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Comment by DevKoala | Hacker News Reader

Glenn Greenwald never disappoints me. He is spot on once again. For years all of these conspiracy theories, calls for violence and allegations of fraud make it to the front page of Twitter/Facebook/YouTube for any user that shows interest in similar topics. However, the day that a competitor decides to openly embrace this content, Silicon Valley goes against it like a pack of predators.

I guess they want a monopoly in being the only platforms allowed to subvert democracies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48349671

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It was actually the day Silicon Valley realized Parler was a platform for recruiting, planning, and executing a violent insurrection to end democracy in the US that they all ran in the opposite direction.

Perhaps these companies are all secretly happy for the excuse, but there’s no question they did the right thing in this case.

The president and his supporters are unrepentant, proud of their successes, and will do more if they can.

Let's look at how great of a point Greenwald is making.

> they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections.

Not stripping EXIF data, getting social security number from users, using the trial version of their IAM system, poorly coded allowing everyone to exfiltrate the data and god knows how many other exploits. So much for privacy...

> As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family

Yeah, what happened to that? Looks like they suddenly stopped caring about that, and no one ever managed to corroborate the obviously fake news pushed by NYP. Let's not forget how Carlson went on a whole fake drama about "losing incriminating papers", but then when UPS found the papers, suddenly Carlson says he no longer wants to spill secrets about hunters private life... What?

This whole thing is BS. The Pirate Bay was deplatformed orders of magnitude harder than Parler ever did and they survived just fine. Parler was just created by a bunch of people who had no clue what they were doing, and they crumbled by their own inaptitude.

Thanks for this. Society needs to start setting a higher bar for public discourse all around.

Tired of these bullshit conspiracy theories running rampant on certain media platforms. There have been dozens of them since the election alone and not a single one has been validated. You would think people would be tired of being obviously fooled over and over, but it seems every time another fake story comes along, they take the bait.

Greenwald is unrecognizable from the Snowden era. It’s like a dementia victim morphing into a completely different person. Very sad to see him like this. The Hunter Biden article fiasco is embarrassing for him, and this makes it appear he is just doubling down in tabloid garbage right-leaning-for-attention nonsense.

The US has one of its worst, most cruel, presidential administrations in its history and the only subject he is obsessed with critiquing is the left and media and tech companies.

Here's one of his takes from a week before the coup. It aged hilariously poorly.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarian...

Wild to me that so many people think that the Hunter Biden fiasco is now settled.

As with almost everything with these lower quality right wing media content, there's a whole lot of brouhaha, and then suddenly it all goes silent and they're never called out for their lies. They just sweep it under the rug and move on. Meanwhile, whenever the NYT gets something wrong, they come out publicly with a redaction, and people use that as proof that NYT is "fake news". I've never seen right wing news ever write a redaction for the countless lies they've posted.

Just last week, all of right wing media was full of posts about those 3 people at the capitol being antifa. Their proof? A cropped image of Q Shaman at a BLM protest (coincidentally cropping his Q sign), and a Google Image Search finding a photo of the other two guys on phillyantifa.com, even though clicking on the page showed that it was an article about white supremacists.

Feel free to come back and post here once the hunter biden "fiasco" gets resolved, but the fact that Tucker Carlson suddenly decided that he no longer cared right after receiving his "highly incriminating secret papers" tells me everything I need to know about the drama.

Yeah, I think the laptop mostly smelled like bullshit, but still think there are legitimate concerns around Burisma and whether pay-for-access happened.

There is zero credible evidence about pay for access. Meanwhile the people spending their entire life digging through Burisma seem to not give a single shit about the hundreds of pay-for-access story surrounding Trump and his properties. Foreign countries literally booking dozens of his properties for months inhabited.

Trump's own children literally got jobs at the white house, ffs. The hypocrisy is deafening.

> Trump's own children literally got jobs at the white house, ffs. The hypocrisy is deafening.

One politician being corrupt does not reduce the likelihood of another politician being corrupt.

