I ran a crawler to collect posts and comments on Parler
anonymousdata.medium.com
anonymousdata.medium.com
Had social networks not, over the last 10 years, been consistently banning anyone and everyone they could for everything ranging from simply slightly disagreeable speech all the way to flat out illegal speech, you would not have needed a massive analysis of data from one-off sites. The crowd sourcing and eyes on the information of regular people could have predicted it.
By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
By isolating people who moderates consider extreme, on either side, creates divided communities of extremism. This should seem like an obvious outcome.
https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
Yet racial diversity at universities and in corporations is highly sought after and supported by all kinds of measures.
Perhaps political diversity should be added into the mix. It would be consistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klob%C3%A1sn%C3%ADk
[1] Here are the listings for "kolaches" from HEB, a very popular grocery chain throughout most of Texas: https://www.heb.com/search/?q=kolaches
"On January 6, armed Trumpist militias will be rallying in DC, at Trump's orders. It's highly likely that they'll try to storm the Capitol after it certifies Joe Biden's win. I don't think this has sunk in yet.[...] To be clear here, I don't think the 3%ers, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers or boogaloo types are going to seize the Capitol. But some of them are going try. And people will die."
https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1341016471795843080?s...
Don't spin this into some borderline gas-lightning argument about letting more of these people run rampart on platforms, this is a result of not taking far-right extremism seriously. If these people faced the full force of the law and state like ISIS-propagandists do you would not see them try to storm (and succeed) to occupy a federal building.
No, he's not.
> An armed militia is a very different beast from a unarmed but violent right-wing protestor.
The groups that attacked the Capitol were armed with a variety of weapons.
Am I a broken clock, or are you just out of touch with the fragmented landscape of political commentary on the internet?
Should we hope the clock is still broken? Because I for one, am going to be watching from a safe distance away (not in person) and fearing for the lives of many people and our democracy on that day.
Save this comment: 4chan will be the next victim and the rest of the internet will say “good”
There might be some large crowds in response to all of the recent deplatformings, but at least some conservatives are claiming that no such events are planned on at the capitols and that the media is inflating the story.
Your guess is as good as mine though. There are so many lunatics in America that anything might happen. Hopefully whatever attempts at violence are made will be unsuccessful.
But HN might be unique in that regard? Or maybe there's just a scale beyond which it doesn't work?
It has also made me aware of how well-researched many HN user's opinions are on both sides. My opinions have largely been formed in conversations with young people of the liberal city I live in. They will cheer at anything that attacks whoever they see as their opponents, regardless of the research quality or partisan tone behind them. I have received a far greater range of perspective from brilliant HN users on both sides, which has prompted me to take a step back and re-evaluate how I am writing about this incendiary topic.
You bring up a good point about people behaving differently in in-person conversations and even perhaps being more willing to change their minds. I think there's a lot of truth there, but I think it comes from thinking that our online personas aren't real and from being physically distanced from the effects of what we say online.
It never occurred to me that my sarcasm online would be a factor in a friend's suicide, but now I live with the consequences of not understanding the very real effects of the things I said.
There are to many of them for a [private] person to really look at all the programs but that out of many many hundreds of millions (in and outside the us) no one bothered to look at any of them rules out objectivity by the full 100%
It means people get all of their information from other people who also know nothing. Information limited to the top 2 groups. If team blue gets all of its information about team red from other team blue members you will have a similar total exclusion of reality.
End of the day you have to get off the ledge yourself either way based on the information you've gathered.
If we want you to know what anarchy, communism or Christianity are we should have you talk wiht the anarchist, the communist or the christian.
> By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
What kept 'regular people' from hopping on 8ch and stopping Christchurch by talking him down? Fun fact: The whole thing was well known in advance and even observed online by law enforcement.
