: "and no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified to according to section 6 of this title from which but one return has been received shall be rejected, but the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been so certified."

Not only does chapter 90, section 4 of the original act you cited provide an explicit procedure for raising objections to submitted electoral votes by state, conducting debate, and a vote, but the congressional record you cite shows the Senators and Representatives following the procedure outlined in the original act as incorporated in 3 U.S. Code § 15.

Hardly an unlawful attack on democracy. Lawful objections were raised, lawful debate was held, and a lawful vote was taken.

You originally asserted >> "The real threat to democracy is allowing leaders to stop following the democratic process. For example, on 02021-01-06, 147 congresspeople voted to throw out the votes from an entire state, even after their party had pursued the appropriate legal remedies [ https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/24/ST... ]. Next time, they may succeed in throwing out votes. At that point, USA will be an oligarchy. This is the real threat to democracy."

Like it or not, the Senators and Representatives followed the lawful process. It was not exhausted until the objections were defeated. Asserting there was something "undemocratic" about the objections or the potential of throwing the out the electoral votes is irrelevant, it is not unconstitutional or illegal.

The objective of the process is to end up with someone holding the office of President. If it is true, however, that the election was fraudulent, and that fraud involved disenfranchising the democratic vote for the slate of electors, that would be a threat to democracy, especially if Congress refused to acknowledge it. The courts want no part of it because it's the responsibility of the State Legislatures and Congress.

The attack last Wednesday was literally successful in preventing a vote about an election and you can't fathom how terrorism is a threat to democracy? Imagine if those two quick-thinking staffers didn't grab the electoral votes and take them to the bunkers.

i think we are post-privacy.

we need compassion to restrain ourselves from harming others

but I dont think anyone can expect to hide from anyone else on this rock at this point.

And now there are folks right here in this thread who will assume the absolute worst about you and try to ruin your life. I wish you the best of luck in surviving this. This is why it's not reasonable to paint every account there as that of a terrorist.

Why would they? Because he did nothing? Or because he was 'present'? Accounts that monitor something are not going to run with the crowd in their act. See also: the historian who documented a lot of the mayhem on the 6th from inside the crowd.

Because they're not going to investigate all 4+ million Parler accounts to distinguish between those involved and those not. Many folks here are just assuming everyone on Parler was a terrorist or complicit in what happened. The poster's name and phone number are now lumped in with everyone else's. All we can hope is they made the effort to use fake information.

I'd hope it would take a bit more than 'present' to be handed a sentence. But time will tell.

No one will be judged for having an account, because a lot of people were signed up just to monitor and watch. It is trivial to claim that you only signed up for that reason and to expect the claim to stick. If you happened to be frequently posting the chronicles of the elders of zion or talking about how you wanted to pursue an ammo box solution to a ballot box loss then you are going to have a lot more explaining to do.

I definitely hope that your analysis here is the prevailing one.

> No one will be judged for having an account, because a lot of people were signed up just to monitor and watch.

Just like certain subreddits weren't banning people just for having posted in certain other subreddits, even if those posts were opposition posts, right?

I think you need to read more Jonathan Haidt, because research shows you're flat out wrong about this.

I've been seeing a lot of people claiming to have been in the Capitol (with the crowd) in a "journalism" capacity who also seem to spend the rest of their time openly and vocally supporting the conspiracy theories and groups that led to the riot. I've become very torn between the dual ideas that a) it's important for people to be covering these things and b) by nature of a protest, those people being in the crowd are tacitly (or openly) contributing their voices to that movement.

I think there's a difference between physically showing up at the Capitol during that event and being present for the whole thing (even if not entering the Capitol) versus just having an account on a site where some planning for the event took place. It seems to me that it would've been quite possible for a casual user of Parler -- or someone like the above poster who signed up as an observer -- to not even be aware of said planning. For instance, I'm pretty sure I have some family members who created Parler accounts in the past, and yet they called me up asking me what was going on at the Capitol and why, suggesting they were just as surprised/shocked as everyone else.

I think folks here are underestimating how many people just viewed Parler as a right-leaning Twitter and didn't realize how far some corners of it had went or were going.

They don't need to assume, because they will have your private messages and posts.

Then you should be worried because your employer and family may discover that you were a member of Parler. The "I was just curious" defence might not be as convincing as you think.

LOL, this is as ridiculous as, "You were once handed a leaflet about the Nazi Party in 1937, therefore you are a Nazi."

If we don't move past this kind of absolute nonsense, you really will have a violent confrontation on your hands, because you're going to end up alienating millions.

Why is it awful? If something you say isn't end-to-end encrypted you should assume it could be made public. I wouldn't be upset if PMs from Twitter or FB were leaked either.

There are lots of those types of comments. Did you read?

Why did you include that “the media told me” part? It dramatically weakens your argument. If you think you’re right and are arguing in good faith, why add this throwaway strawman to imply that everybody who disagrees with you must be brainwashed by the media and not thinking for themselves?

It's amazing isn't it? Principles, ethics.. all talk for a lot of people, situations like these show it. Watch them spin it as a good thing for humanity as a whole. Amazing.

Which side are you talking about in this?

I am reading this comment and I can't help but to chuckle. The reason I am saying is that can be read in several different ways and so does parent's post. We can just barely communicate with one another clearly so our proxy becomes 'who are you talking about exactly'.

We need better communication tools -- language seems to be failing us.

Was about to ask the same thing. My, how the story changes when it's on the other foot. This type of thing is exactly why we can't have noce things. Regardless of how you feel about the people in question, the fact is you've got people on the side of throwing even more fuel 9n the fire for stoking divisiveness and chaos. The sheer fraction of HN posters who show no apparent awareness of this is a bit offputting.

You can pretty easily see for yourself they are THE bad guys. There are calls for violence and white supremacist rhetoric ever way you turn. You really have to try hard to find the non horrible parts of that site.

You're slightly wrong by stressing "THE". They are SOME of the bad guys. Those weren't the only racially charged and violent riots that happened this year.

