Parler's home page is back online, but app still not in stores | Hacker News Reader

Parler's home page is back online, but app still not in stores

reuters.com

155 pointspseudolus430 comments

It's weird seeing Epik being referred to as the alt-right's favorite host. I use them as a registrar for completely benign personal domains. I did so because they offered Whois privacy by default. That was it. It's weird that it's being discussed like the site/service itself is some nefarious/controversial thing instead of just some of its customers.

The owner reportedly is not far off his most notorious customers politically, and given that they’re popular for hosting sites others won’t it’s not surprising that this became their public image. It’s like how a bar doesn’t need to have 100% of its customers be bikers to be known as a biker bar.

> It’s like how a bar doesn’t need to have 100% of its customers be bikers to be known as a biker bar.

Reminds me of this bartender tale: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

Link where the thread isn't broken: https://mobile.twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/12808925350...

> The owner reportedly is not far off

can you link the report? It seems like they just don't connect their moral values/opinion with their business, which I kinda like

Politically polarized people tend to only have two brushes to paint people with: You’re either with them or against them. If you have any relationship whatsoever with their opposition, in their view, you’re against them. Ultimately, Epik is just a company that seems to have found a captive client base. That doesn’t make them bad...it makes them a company with a captive client base.

Sure. It's classic you're either with us or against us.

The discussion reminds of this SlateStarCodex classic, in particular this quote:

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

It’s a weird quote to me, because there are no witches. Modern society does ban literal witch hunts, and it doesn’t cause witches to exist.

i think the point is that sometimes bad people need to be called out and not just tolerated.

it’s also called the paradox of tolerance, where if a society is tolerant of intolerance, eventually the intolerance will win by taking advantage of tolerance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Any time I hear "small groups with loud voices" to describe what's going on in society these days, I think of this.

The documentary "The Power Of Nightmares" by Adam Curtis highlights an excellent example of this.

During a 90s election in Algeria, a radical (and popular) Islamist party made it clear that if they won, their first action would be to cancel all future elections.

This basically put all the secular parties (both left and right) in a bind. Do you just proceed with the election as if everything's normal, even though it might be the end of democracy if the radical group wins? On the other hand, if you decide to boot out the radicals from the democratic process, haven't you now ended free and fair elections?

> This basically put all the secular parties (both left and right) in a bind.

Which is the solution. Bind themselves and everybody else.

Have a constitution that enshrines the right to things like fair elections and free speech. Have an amendment process that requires two thirds of the Senate, in a Senate that only has one third of the seats up for election in any given year. And three quarters of the states, which rarely agree on anything. Things like that.

Then even if the populists get in once, they don't have the power to end elections or free speech. And once the people see their true nature, they lose the next one.

Obviously you do have to be very careful not to allow any end runs around that process.

That's absolutely not the point. Scott Alexander from the Slate Star Codex is definitely not in favor of shutting down discussion from undesirables.

Have you read that Wikipedia article you cite?

Because extra-judicial persecution of "bad people" [0] is something Popper never discussed or advocated for in _Open Societies and Its Enemies_. He very specifically advocates for this only when all else has failed, and only by the state itself -- being as such action doesn't bode well for any liberal democracy that undertakes such action.

I know you've not read the book, but perhaps read the Wikipedia article you're citing.

0. I've seen a whole range of people called "bad people" by antifa types these days, from centrists all the way to white supremacists.

You're going to need to come to grips with figurative language if you ever want to communicate effectively. It's a large part of discourse.

Replace the word "witches" with "violent racists"

We've had modern witch hunts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

I don't deny that. I was just explaining the connection.

Replace the work "violent racists" with "kulaks".

reading gulag archipelago so i go that reference

So you'd be happy not to persecute non-violent racists?

It is an interesting bit of etymology, isn't it?

The quote doesn't really make sense if you use a traditional definition of "witch hunt", because the phrase comes from actual historic trials where the charge was something like "consorting with demons". The penalty was often death, even though people don't actually consort with demons in the real world.