Point is, the argument doesn't hold up. Bubble or not, things like these are accessible in every way for almost everyone. The problem is that it's not taken seriously. This has nothing to do with isolation. Simply no one cares, that's what it is. There is just too much of this on the internet at any time. Are you supposed to go after every hate comment? How would that work? It doesn't. It's just too much, even with regularly banning people.
What kept 'regular people' from hopping onto a widely derided and supposedly extremist platform, where threats of exposure of ones personal life simply for being there stopped them from noticing extremism?
Are you sure that is a good argument?
Firstly, almost no average FB or TW user knows of those forums, let alone the ones that do being willing to also 'go there' given all the stigma.
My point still is, if you force these people into places like that, where their plans are easily observable, and 99% of people wont go there then it will fester in silence.
Whereas the other potential is..sunlight. Let them say their statements in the sunlight, rather than ban them.
1. Family or friends will banter them down
2. Friends of friends will bring them to center rather than extreme (on EITHER side)
3. its one place rather than 35 distinct forums for LEO to follow.
Good.
Better they fester in silence in a place where they can be observed and reported to authorities when they cross the line. Without a popular, legitimate, high traffic platform that allows them to influence a mass audience the cancer doesn't metastasize.
I can't banter my own mother into giving up whatever conspiracy theory crosses her path. There are so many people with equally poor fact-checking and critical thinking skills that they form their own festering bubbles on popular platforms. The bigger the bubbles, the more extreme they get, and now the end result is a confederacy of deluded, violent extremists sacking the capitol. We're lucky it wasn't worse, but this might be a dress rehearsal for far more violence if we don't get a better grip.
Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.
At least 75,000,000 people think one way. Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?
I gather, as a late night estimate, 75,000,000 people talking to about another 55,000,000 people why they are right.
And you want to force them all into darkness, unable to engage in the political discussion.
Madness. Absolute Madness.
I've read quite a few, and they don't bear out your description at all.
> Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.
Not really, not really, and really not.
> At least 75,000,000 people think one way
74,222,593 people conclude, for a wide variety of different reasons, at a particular point in time, to vote for a particular candidate. But even those 74,222,593 people don't “think one way”; if that wasn't obvious from, oh, actually listening to them at the time or having a basic understanding of humans, it's pretty damn obvious right now, when in defeat the Republican Party which was, if nothing else, pretty unified in electoral support for Trump, (much less the broader group of Trump voters which necessarily included a substantial number of non-Republicans) has been turned against itself with great intensity by Trump’s post-election actions, starting with the election challenges and escalating through the Trumpist attack on the Capitol.
> Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?
No one is interested in denying the vast majority of the people who supported Trump in the last election the right to speak openly. You are railing against a strawman.
Nobody is denying these people the right to speak openly, and it's ridiculous to paint with this broad of a brush. The overwhelming majority people are perfectly decent, have normal lives, and don't go around making violent threats or spreading absurd, easily disproven conspiracy theories.
There is an infinitesimal minority who are toxic, deluded extremists. Giving them equal footing on huge platforms with global reach helps them spread their poisonous ideas to a still-minority, but vastly larger group. That subsequent small minority which they infect are able to wreak much greater havoc. Parler was a perfect example of this in action.
> Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.
To this point, I would direct your attention to the Rwandan genocide, a perfect example of what can happen when you give a mass media platform to people who advocate murderous extremism. The genocide was incited by extremist radio shows spouting conspiracy theories and hatred.
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20190317214903/https://www.bbc.c...
> Are you sure that is a good argument?
It was live streamed on FB. I think the argument holds up.
This is lie. Social networks were not banning for "simply slightly disagreeable speech".
By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.
You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.
It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.
The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.
The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.
I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.
I'm not claiming a "bad apples are always planted" conspiracy theory, but it does worry me how easy it is to do so and create a destructive narrative if you really wanted to.
Whereas if you're just trolling in a general platform, most likely outcome is that you'll get called out for it from both sides and that's about it.
BLM protestors didn't show up with a guillotine
This was setup in front of the mayor's house in Portland OR:
https://twitter.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1297421944799686658
—
I am starting to question if people do not realize this activity has been going on for many months in cities across the country.