The 2nd most upvoted comment is about that. The most is about how the Parler developers are inept.

Remember to blame the media, right. It helps flood the zone with misleading accusations. Racist fascists attacking a democratic institution while calling for blood are objectively bad guys. Full stop. If any of their private messages were used in planning and execution of that crime that is evidence on which they should be charged. That evidence will mostly be made public in the course of a trial. Everything else just delete.

I'm willing to own my belief these people are bad guys, no need to protect me by saying the media told me so.

If you think every person on Parler is a bad person, you're mentally deranged, period.

We’re you complaining when Snowden leaked? Or the Panama Papers?

I think most Americans have already judged for themselves.

https://www.ipsos.com/en/american-reaction-pro-trump-mob-ass...

A lot of this "what about their rights" bullshit is likely a covert misinformation campaign by botters and operatives.

Hate speech is not protected. Plotting and committing treason against the United States government is not protected.

Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.

> Hate speech is not protected.

Yes it is. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. [1]

> Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.

This is incredibly dangerous and short-sighted. I can tell you've likely never been in a fight, or very, very few.

People who think this way need to be very fucking careful with their rhetoric here, because while they think they might be the Billy Badass who'll set the world 'right', there's a lot of other Billy Badasses out there who might just jerk a knot in their ass, either temporarily or permanently.

You might want to take a more reasonable approach and figure out why someone feels the way they feel first.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

i am really sad that hate speech is allowed in the US. i think it is shameful and dangerous. I have no comment on you telling that other guy to be very fucking careful

> i am really sad that hate speech is allowed in the US. i think it is shameful and dangerous.

Fortunately our founders realized how necessary speech is, especially speech we don't like. I'm waiting to see Noam Chomsky get canceled for saying, “Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”

> I have no comment on you telling that other guy to be very fucking careful

He should be thankful, because I'm trying to save him from getting seriously injured - perhaps even killed one day. People who have a lot of experience fighting, especially having either seen or participated in fights outside of a controlled environment, will tell you just how incredibly dangerous it is to fight someone for whom you have no idea of their capabilities. You might have just picked a fight with someone with advanced combat training who will hand you your ass... even worse, you might have come upon someone with enough training you to seriously harm you, but not enough training to know how to exercise restraint.

You are far better served to try to de-escalate a situation than to actively jump in like your John Wick... because you're not. John Wicks of the world are only fighting when they have no other option.

Everything that was "hacked" is just publicly-available information on Parler that was archived: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

I've always been amazed at how hackers can exfiltrate so much data with no one even batting an eye. Doing the math, the pure data cost to Parler was $7,700

(($0.15/GB10) + ($0.11/GB 40) + ($0.09/GB20)) 1000 => $7,700

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-transfer-prices-re...

Even the Chase Bank hack had an astronomical amount of data that didn't appear to set off any alarms.

Of course, being unaware of how much you’re being charged is par for the course with AWS!

Best they can do is eventual consistency for billing, apparently.

To be fair, there’s a story on here every week about how cloud provider alarms are happy to ping you 24h after the spend.

According to reports, their monthly AWS spend (prior to today, obviously) was ~300k (or 3.6M/year).

7.7k is not really a noticeable increase, and any alarms that did trigger would likely have been attributed to increased user growth and platform load.

That is if someone was even seeing a billing alarm alerting with every other issue that was going on.

I've seen more than one company that had a cloud spend policy that boiled down to: "if you spend a lot, the finance guy is gonna send you a snarky email a week later"

Totally not surprised they didn't catch a 7.7k spike in real time

At a certain scale it can be difficult to distinguish between data exfiltration and normal spikes in legitimate traffic.

This so much. Are they not using dashboards? This amount of traffic should have triggered multiple alarms. Makes me think their devs just stopped caring.

maybe the devs are doing free speech activites and not watching the dashboard. I know I am being distracted from work by the activity here

While I understand that Twilio is probably not at fault for the actual leak, I'm curious if they gave Parler some time to migrate/shift before cutting them off from their services.

It's easy not to care since Parler is the "bad guy" here, but I do think that Internet infrastructure companies need to give a reasonable heads-up before pulling the rug under business customers.

Twilio is far from the top of Parler’s infrastructure problems, to be fair.

The issue is that a “reasonable” heads up here is literally years long for some of these products, especially AWS. It’s hard for these companies to show bad clients the door in a way that isn’t disruptive.

They ignored AWS’s warnings for weeks. It seems unlikely that a grace period would do anything.

This whole ordeal really sours Twilio in my mind.

Whereas AWS can plausibly claim that they don't want to host illegal content, what can Twilio say for themselves here? From Twilios perspective, providing Twilio's core product to Parler isn't any different than serving them to other platforms. They have no responsibility or liability. The lack of moderation on Parler is irrelevant when Twilio isn't involved with moving that data.

For a Saas platform to abruptly cut-up a contract, immediately breaking the authentication mechanism for the site on the other end of the contract, which directly results in a serious data breach for thousands of users (the majority of which have done nothing wrong), because your employees and leadership don't like their politics, doesn't sound like something that a publicly traded company should engage in.

edit: especially once it became obvious that AWS was going to bring the site down just a few hours later. They had a clear route to make their ideological stand and cause no damage by merely waiting 12 hours more.

If we had a responsible administration we'd probably be seeing takedown requests from DHS over national security grounds. This isn't just a speech issue, it's safety. There's a void of government guidance on how to deal with this in a measured way, so deplatforming is the easiest and safest option. They can't force Parler to moderate their content and they can't let themselves be party to fomenting insurrection.

You don't actually have to fail open. That was a decision on parlers' end, they could have decided to fail closed just the same. A service outage on Twilio would have had the same effect.

If there's a drunk guy trying to start fights in your restaurant, you boot him out the door immediately for being a safety hazard and overall reflecting poorly on your business. I don't think any reasonable patrons will see that and think "Wow, they just kicked that guy out because they didn't like what he was saying, it could happen to me too, better get out of here".