And one politician being corrupt doesn't mean that they are all corrupt. Get back to us when there is actual proof of corruption and not the same right wing rage machine making all kinds of baseless allegations.

Yeah honestly wondering if mental illness or drug abuse may be at play to explain such a dramatic change in journalistic integrity.

Greenwald is part of the reason I would not touch Substack.

Horrible font kerning is arguably even more eggregious reason to not touch Substack.

Agreed, I just checked and their web view is a readability nightmare, though thankfully it does not apply to mailing lists. (I read a couple of Substack publications via email, but am unwilling to pay for it or publish through it myself as infatuation of folks like Greenwald with it and Kik background lend it a dubious aura.)

>no one ever managed to corroborate the obviously fake news pushed by NYP.

At least two of the messages were DKIM-authenticated by an unrelated third party. Combine that with:

* The FBI, the DOJ, and the DNI all refuting the "Russian disinfo" theory

* Biden's campaign explicitly refusing to call the emails inauthentic

* Pics of Hunter in compromising positions

* The laptop being the subject of a grand jury subpoena

...and there's more evidence pointing towards the story's legitimacy than away from it. In fact, that leaves the only real thing pointing away as "it's a sketchy-ass tabloid", which is adhom at the end of the day.

This whole rant looks like a personal thing for Greenwald. Ever since leaving the Intercept because of the Biden story he became very narrow minded. He's definitely in the wrong about Parler. The platforms have a rightful expectation that you can moderate the content on your site and it was proven that they have the right tools for the job. It was also shown that a huge part of the moderators were indeed MAGAs. It also seems to have incentivized users to spread disinformation [1]

Additionally: wasn't there a post recently about the investors being unknown? I read speculations about a Mercer involvement but other than that little is known. How can Greenwald make naive assumptions like this only looking at the public figures? Aren't there connections to Russia that had to be investigated? (Can't find source right now, it's on HN though)

[1] https://twitter.com/donk_enby?lang=en

What he's saying about Parler is easily provable as false:

https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/i-have-guns-and-ammo-v...

I used to love Glenn, But I don't know what happened to him after Snowden. He's been an unapologetic hypocritical bootlicker ever since.

I'm not seeing the contradiction here. Are you suggesting that Greenwald denied that Parler was used for planning/coordination? Perhaps you missed this paragraph?

> It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.

Yesterday he was claiming that no one arrested was an active Parler user, he moves the goal posts https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/13490283841107312...

I hadnt even heard of it before it was banned. Dismissing one of the few genuine voices on the left because of a misperception is supercilious.

Edit: It looks like Greenwald wasnt even wrong about what he said, people are just accusing him of lying for some reason

https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457?s=2...

Edit: Has the left accomplished all of its goals? No? Then it needs to figure out what its doing wrong.

I’m not dismissing him because of one mistake, I dismiss him because the only lens he looks at anything through anymore is how the it’s all actually the left or the media’s fault.

Yeah Greenwald has transformed into a conspiracy-nut / troll since leaving the Intercept and starting his substack.

Looooong before then.

Would you like to make a substantive criticism or just use ad homonym?

It's ad hominem, and Greenwald has always been incompetent. Just look at his PRISM reporting, which he still hasn't issued a correction for and just never talks about anymore (not a single mention in his pardon rant on Substack) after apparently finally realizing how embarrassingly wrong his reporting was.

What was wrong about his reporting on PRISM?

It was entirely wrong. The slides he published very clearly showed that it was an integration project with the FBI. The companies sent the FBI data for specific accounts under court order, and that is the only data that PRISM ingested. Greenwald thought the NSA could access arbitrary accounts' data. He could easily have gotten this right (like the New York Times did the very next day and CNET and the rest of the tech media shortly after) if he had bothered to figure out what each piece of the diagrams meant or if he had consulted anybody who understood computers at all instead of just a high school dropout SharePoint admin — you know, journalism.

https://images.theconversation.com/files/26668/original/ngww...

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies...

https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...

IIRC that was Snowden’s claim too and he worked on it (I don’t have an exact text quote since this is from the Citizenfour doc), and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.

Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act. Without Greenwald and Snowden the New York Times wouldn’t even touch the topic.

> IIRC that was Snowden’s claim too and he worked on it

Snowden did not work on PRISM, nor did he ever claim to. He had failed a test necessary to even see data collected under Section 702, so he couldn't so much as see the data that PRISM ingested. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden-tri...

> and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.

No. It goes through the normal court order process where the company will push back if it isn't legit. Section 702 court orders can only request data for non-Americans outside the US, and the company that gets the order will have a good idea of whether this is true for a particular account.

> Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act.

The only illegal US program that they exposed was phone metadata collection. The pair of illiterates thought that PRISM was something supremely sinister (that anybody with the most rudimentary computing and reading skills can easily figure out it isn't), so they hyped that story a lot. People corrected Greenwald on Twitter on day one, but it took years for him to understand how much he botched that story, and his ego prevented him from issuing a correction. Instead, he just stopped talking about it and now only ever mentions phone metadata. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...

Where did he move the goal posts? From the article...

>Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube

The tweet you linked shows a post on parler dated November 16. That's not evidence the poster was an "active user of Parler". In fact, it suggests the opposite. All we know is he made one post in November.

The "viking guy" who has been talked about probably moreso than any other single rioter is and was active on Parler.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210106213432/https://parler.co...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-breaking/...

So this claim is trivially falsifiable with even the most minimal journalistic effort.

He's not listed as part of the 13 people charged by the DoJ. It's possible that he was arrested later. But Glenn didn't lie here.

So the parler exec probably looked at this list, checked to see if any one of these people used his platform, and found none did. Then he told Glenn. However, more people have since been charged.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/thirteen-charged-federal-cour...

The entire point was silly to begin with. Why start doing victory laps over the first 13 people? What's so special about them? Nothing.

I think they are some of the more notable characters. That's why they were the first to be identified and then arrested.

Or - Glenn's just trying to be a contrarian again, which has been his shtick for a while now.

This post from 2 weeks ago aged like a corpse.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarian...

Glenn is absolutely right here. If anything, the article needs an update because of all the authoritarian shit (new patriot act, sending rioters to gitmo, etc) proposed over the last week.

You accused Greenwald of moving the goal posts. You have not demonstrated that.

Edit: congratulations drally you win

"I" did not.

Focusing on the first 13 people arrested the day of the attack instead of the dozens arrested since doesn’t make any sense or help his argument.

He's not a "bootlicker". He lost his faith in the US and became (more of) a fan of Russia.

(Parler is run by a CEO who married a politically prominent Russian (not Russian-American) spouse with essentially zero ties to the USA.)

Ah yes, Greenwald is a big fan of Russia and their progressive gay-friendly agenda.

"Have you know shame Senator McCarthy"

Greenwald a fan of Russia is one of the funniest jokes I have heard lately.

With the state of American politics today, saying "I don't think we have enough evidence to conclusively tie ____ to Russia" is sufficient evidence for a significant chunk of the population to accuse the speaker of being "in the pocket of Russia". Unfortunately.

What? Glenn has done crucial work against Bolsonaro's corruption in Brazil, so much that he's been charged and persecuted with bogus allegations:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/prosecutor...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brazil-sergio-moro-corr...

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/glenn-greenwald-charged-...

His family has been threatened and he is constantly targeted by the far right in Brazil. How ignorant and naive you must be to call him a bootlicker?

But his main point is that free speech is curtailed unevenly, which isn't false.

You just feel betrayed that he went from criticism government to criticizing corporate, and to calling out the double standards in the culture that protect liberals, and punish conservatives, which as a "tolerant centrist" you should be against.

Instead you call him a gimp while it's your attitude that sounds like unapologetic hypocrisy feverishly licking the boots of whoever you're no longer allowed to criticize... As George Carlin (i think) said, that tells you who's in charge and what they fear. I'm sure they thank you for supporting their cause.

Glenn is off his rocker and has been for a while. This is not some arbitrary action.

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