Why the media kept this relatively quiet (now and previously) is beyond comprehension for most people aware at this point.
The media is divided and therefore, our people are also divided.
If two people can’t agree what/when/if past events occurred, how can anyone discuss, much less agree on the current events?
In other words, perhaps people should consider that any opinions formed re: politics were likely formed from/by the media they consumed.
If we know the media has lately been “one-sided” (yet coming from all sides), perhaps we should be a bit more vigilant to not make assumptions about “another side” if we are unwilling to look at that side - outside the lens of the “great filter”.
IIRC, the great filter is what Elon Musk calls it, at least that’s my understanding of the meaning.
The instant outrage of today - solely based on what the media is presenting - is at the very least - a possible attack vector for outside or even internal forces.
It is my opinion that folks need to better understand this before becoming immediately outraged.
It’s up to a person to determine what side they want to present to others politically, but having an understanding that most people won’t review “all sides” before discussion can help keep “toxicity” in-check upon the inevitable disagreement that will come after posting any political statement.
This is why it’s an attack vector, and why the attack works. It works based on the likelihood that most won’t even look, yet will make assertions as if they did.
The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.
This is not a very interesting post. Yeah you could predict that there was going to be a protest from Parler. There would have been people saying "hey, there is a rally on the 6th, lets go there and show our support".
[0] https://www.victoriabuzz.com/2019/11/climate-activists-plan-...
[1] Refering to "Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians ... through gross negligence or willing ignorance. This idea manifested itself in the gallows erected outside the US Capitol on January 6th.
‘OFF WITH HIS HEAD’ Black Lives Matter protesters put Trump effigy in a GUILLOTINE outside White House
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1384275/protesters-trump-effigy...
Both sides do it. Both sides fein outrage and disgust at the other side doing it.
The fact these sorts of things, including all the other violence and destruction going on at the time, were either ignored wholesale or played down by mainstream news sources, while also being actively encouraged in the next breath ought to be a source of shame for them. The country spent the last year being gas-lit.
Its no surprise at all why many people on the right distrust them.
Still, Trump supporters have become quite removed from reality, and "liberal" outlets at least recognized Trump's insane hubris.
It's sensationalistic because how one person, or several people, or even dozens or hundreds express themselves in a large crowd doesn't say anything about the other people "standing with them", or politics, or political leaders. This applies to the right and left.
Showing someone a guillotine or a gallows or making threats to use deadly violence as part of a political protest is just plain wrong.
The threat only becomes misguided if you're wrongly under the impression that democratic norms have been violated and thus you're threatening legitimately elected officials.
Think of it as a prisoner's dilemma. Perfectly rational or virtuous prisoners might cooperate out of their own volition. But even very selfish prisoners might be convinced to cooperate if they repeatedly get reminded of the grisly outcomes that happen to defectors. We might prefer the former (virtuous actors) but if we can't rely on everyone being like that then encouraging good behavior through threats is the next best option which is still far more preferable than the worst possible equilibrium.
No. We do not need this. The grisly outcome that they who would defect should not be death. Economic hardship after months long protests which shut down the economy are a much better tool. Or even mass emigration to a safer or more just state.
Gandhi was plenty effective enough. We do not need spirals of threats and violence and arms races.
These are real people with real lives and living children and parents and friends.
We need to say when things are wrong. It's vital. And right now what the right in America is doing is wrong. I'm not some absolutist left-winger. I once had a firearms license here in Canada. Though I'm a happy Liberal Party of Canada member, I've voted for Conservatives in the past and I'm open to doing so in the future.
I do not have intolerance of other viewpoints. I actively seek out a broad range of views. What I have intolerance for is violence and calls to violence and lies. If that's the charge against me I happily accept whatever verdict you or anyone else will levy against me. The truth matters. Peace matters. I am unwilling to let these half truths go by without comment or rebuke.