It's a similar (digital) situation here. Parler is (was?) actively refusing to moderate their platform to prevent a literal insurrection.

> especially once it became obvious that AWS was going to bring the site down just a few hours later. They had a clear route to make their ideological stand and cause no damage by merely waiting 12 hours more.

AWS cutting them off probably made it even more urgent. Like the pr department likely wouldn't be happy with the company supporting parlor til the very end...

If you suspect that your product is being used in the commission of crimes, wouldn't it be your responsibility to cut off service immediately?

Wiki says Parler is a team of 30 people,

So realistically, does that mean like 10 devs running a social network with 5-10 million users?

I imagine its pretty ceazy there right now after getting booted off AWS, google just banned u off play store, so cant use them, i assume they cant use microsoft because theyll ban them there as well, it would be cool to see if they are able to get things up and running again. (Ive never used Parler but i assume its just like a simple Facebook type webpage/apps)

I was thinking about it this morning. They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.

Not defending, just observing. It's interesting from a business/development perspective when it comes to rapid scale and team size.

Setting aside moral qualms for a moment, the engineering problems they're having right now are probably one-in-a-career problems, so it would be interesting work, without a doubt.

> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.

Parler established itself as a "free speech" social network platform. Part of its objective, based on that principle, was minimal or no moderation. Ironically, of course, they banned many people who came in with left-wing views. Which means they actually worked to create the extremist bubble that is now causing them problems with others.

> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.

Maybe, but I would wager that there are a lot of tech people who sympathize explicitly with the people that Parler is trying to attract, and an even larger contingent who would work there under the auspices of protecting what they believe is the right to free speech, etc.

Do you need to have many technical staff if you are renting your infrastructure? The scaling part probably is mostly handled by AWS so most of the the people there are working on product development, which shouldn’t require that many people since it’s just another social media software.

I would guess that they spend quite a bit of resources on content moderation tools development as this is the bespoke part of their business.

What I don't understand is: if you're going to host something like Parler, knowing that it is extremely controversial, why wouldn't you host it yourselves? The money they would have saved over using AWS (at the scale quoted in the previous comments) could have paid for the servers and the people to manage them. I suppose the deplatformers would have just gone after whatever data center they used, though, or if they'd have setup shop in their garage, then the ISP they used. It's turtles all the way down. My point is that I can't wrap my head around the fact that everyone is just assumed to use a cloud provider now, and the act of racking your own servers and managing your own proxies and firewalls seems to be a dead art.

They were a startup at heart, and what dev with access to millions of dollars will be interested in running some enterprise VM solution over the shiny toys you get by using AWS or GCP?

Probably same reason everyone else uses cloud services. They're just way easier, faster and cheaper if you don't have the engineering capacity in-house. I'm sure they're pivoting to self-hosting right now, but it could easily be 2 months of frantic work to get back online with a system that can only handle a fraction of the traffic. And I'm sure they get hit with DDoS attacks 8 days a week.

> why wouldn't you host it yourselves

Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.

> Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell.

I helped build one out, which was later acquired, but I wouldn't think it would take more than a couple of cages of equipment in a colo facility to host Parler, especially in these relatively early days. Maybe I'm completely out of touch.

I suppose it depends on what their backend actually looks like. Someone quoted in the data leak thread that they spent ~300k/mo on AWS which suggests they're definitely past a few cages of equipment. Who knows though, AWS charges insane rates for the privilege of not needing to think about hardware and making trivial difficult problems like establishing geographic presence or redundancy across datacenters. Parler is probably going to eventually need to self host anyways though, and then we'll see what a popular website will look like when it goes back to doing things the old fashioned way.

> knowing that it is extremely controversial

Aside from it being sad that supporting free speech is controversial, if we assume good faith in the founders' statements then the controversy is simply the way the media has highlighted a section of the user base. Have you been on there? I haven't but I've been around long enough not to rely on the media for accurate representations of groups on the internet (or much else, to be honest.)

yeah look at the recent dumps and insight into moderation and it's quite clear supporting "free speech" was smoke and mirrors. combined w/ the security lapses it's pretty jarring.

I don't look at dumps of other's personal data, and I haven't heard about the moderation - please, without revealing anyone's private data - would you enlighten me?

yea it sounds like a reasonable IT person at Parler would suggest preparing for getting booted off these big tools (aws, twilio, etc.) considering Parler sounds like exactly the type of product that would get kicked off these services.

One of the founders of pirate bay had a tweetstorm recently where he was like, i get that aws kicked u guys off, but like, u guys cant get a homepage up and running? I agree with this guy.

parlor was founded with politics in mind, maybe they are ok with shutting down their community because in a way that serves their political goals, sounds like parlor and aws are already suing eachother, i dont doubt uber-conservative users will find an alternative platform to use in the coming weeks.

I totally agree with you. I run the data science department at a corporation and we do most things on our laptops (I have a mobile workstation) or on our in-house server. Most data science teams seem to be moving to cloud. We've saved a lot of money and awkward conversations with accounting about why we're using so much computing power for so many hours a day. I don't bat an eye at running something overnight that has a high chance of failing.

Back to the topic at hand, Parler dedicated itself to being a place where people could say alt-right things. How did they not price in the risk of getting booted by AWS? Even estimating a 5% chance should have convinced them to self-host.

"researchers".

Imagine what they'd be called if this was Reddit, Twitter or a non-conservative site they'd hacked.

terrorists of course

The hack is equivalent to if someone downloaded all of the content of Reddit, or a database of all tweets, if this post is to be believed: https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kv0jo6/psa_the.... Would anyone even bat an eye if that happened?

From the original article

> This may include things from deleted/private posts.

I think people would be alarmed if private DMs were leaked from Twitter, yes.

The data also includes the geolocations of posters.[1]

Another comment also suggested that the photos of the driver's licenses that were used to verify users were also being downloaded, though I'm not certain if this is true.

1. https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...

Yeah, but this apparently was all downloaded through Parler's publically accessible API, so if anyone should be to blame here, it is Parler.

You can literally download Reddit and Twitter archives anytime you want.

