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Comment by pjkundert | Hacker News Reader

Not to provide facts to counter your generalizations, but...

I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events.

At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members.

So, if you want to deplatform people based on their political leanings, I guess you can go ahead and do that. But, the "reasons" being used to shut down Parler don't seem to be founded in fact.

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> At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members.

how do you reconcile this opinion with the reporting that uses gps data from the parler data dump to place parler users at the protest and in the capitol building?

https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...

Ok - those were likely Facebook users also, maybe on Twitter, maybe they used Gmail.

Guilt by association is something we should avoid. It looks an awful lot like a witch hunt.

Once again, none of those other services listed exist for the rhetoric leading to the 6th.

From my perspective, it's pretty disingenuous to argue that was the sole purpose of Parler.

Anecdata from HNers in this thread suggests otherwise, and unless you can show evidence that all 4 million users conspired to storm the Capitol building, there's not much of a leg to stand on there.

According to the article "at least several" out of 2+ million active users were in the Capitol. If this is the standard to upload, we would have to ban every social media app ever made.

I'm not trying to argue the Parler ban or at what percentage does it transition from people caused this to the platform caused this. What I am arguing against is the out-and-out misinformation campaign that zero people who used parler were involved in the capitol insurrection. Everyone has access to the receipts.

Parler users wandering around the Capital sucking on their soda pops are different than those wanted by the FBI for breaching the building...

> Parler users wandering around the Capital sucking on their soda pops are different than those wanted by the FBI for breaching the building…

No, assuming that they exist at all (which seems unlikely given the nature of the incident: peaceful people interested in just “wandering around…sucking on their soda pops” don’t tend to casually hang around riots involving violent clashes with the police, use of chemical irritants on both sides, gunfire, etc.) they aren’t, except to the extent that some of the former may not have been identified yet and moved into the latter category.

Anyone who illegally entered the building and is identified is being charged.

1. Do you earnestly believe the people around the Capitol were "sucking on their soda pops" during a large protest? As someone whose been around several protests in Seattle, there's an overwhelmingly small number of people that close who are not directly involved.

2. The gps data shows them being inside the Capitol building.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/13/22228675/amazon-parler-ta...

Just some examples of those non-existent violent posts

http://reddit.com/r/parlerwatch http://reddit.com/r/insaneparler

Why bother providing an anecdote like this when we have mountains of empirical evidence about the content on Parler? And that evidence directly counters your assertion.

The claims are that Parler’s primary purpose was to accommodate evildoers, but it only takes a single counter example to invalidate such a broad claim.

My example and personal experience does so.

Producing a bunch of bad posts that they had not yet deleted also doesn’t prove the claim.

Just as the never-deleted “Trump severed head” picture doesn’t prove evil intent by Twitter, et.al.

Perhaps they just hadn’t gotten to them all. Perhaps their user-driven moderation scheme didn’t scale.

I’m getting fairly tired of being impugned by generalizations; I personally didn’t join Parler to plan evil; I just didn’t want to be on a site where everyone seemed to hate me.

So, I am a counter-example that invalidates the wildly general claim.

That is all.

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