We do not need men in viking hats storming the capital or symbols of mob-rule-sanctioned execution to fix things.
Bezos has done some good. Especially on climate change. Just because we disagree on the distributive effects of capitalism doesn't mean we're not both part of the same human race and world.
having been in the IT field throughout this period,i remember the awful pains you had to go thru to get any reasonable amount of computing power ,including purchasing hardware with months-long leads and having to deal with import/export documents and shipment ,not to mention things that are completely irrelevant like power requirements and rack weight per sqm of datacenter space
this has changed completely and now anybody with a bright idea can spin up a cluster of tremendous capacity for literally a few dollars that would deliver enterprise grade software (like RDS , EMR or ML engines) that you as a startup wouldnt have been able to license at all
this has been an immense boon to humanity for which Bezos deserves every single penny of his fortune
But I will say this: AWS really has done a lot of good to improve security in software. Their cloud is massive and the security options they provide are great. They also simplify many otherwise complex things for many people, but I disagree that Bezos deserves every single penny of his fortune.
He doesn't pay enough in tax. The loophole of never paying tax if you don't sell your shares is stupid. He gets to do all the cool billionaire things like building space rockets, etc. And meanwhile people with conditions where going to the loo take longer (PTSD, IBS, ETC) are in pain holding their bladders all day because they can't afford to lose their job because they have desperate families to feed and clothe.
I don't presume to predict anything as was correctly pointed out. I could not and did not imagine the events that transpired.
This looks to me like a classic correlation-causation mistake.
* Discussion a book with mass hangings can lead people to talk about gallows.
* Going to a political protest can traditionally involve bringing a gallows.
They are not linked, even though both things involve a gallows. Political protest commonly involves nooses (here is a really good one [0]). That is totally normal symbolism after a US president is voted in.
[0] https://www.cbs17.com/news/kentucky-man-hangs-effigy-of-dona...
I've updated my writing to clarify it as an opinion, and I'm taking a step back to improve my research and tone of writing. The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and the constructive criticism of HN users has helped me tremendously. I want to make neutral statements/analysis of facts and rarely if ever provide my personal opinion.
Thank you both for taking the time to provide your feedback.
Until then, this claim seems like a leap:
> It is clear that Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians to spread virally on the platform, either through gross negligence or willing ignorance.
The recent NYT article that appeared on HN (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-p...) mentions examples of posts being moderated and removed. So there is a non-zero amount of moderation happening, apparently? Let's also keep in mind, Parler is a 30-person company. How can they keep up with the deluge of traffic they received? If the answer to censored speech is "go make your own social network" but then people turn around to deplatform a small social network that does not have the funding, monetization, or staffing of a megacorp like Twitter or Facebook, then there is no viable competition for the big players. They not only have the competitive moat of network effects, they also are able to collude with each other to kill any new competition.
And if these companies like Facebook and Twitter face no realistic competition, we should recognize that they are simply public utilities operating the digital public town square on the public's behalf. As such, they must be held to a higher standard and required to carry all speech that isn't illegal.
> there is panic among the ex-Parler community that all their data, even private/deleted posts, have been scraped and archived — it has, just not by me. Furthermore, Parler did not follow industry standards in obfuscating EXIF metadata from uploaded images, so millions of users had their exact location logged.
However, I am stunned that Twitter still has not taken down the tweets from @donk_enby, the person whom this post mentions with the location logging (example: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128). This account has been sharing datasets with the private information of all those Parley users widely and archiving it all over the place. Isn't this textbook irresponsible disclosure of personal information? Doesn't this violate all the rules of Twitter for doxxing? I've submitted several reports at https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information but it seems no one at Twitter cares about preventing privacy leaks and doxxing when it concerns their political enemies.
"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
If anything, the people on Parler doxxed themselves by posting all of it in public, it was all directly visible by everyone who used the site/app.