No, you can't. There are private tweets, profiles, DMs and deleted messages/posts/tweets and for sure the profile data. This isn't a scrape of the site using a regular account, this is cracking admin accounts, creating their own admin accounts and using it to scrape private accounts, DMs, user information, and deleted content.

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/parler-grab

The details in the post are generally false - nowhere in this grabber (which is what was used to download the 70TB (or 56tb based on the tracker[0]) are admin credentials used to bypass access controls. There were no ACLs on the video and picture files, so anyone could wget them without issue.

0: https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/

Someone went to prison for wget'ing ATT data. And people right here argued that when you create a script to do so, you're no longer using their intended functionality in good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876481

I was talking about weev, not Aaron.

To be fair, weev (in this case) didn't really do anything legally wrong IMO other than maybe should have stopped once they had PoC as you would with a bug bounty. However, those standards for responsible bug finding/disclosure weren't fully developed yet and I consider one of the problematic overreaches of the CFAA. Even ended in weev being radicalized in jail, so no one won, AT&T was still embarrassed by it. If someone leaves a unlocked filing cabinet on the edge of their property near the public road full of PII and people cross onto the property and look in the filing cabinet and take pictures of the files and use it as evidence of the property owner's irresponsibility, "should have known better" isn't a compelling argument to me to arrest them for trespassing, breaking and entering, and theft. This was a case where they didn't even bother to put a fence around it, they just assumed no one would notice it.

Weev, at best, committed the equivalent of a misdemeanor in my mind, and that's probably only because he kept downloading everything he could even after they had enough to call attention to the issue.

I think a similar case happened with a teenager accessing public records in a hidden directory on a government server, they tried to throw the book at him too for calling attention to it, when legally citizens could access the data anyway, and they were the ones that made it available to public. They tried to ruin the kids life over it, but thankfully cooler heads and a public outcry about it prevailed.

I crawled reddit in several topics.

It's supported through their api.

Imagine if they published a portion of the contents of a laptop they legally owned.

Could these "Researchers" be prosecuted under CFAA? Purposely accessing information known to be private?

EDIT: accidently wrote DMCA

Yes, of course. This is an illegal hack.

Edit: I should add, it would be under the CFAA.

Edit #2: I could be wrong, it looks like they used Parler's APIs, and didn't bypass any auth. I really shouldn't have even called this a hack, it's more just archiving. But weev went to jail for the same thing, so I'd say there's a chance of prosecution, would come down to a court case. If I was the person who did this, I would never step foot in America, just to be safe.

Is it? The article indicates at least some of this comes from merely incrementing an integer in the video URLs.

> I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total...

I believe from a legal standpoint, all that matters is whether the user intended it to be private or not.

It is a felony to open a mail envelope addressed to someone else. It doesn't matter that a butterknife can cut open the envelope, the intent is clear.

This is more a postcard than a letter.

The public posts are probably allowed to be accessed (like a postcard).

The issue comes with the posts that were deleted: they arguably have an expectation of privacy.

EDIT: And direct messages, if they work like Twitter, DEFINITELY have an expectation of privacy. If Parler has a DM-like system, they are probably illegal to access.

At least one person has already been prosecuted for "hacking" for incrementing integers in a URL.

People have been sent to prison before for nothing more than fetching publicly available web pages by incrementing numbers in a URL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev

We tend to think that's bad and an incorrect definition of cracking that should be overturned around here, right?

> the conviction was vacated by a higher court

> While the judges did not address the substantive question on the legality of the site access, they were skeptical of the original conviction, noting that no circumvention of passwords had occurred and that only publicly accessible information was obtained.

I don't know how it works "over there", but where I'm from "URL-hacking" is not considered hacking, but data publicly available.

...and you are 100% sure that if this got before a court, the decision would go your way?

No, I am not a lawyer.

I did some reasearch though, and indeed there seems to be an untried case where, if it is obvious that the owner of the data wants to keep it secret, it isn't okay. It is in danish so you'll likely need som google translate or somesuch, search for URL hacking: https://projekter.aau.dk/projekter/files/305754822/Speciale_...

But as a rule, it is on par with an email sent to a wrong recipient. https://www.version2.dk/artikel/lovraad-slaar-fast-url-hacki...

I’m assuming, but the USA then. What country is that?

Denmark.

It is considered on par with an email sent to a wrong recipient. There might be an exception though, but it is untried in the courts, AFAIK.

...and publishing the personal data they got their hands on this way ("In revealing the flaw to the media, the group also exposed personal data from over 100,000 people")

It was a bit more than that. The attack was against AT&T, there was zero public interest in the information from a whistleblower perspective, the victims were customers of AT&T, a telecommunications provider.

Dumping the contents of a far-right website that helped push for Insurrection against the US Government seems pretty tame by comparison.

Also, Weev is open and proudly a Nazi, so the optics of bringing him up while defending the rights of a Fascist website isn't great.

>The attack was against AT&T, there was zero public interest in the information from a whistleblower perspective, the victims were customers of AT&T, a telecommunications provider.

You think there's "zero public interest" in knowing that a large US corporation, with private information about a significant fraction of the American public, has neglected their obligations to protect that private information? And that they've ignored all pleas to treat the vulnerability with the seriousness it deserves?

>Also, Weev is open and proudly a Nazi, so the optics of bringing him up while defending the rights of a Fascist website isn't great.

How are his political leanings relevant to the question of whether accessing this data would constitute a crime?

Weev when to jail for the exact same thing under the CFAA.

Weev's conviction was vacated.

On a technicality because of where he was charged, not because of the law. I don't think he should have ever been convicted under the CFAA, but he was.

From Wiki on his case:

It's a pity it didn't make it to full review on appeal to get a solid ruling on this.

Well if I were to do the same to any social network, I would have to request their permission first on the basis of security research according to their Terms of Service.

In this case it is still an unauthorised hack.

DMCA is only for intellectual property, not private information in general.

There are other laws this would likely fall under. Laws against hacking are generally "access in excess of authorization," where "authorization" is legal permission, not system permission.

