Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Also, kudos to this author for not logging personal information:

> 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.

The dump only contains information that people posted publicly on Parler, as per this:

"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 They were publicly visible in the past and could just as easily have been archived then.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.

So why is media treating this differently from when Zero Hedge posted the contact information of a head of a lab in Wuhan that was conducting research into coronaviruses carried by bats? In that case, the person’s contact information was also public and it was intended as such on the lab’s own website, since he was the public face of it. And yet Zero Hedge was attacked by news media and posts on social media as “doxxing” the researcher. Twitter even banned them “permanently” for it, only to reverse the ban months later.

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.

I don't represent Twitter, nor do I have any influence on their decisions. I simply corrected your misconceptions about the data present in the dump.

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.

I don't read Zero Hedge and I'm not a "fan" or anything like that. But there is significant disinformation about what they claimed and wrote. Zero Hedge did not present their theory as definitive (read for yourself at https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir...). It was speculative, and frankly it is totally appropriate to speculate in a situation like this. Why wouldn't a leak from a lab be feasible? Why were activists and media (and even scientists) so quick to squash any speculation or exploration or investigation about origin, when there have been numerous historical incidents where powerful governments and corporations denied culpability only to be proven wrong later when evidence came out (in some cases decades later)? There has to be an outlet for theories because hard truths often begin as open ended theories.

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.

The headline on the Zero Hedge article is literally "Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?", which places blame on the guy, under the bad-faith guise of "just asking questions". They know full well what that means to conspiratorially-minded people and what they're implying.

Since you appear to only want to argue in bad faith, I have nothing further to discuss with you.

I appreciate what you are saying here. What started as concern for my personal safety morphed into a realization that an Internet mob is looking to lynch any Parler user who said anything even remotely questionable. I also believe these people need compassion and dialog from the other side, as they will retreat even further if the people they consider elitists start publishing names.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com