EDIT: Posts that people tried to delete are also in the dump, because of Parler's choice to only mark them as "deleted" and not actually delete them, hence they were still visible to admins. They were publicly visible in the past and could just as easily have been archived then.
Parler does have those people's e-mails and so on, but that is not in this dump. It will have to subpoenaed.
Another consideration is that even if email addresses and phone numbers aren’t in the dump, there is EXIF data with locations and orientation. If this person was at all ethical and responsible they would have stripped everything that could identify a person out. But she didn’t, because the same rules don’t matter when it’s a leftist (she’s a self-described “anarcho socialist”) is attacking political enemies from the right. And no social media or news media is taking this down or even describing it in negative terms.
It’s hard for me to see all this as anything but shameless double standards.
However, there is a big difference between posting the information on a single named person and in effect blaming him for the COVID-19 pandemic, based purely on speculation and hearsay about the supposed origin of the virus, and dumping the publicly available data from a website that provably hosted and tolerated (perhaps even boosted) conspiracy theories and incitement to overthrow the results of a democratic election.
Zero Hedge does this a lot, they latch onto wild theories and present them as if they are factual. Their hit:miss rate is absolutely atrocious, they are not a reliable source of news.
As for @donk_enby's political views, her profile says "Meiklejohnian absolutist. free speech as in free-for-everyone.", for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiklejohnian_absolutism
"Therefore, all speech, even criticizing the established government, is healthy to the life of democracy. In essence, this means that free speech must be protected not for those speaking, but for those who should hear what they are saying."
This is not a left vs. right thing, it's an issue of Parler('s users) wanting to stuff the genie back in the bottle, they want to unsay what they have said and unpost what they have posted, because after the 6th it is extremely compromising for them to have said/posted it.
Consider as well that the CCP has still not permitted an international probe and site visit to this Wuhan lab. Note that in late December, a scientist said they would welcome a site visit (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55364445) but then when the WHO wanted to visit Wuhan to investigate, their visas were denied (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55555466). Lastly, note that other media outlets were NOT banned for doing what Zero Hedge did (example: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2020-02-13/after-zero-hedge-t...).
> This is not a left vs. right thing, it's an issue of Parler('s users) wanting to stuff the genie back in the bottle, they want to unsay what they have said and unpost what they have posted, because after the 6th it is extremely compromising for them to have said/posted it.
It is absolutely a left versus right thing if the same standards are not being applied to both sides. I'm not sure how your statements invalidate the double standards around doxxing. One group sharing publicly-available information for the public face of an organization is considered impermissible doxxing. But another group evangelizing and disseminating unintended public disclosure of private information (location data) is okay? The latter is not just equivalent, but a significantly worse act.
Since you appear to only want to argue in bad faith, I have nothing further to discuss with you.
The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language.
Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way.
Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.
We need to take back the web.
If I do something illegal, it shouldn't take down everyone I ever happened to chat with, or who read or liked something I wrote once... even the Godwin's law protagonist had a few good ideas mixed in with his assured evil.
Free exchange of legal speech shouldn't arbitrarily be squelched because some corporation decides their advertisers wouldn't like it.
For example, a few years ago there was a great machining set of videos in which an M-16 lower receiver was machined out of a billet of Aluminum. Youtube decided that anything like that had to go, not for legal reasons, just because of... you know... whim.
There was nothing wrong with the video series, it didn't promote violence, it was just a well done documentation of all the tips and setups required to do a tricky bit of work.
The replacement that seems to be safe (for now) is to machine model steam engines and lathes from casting kits. Cool, but far less useful in learning the real thing.
[update] The idea of learning by watching is a lot less powerful when whole areas of study are excluded randomly, for "reasons" that are never fully explained.
If someone decided that hashtables and binary trees should be hidden from view, could you really teach computer science without them?
It's a filter bubble of the worst sort. It keeps you from even learning what you don't know, because it can't be safely mentioned.
it is a shame , with so much of surveillance and the tax money gone into it, and yet this wasn't prevented.