I think I meant to write CFAA, thanks for pointing that out. Comment updated.

I think the extracting of the data will definitely go to court as a violation of the CFAA. The publishing of the data might also fall under the DMCA but it sounds less plausible to me. I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt.

Practically no. Judges, tech community lobbyists, and basically the entire state is on their side.

That's not really how it works, jury nullification notwithstanding.

Trigger warning, but this reminds me of the Steubenville High school rape case (you can google it).

A hacker accessed and leaked video of the situation in question (IIRC after officials refused to take action, and gone as far as too allegedly cover up the incident in order to protect the athletes and school's program).

At least one of the individuals responsible for leaking the video was charged under CFAA. IIRC this individual received a harsher sentence than those involved in the underlying crime.

You'd like to think that a judge and entire state would be understanding, but that's not always the case and not something to depend on.

Possibly. Automatically creating fake user accounts[1] likely falls into that category.

I'm not in favor of vigilante justice. I hope some of these people do sued under the CFAA. If all they wanted to do was archive public posts, there are ways to do that that don't involve programmatically creating fake accounts.

[1] https://archive.is/Dupjk

Doubtful, all the links were publicly accessible. I believe the researcher just crawled the "video.parler.com" domain after finding out they used sequential IDs.

Allegedly Parler didn't scrub exif data from any media, including all of their "verification" materials including Drivers Licenses and Passports.

> Parler, a social network used to plan the storming of the

> U.S. Capitol last week [..]

I thought "huh, never heard that before" - checked the source [1] and it's essentially some people working at DRFLab speculating that it _may_ have been the case. So not off to a great start.

The links appear down to me, but if I remember correctly these were a series of links to Parler - which the website is now down due to AWS. So the "leaks" can no longer be downloaded. I also believe that the links were essentially all just public material from what I could find...

[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/fastthinking/...

All the claims about the big tech censoring Parler got it wrong. It's not about censure. It's about legality, and Parler fucked themselves.

Apple told Parler to moderate their extremist content, and Parler refused. At that point, if Apple left Parler on the App Store, Apple would be complicit. Same story played out for all the services.

And guess what, treason by definition is infectious. Giving aid to an enemy of the United States. So Apple at that point would be opening themselves to a huge legal liability if they kept the app available. Nothing has been proven in court but big tech is naturally risk adverse.

If Parler has agreed to moderate extreme content, even if they had done so dragging their feet, they would still be alive.

Refusal to impose extralegal speech restrictions is treason? No, it doesn't work like that. See the Brandenburg case. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Illegal. Some of the content on Parler was illegal. Not extralegal. Illegal. And they refused to moderate it when asked.

Some if it has the risk of ending up judged treasonous as well, and that's all that matters to a risk averse company.

The claim I see over and over is that broad swaths of speech on Parler were illegal. It's not true. Repeating it doesn't make it so. "Insurrection" --- a call to overthrow the government --- is 100% legal speech in the US under the Brandenburg precedent. You don't get to call a company's refusal to go beyond the law in enforcing speech a form of treason.

I never said there had to be swaths of illegal content.

In other words you are asserting there was absolutely no illegal content on parler that would require them to moderate their content when asked. If that's the stand you want to take, cool, have a great day, I am not responding to you further. Corporate legal risk assessment is what killed Parler.

I decided to look it up

>The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"

I would say it's pretty clear that the speech we're talking about incited or produced imminent lawlessness. If you were following the various platforms that these groups were organising on it was very clear that they were inciting lawless action on the 6th- which of course was demonstrated on the 6th. It's also important to understand this didn't stop on the 6th, those same people are now talking about the 20th with similar suggestions.

Brandenburg seems to protect basically idle talk - but that's very clearly not what's happening here.

This person committed a crime to leak this data. I don't know how any of you can be this blatantly two-faced or so unprincipled.

You're cheering on a criminal committing a crime. You're cheering on the suppression of an entire political party, while calling them extremists, fascists, terrorists, and every other -ist that you feel vaguely fits the bill.

Yes, a few of them marched on the capitol. Yes, that was awful. No, you're not going to stop the underlying feeling by simply wishing it away, or taking more and more byzantine measures to suppress their ability to associate with one another.

It is certainly arguable that if this data contained evidence of serious crimes--such as plotting treason and murder of government officials--then under normal circumstances, it should be turned over to the appropriate agencies, such as the FBI, and not released publicly, so as to not doxx people who may not necessarily have committed any crime beyond the poor judgement of hanging with fascists.

Whether we can beleive that the FBI, etc, will deal with this appropriately is another matter.

That’s a fine argument, and if someone had seen such a thing, it might even change my mind. But this was done preemptively: “that probably exists, so this is probably okay.”

Some of it had been seen. The folks plotting criminal stuff weren't especially good at keeping it hidden.

Not an entire political party. "All terrorists all Republicans" (which is most probably a true statement for the terrorists who attacked the Capitol) and "All Republicans are terrorists" are not equivalent statements.

Republicans are way more than that alt-right fringe. They have a respectable history and many good political stances.

> With this type of access, newly minted users were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery. That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.

Can anyone make sense of this? In all the "forgot password" functions I've seen, you click "forgot password" and they email you a link to reset the password. How does "Twilio won't send our emails any more" lead to the "forgot password" function allowing account takeovers? I'd have expected it to just make "forgot password" no longer work because nobody can get a reset link any more. I can't figure out how you could configure things for this to lead to a security flaw this bad - other than "write all emails that fail to send somewhere public" which I can't imagine anyone doing. I can't imagine Twilio writing rejected emails from a closed down account somewhere public either. How does Twilio shutting down the account mean password reset links leak?

I don't get it as well. Maybe the reset password page had a username and an e-mail and Parler stopped checking that those belonged together?

I'm making a wild-ass-guess here, but it sounds like when you clicked "forgot password" it would text you a code to punch in to verify your identity. It sounds like that part failed open. So once twillio went away, any code would succeed.

