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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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