>the lack of moderation on Parler is not the issue. they actually have very robust moderation tools and all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators

https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506

>This is not an ad network. This is a system where their most "influential" users can get paid to post organic-looking sponsored content. Their CEO talks about it…

https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136

Sounds like Twillo was actively helping hackers "That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease."

Maybe Parler should have done their due diligence and planned for if their email verification service stopped working.

The logic doesn't even make sense. Twilio goes down for them and then they just allow anyone access to user accounts.

Or maybe self-host.

As I'm reading it, Twilio simply shut down the account, Parler is the one who reacted to that by assuming everything is authenticated if the API doesn't work.

Seems implausible. Why would anyone design a system that way. I suspect it must be a more complicated combination of circumstances as it often is.

"The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand." - Deep Throat, during Watergate

I could only find "All the President's Men" (1976) as the source for that quote. While googling that, it seems like he never said "Follow the money" either :)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/All_the_President%27s_Men_(fil...

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._Mark_Felt

Because you want your users to be able to access the service if Twilio is having downtime rather than your service being essentially down for them. Twilio killing their account was probably not an assumed use case. The biggest expected impact was new user SMS authentication which you could run after the downtime is over. Better some spam users than losing those potential users was their thought I'm guessing. I suspect password reset also failing open wasn't thought of as deeply because it's a rarer path but it got bundled together with the SMS auth code path.

edit: I'm sure we've all had really stupid requirements pushed on us by the business side for the sake of user experience or increasing metrics. Or written bad code at 3am during crunch time.

This assumes it was by design, likely someone unfamiliar with the security implications thought they were improving the customer experience by not failing hard.

Or just oversight, could actually be embarrassingly easy to mess up:

    if not twilio_authenticate(user, pass):
        return Err()

    return User(user)

and:

    def twilio_authenticate(user, pass):
        try:
            return twilio.verify(user)
        except:
            return False

Might independently look reasonable enough.

Many businesses today still grapple with the decision to fail-open or fail-closed for things they build in-house.

>Why would anyone design a system that way

Because they knew that, being a save haven for violent white supremacists, it was likely one or more of their service providers would terminate service and wanted to continue to operate despite any termination.

fail open heh

That's like saying Amazon was actively helping hackers when your app allows anyone to log in when it can't connect to a passwords table in a shut down DynamoDB instance.

Twilio shut down the account and Parler decided to pass all verification attempts instead.

DNC emails were leaked by russian "security researchers".

Just because Russians broke in doesn't mean it was them. I still believe it was an inside job.

Yes, it could've been internal security researchers.

DNC emails weren't planning terrorist attacks.

Discussion of how it was done here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kuqvs3/all_par...

Edit: this Reddit post appears to be inaccurate. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725268

The linked post celebrates this saying they can share this data with law enforcement, but is it legal for them to pursue cases based on the evidence found in stolen data?

Yes.

Why doesn't chain of custody apply to data?

It does, but in a murder trial, the weapon was generally out of police custody for at least some time, right?

There's an opportunity to introduce reasonable doubt when a third-party is in possession of the data in-between, but it's likely this sort of data isn't going to be the only evidence in any resulting prosecutions. It's far more likely to be probable cause for warrants.

It does, but it’s actually the fourth amendment that would be in place here, and numerous child pornography cases as well as the Panama papers have shown that US courts will allow illegally obtained data, as long as it was obtained by private citizens who were not working with law enforcement and that the data can be established as reasonably untampered.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-cit...

> But, in some ways, there’s really no such thing as an “illegal” search by a private citizen, at least in the sense that police searches can be illegal: Regardless of issues like lack of probable cause, evidence found by private citizens acting on their own is usually admissible in court. That’s true even if the private citizen committed a crime like trespass or theft to accomplish the search.

Thank you very much for the detailed link

I don't know but they have "legal" work-arounds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

This copypasta is incorrect. See more here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725268

Ah, thanks for the info. I’ll edit my post.

I tried to access some of this - went to:

https://donk.sh/06d639b2-0252-4b1e-883b-f275eff7e792

Picked a URL from one of the files - eg.:

https://parler.com/post/c86aa37121374606aa63439ff15362aa

And put that into archive.is - eg.:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210110213100/https://parler.co...

All just seems to be Parler "tweets"; not particular interesting.

Let me be clear; nothing there that you could not find by just browsing Parler.

Maybe there is a deleted post somewhere and that could be interesting but since it is not marked and there a millions of URLs it is kind of useless.

Story is that Parler didn't delete the media associated with posts once they were deleted, so while you lost access to the post's text, the video files using incremental names (eg. 1.mp4, 2.mp4 etc) meant you could download videos from posts that might be deleted.

I think the "story" here might be a bit of hyperbole as what is going on here is just an archiving of the public contents of Parler similar to what happens all the time with Twitter.

Call the spade a spade.

There is an inappropriate use of the word "researcher" in the title. More appropriately this should read "...scraped via IDOR vulnerability."

If this is true, the adversaries of the US now probably have a considerable database of people who are vulnerable to manipulation and who can be used for active measures on US soil.

Not that I don't think they didn't have a pretty good database of this already.

But this still is the aspect of this that I find more worrisome. Russia, China and whomever else might be interested could weaponize this to great effect.

> Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.

I don't give a damn about Parler or USA politics.

The troubling thing here is how the security underpinnings of an entire platform like Parler can be screwed over by third-party SaaS provider.

The fact that the platform contained some "bad actors" is only a distraction. This is the real issue, or one of them.

> The troubling thing here is how the security underpinnings of an entire platform like Parler can be screwed over by third-party SaaS provider.

News flash: Twilio doesn't control who gets in, just instead of returning ack/nack, they simply were unavailable.

The onus of what to do in this case is entirely on Parler who foolishly decided to default to fail-open (presumably because Twilio being down might impact their bottom line or adoption).

If that's a "real issue" then blame the ones who implemented this service for Parler.

So basically, "I'm unable to verify that you are the owner of this e-mail address now due to the third-party verification platform being unavailable. So, just, here you go, proceed to resetting the password, whoever you are ..."\

Could just that be an integration bug? Things failed open because someone didn't code, or else test that case?

This wasn't leaked, it was archived from public sources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25727025

See original author clarifying this wasnt a leak or a hack. https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

Can we kill the whole "security researcher" term right now? Hacker is so much easier to type.

When Edward Snowden leaked information, he went through a journalist gatekeeper to do so as responsibly as possible.

Even the Hunter Biden story went through the NY Post.

This doesn't feel like a responsible, good-faith effort to save the republic. It feels like an attack on one's political enemies.

Using the euphemnism "security researcher" in this case doesn't help. Perhaps underhanded tactics are needed to prevent evidence destruction, but call them what they are. Don't pretend they are curious academics or a corporation hardening their systems.

It's interesting to me that the demand for Parler was almost exclusively the result of policies enacted by other social media platforms. Perhaps there was merit to the notion that letting groups operate in a contained area of larger platforms would have been favorable to outright bans. This would allow the larger platforms to monitor engagement, control spread, and quietly respond as they desired, no one the wiser. Instead they made very public proclamations of content restrictions and bans, which escalated some casual participants to more engaged participants. These participants then gathered on a new platform that promised the ability to say anything, so they started saying anything. But then some people started to believe anything. And then the beliefs turned into action, and then it became a real problem. But the outcome is in no way surprising. What is surprising is that the response now is the same response that started it all, more public bans and content restrictions. It's trivial to start a social media app (especially when security is not the priority), so in a few months another app will pop up, and it too will get out of hand, but what then? It seems like policymakers and thought leaders aren't thinking long term and are doing nothing to look at underlying issues.

Sounds like you're arguing for more of an approach of placating them, giving them a platform and trying to listen to them as misunderstood victims.

Seems to me like that's exactly what the rest of the country has been doing this whole time. For years everyone went along with the fringe right and placated them. The mainstream media covered Trump closely. Talked to his supporters to try to understand them. The more mainstream Republicans have backed up all the things Trump has done and said until now. Facebook got tons of flack the last 4 years for not silencing them sooner. Now it has escalated to dangerous levels of inciting violence that actually came pass, which has led to a stronger response. But you're arguing for continuing to go along with them? Why should we expect that continuing down the path we've been on for years would reverse the trend of them getting more and more extreme?

“Security researchers”?!

So long as we're talking about white supremacists and hacking, I remember when a "white supremacist" hacker weev was convicted and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for reading a few thousand sequential ids from an AT&T webpage. He reported the vulnerability to AT&T and showed a limited example to a journalist.

This seems far worse - so of course we can expect criminal prosecution of these "researchers"?

Why'd you put "white supremacist" in quotes? He's a proud neo nazi.

Because I don't know much else about him apart from that story and I don't trust the media when they call people white supremacists. I intend the quotes to indicate that people call him a white supremacist, not that I don't.

Where is the responsible security disclosure?

If these guys are security researchers, then Julian Assange is the best security researcher of the world.

This all looks like normal politics to me.

Would not want to be a part of the Parler team before this, and certainly not after this week. I can only imagine they are dealing with an insane amount of fires, rapid growth/demand and it seems that they have a far from robust product. Compound all that with the political component and intense attention - it would be an unbearable grind.

I'm really starting to feel like my grandparents, who smiled back at me in such a way I could tell they had no idea what I was talking about back when I was a kid.

This hack made the "front page" of news sites here in Norway, and I've never heard of the thing.

I guess it's only fitting that I just got my own lawn...

It feels like this sort of fail-open should never have passed a security audit.

... but that's probably one of the lessons here: unless we demand accountability, we generally have no idea of what practices services we rely upon are using. How many systems we use daily do any kind of formal audits?

I tried to sign up for Parler out of curiosity when I heard it was being removed from app stores, but as soon as it required a phone number for account registration I deleted the app.

I'm surprised it also didn't require a social security number and credit card as well. /s

some parts of the site apparently require a SSN and drivers lisence

On the one hand, dick move. If I leaked that person's twitter messages it'd be a shitstorm.

On the other hand, lock down your shit hard. Can't blame them for scraping it all down if it's just hanging out in the open like that

It's disgusting that total strangers can read our public social media postings.

Hmmm... comes close to lynching a ton of people, if you ask me. Never mind who´s right or wrong, the point is that we all agree upon trusting a judicial system to do this kind of thing, don´t we?

These folks had their private messages exposed. In no way is that "close to lynching".

Depending on what the user posted, they might be embarrassed, lose their jobs, or end up in court.

We can have a reasonable discussion about the ethics of hacking a site like parler, but not if the starting point is "this is the equivalent of violent mobs literally murdering innocent people".

People on twitter are posting addresses and lat&long from parler users. People have also been posting on twitter statements advocating for the murder of people involved in the events in DC this week.

Of course, 99% of that is meaningless bluster but 99% of the crap on Parler was also meaningless bluster.

So I think it remains an open question as to what the consequences of this hack will be. I don't think it's impossible that someone may be literally murdered.

But if it happens I'm sure everyone in the causal chain will be as quick to claim no responsibility as the Parler CEO was...

If parler is being used for either wide-spread or violent-motivated sedition, that might sway the court of public opinion somewhat.

I interpreted the poster saying "hacking parler is close to lynching", which is what I was responding to.

Many had images of their driver's licenses revealed also. Calling this close to lynching is definitely hyperbole, but it's also true that their identity and addresses were revealed and their lives are in eminent danger.

You have a reasonable take. (I'm still not sure my own position on this stuff.) I'm not pushing back on the idea that we can discuss the ethics here, only the extremely hyperbolic take of the OP.

One side has the guns, the other the hackers. Place your bets.

Shooting the computer does not erase uploaded evidence of criminal activity.

Pretty sure the side with the hackers also has guns though?

Well, if nothing else, glad to see there is a paper trail to track down the terrorists who plotted and took part in last week’s insurrection.

When I read that the FBI was asking for help in identifying people at the capital on January 6th I didn’t think someone would actually help.

If you think that's funny, someone made a post asking for people's names, locations and list of crimes so that they could be pardoned and people obliged.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/10/social-medi...

The low hanging fruit of social engineering.

I thought Twitter had a “no hacked material” policy.

This title is misleading. Leaking private data of users after accessing it illegally is not “security research”, its criminal hacking.

The difference between a security research and a hacker is the same as between a protester and a terrorist, apparently.

A second-hand recap of how it was done -

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kuqvs3/all_par...

Photo caption says :

"Trump storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021"

While as we know very well, chicken shit (and/or delusional?) as he is, Trump himself did no such thing.

I don't know this news site, but I hope its a typo

Now the NLP researchers can study how influence through language works in the far right groups. This will give a good enough strategy for other social media and knowledge to us as a society to not fall prey to such traps in the future.

There's been a bit of talk that Parler was only ever a way for alt-right Republican operatives such as the Mercers to have their own social media and data gathering platform after the Cambridge Analytica fallout.

This is the data they wanted...

I disagree with everything Parler, but this is a pretty steep ethical violation.

This may have been covered in the previous 900 comments, but...

Did security researchers leak the messages, videos and posts? Or did they access them (i.e. Parler leaked them to the researchers)? Seems the headline is misleading.

i like how there's two narratives here.

like i get it, personal information shouldn't be leaked and i feel bad for those users who weren't a part of the extremism and getting potentially doxxed for it.

at the same time anytime this happens to a larger corporation don't we absolutely SHIT on them for the substandard security procedures? and whatever happened w/ parler is looking more and more amateur hour here, nothing sophisticated to get the data.

just because it's some "underdog" suddenly it's okay?

Sorry for the double post but hoping someone could chime in -

How did they accumulate so much content so fast? 70TB seems insanely huge for a pretty new company, isn't it only like 5 months old?

Can we now see how many users there actually were, and how many were in the US? Because there's no shortage of troll farm companies that exist solely to get people riled up.

interesting opinion from Glenn Greenwald:

"Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?

Zero.

The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start."

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293

Good ol' Glenn Greenwald, always stepping up to defend fascists

What? Could you please explain your point of view?

Can anyone tell me what would have been the hosting and bandwidth costs of having 70tb on aws?

I'm left-winged with absolutely no love for Parler and believe a lot of people have blood on their hands for the violence incited last week.

The security researchers were wrong to make this information publicly available but the fact that Parler actually put their users at risk like this with such a disturbingly glaring security flaw is absolutely infuriating and outrageous. I'm speaking as a believer in civil rights and user protection. Call it growth hacking or try to overlook this as a sympathetic mistake if you wish but this was a disgustingly reckless decision for any competent technical team to make and it deserves profound censure.

Was it really a comprehensive data breach? Or they just got a list of URLs. Because some claimed it's fake news.

You say leaked, I say additional backup :)

Not a serious country

So, can we now all see the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop as well?

All of this is surely going to end well.

I mean let's call it what it is, a hack and dox.

That being said, doing to lords work. Expose this cancer so it can be removed.

First it gets removed from Google and Apple stores. Then it gets deplatformed from Amazon. Now a hack that was in the making for a while due to political motivations.

This is a political purge.

So cyber criminals stole millions of peoples private communications and leaked them online — people who did nothing and who are under no individual suspicion?

And HN is cheering?

Patriot Act 2.0 in 3... 2... 1....

What’s extra funny is I recognize the names cheering — and on other days, they’d talk about how the Patriot Act is wrong.

But these are bad hombres, you see?

I just can’t help but laugh that this service existed and to become a verified user (or whatever they called it) you had to upload a front and back scan of your driver’s license?? And then this happens and people who stormed the capitol are whining about being labeled terrorists and unable to fly home. 2021 has sucked but the fallout almost makes up for it in this case.

This sounds like an incredible fuckup by Twilio. If it's true that their authentication verification was the entrypoint, they could be liable for leaking an enormous amount of personal information.

It's hard to tell. It could be that Parler's systems were set up to just fail the wrong way if the Twilio auth system didn't respond (on error: allow).

Whatever the case, this is going to be 'fun' to watch.

Not necessarily. See my other comment on this thread, but they may have failed-open when the OTP authentication dependency was down- ie, hey, Twilio throws an exception sometimes so presume the user is approved so we don't impact the user experience due to Twilio being flakey.

How so? Twilio simply suspended service which they are allowed to do based on the ToS. It was Parler that reacted to it by allowing unrestricted authentication rather than simply failing authentication.

No, it'd be a fuckup by whoever code it to go "if Twilio is unavailable, just let them in".

It's highly unlikely Twilio's API responds with something like {"authenticated": true} when you haven't paid your bill or they suspend you.

This loooks serious. I might have to start looking into Twilio alternatives form my company.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

If you read what happened you'd know that this could never happen if they built their system with the minimum care required. Twillio is absolutely not the culprit.

I'm highly doubting Twilio is the culprit here. Sounds like Parler was just treating failures as valid authentication. Keep in mind that at the time the hackers gained access, Twilio had already suspended Parler's account, so there is little to no possibility of this being on Twilio's shoulders.

Hard to understand exactly what happened, but seems like a faulty implementation of Twillio's authy service.

How is this Twilio’s doing? Parler was not a customer when this happened. This was Parler being held together by duct tape and not having choices. This is what happens when a young and populated site dependent on services loses all of said services. That is to say: you are a fool to trust websites, especially Parler.

I think that depends on Twilio's knowledge and intent. If the specific purpose for suspending services was to allow unauthorized access, that's conspiracy.

It'd be as if a bank's security guard quit and walked off the job the day of a bank heist. He has the right to quit, but not a right to coordinate with the robber and leave his post for the purpose of assisting in illegal activity.

The latter is also conspiracy, and a stretch at that. What would Twilio gain? The most likely explanation was that everyone ditched Twilio as a customer and the remaining skin was quickly pecked off by vultures.

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