There were no witches, of course, and the underlying causes of real witch hunts are a matter of speculation. Some people say it was a way to get rid of the elderly, some people say that ergot poisoning could have played a role, some people say that mobs are violent and irrational by nature. But everybody who was tried in a historical "witch hunt" was innocent.

Still, with the advent of the internet, it's taken on a new meaning. Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on". The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.

It might be interesting to investigate when that change in meaning happened, and why.

> "piling on"

I don't think it's used in that context at all. There doesn't need to be more than one "witch hunter" for something to be called a witch hunt.

> The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.

This is correct.

> Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on".

And historically, it often meant moral panic and mass hysteria. Compared to another comment, that's _all_ it means to me when applied nowadays. The mainstream reception of the threat of witchcraft is what's changed. You might see parallels with (theoretical) homosexual conversion in parts of the US, I suppose.

Speculating on historical drivers: coercive confession existed then as it does now. Some law-enforcement officers' careers depended on confessions. After 35,000 to 100,000 executions I bet the technique was pretty smooth.

> Modern society does ban literal witch hunts

There are literal, and I mean literal witch hunts going on in Western nations by the authorities, like Britain or the USA. Generally they use the word satanic.

They are far rarer than 40 or 100 years ago.

Obviously amongst the general population you also have things like Qanon and the Satanism within Pizzagate and in most developing countries they still exist at troubling numbers.

But I don't get your point, so no idea if that's OT

You have no right force own morality on private enterprises and other people.

If something is illegal the government is supposed to deal with it.

Speaking of witch hunts: when Amazon uses their ethical standards to terminate a paying customer with minimal warnings, that's fine. When a hosting company accepts this deplatformed customer, you want to go after the provider although neither the customer nor provider haven't been convicted of any wrongdoing.

Yes but this witch-hunt is extreme. You are a witch by association. The host of a social media platform should be no more lumped in with the users of that platform than a phone company that provides cell access to the KKK. At some point it's just going too far.

In this particular case there's pretty good evidence that Parler's moderation is/was anything but even handed. Parler may be a lot of things but a neutral platform provider doesn't seem to be one of them.

Does a neutral platform even exist? It seems like all the major ones have some bias in their filtering and moderation.

Can a neutral platform with algorithmic feeds exist? Self selection + optimization will result in feeds reflective of the community rather than some neutral standard.

The point of algorithmic feeds is to be the “everyplatform” and serve all biases. So in theory it’s neutral as a platform. But as we’ve seen has extremely negative results.

Well the problem at present is you have to moderate such that all content is within the Overton window. Only the left and right have different views on what does and does not fit inside this window. For example right wingers want to argue about the role of trans rights in womens sports. Much of the left and Twitter consider this to be outside of the Overton window.

You live in a society so there are always going to be cultural limits on the views you can express without social repercussions. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence nor does it trump other people’s freedoms not to associate with you or exercise their freedom of speech to castigate you.

My point is you can't have a neutral platform when there is a split between large groups on what is the current cultural limit. Each platform has to pick a side in that case.

I mean you absolutely can, whether anyone would want to be on it is another question. That most/many platforms do moderate content doesn't mean that they must moderate content to fit into their cultural frame of reference.

I have never understood why people get so angry at assumptions by association. It is a very natural process that people do. If you find out that someone is best friends with someone you despise, you will automatically assume the worst about them.

Best friends are not the ones being targeted here. You have examples such a Don Lemon trying to tar all Republican voters as being in league with the neo Nazis https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6223009033001 .

Loose associations don't mean you are in agreement with people on every possible issue. I agree with Hitler that public sanitation is important but consider him to be one of the most evil men to ever exist.

It's just not a good way to make a judgement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

So would you vote for Hitler because of his public sanitation policies, while overlooking his other evil policies?

Because this is what Republican voters seem to be doing: they vote for Trump because they like some of his policies (e.g., lower taxes) while overlooking his other policies (open racism, open misogyny, anti-science, etc.).

Well I would agree that voting for someone with racist or misogynistic policies would be a problem, however I've not seen any policies or laws that were. You are welcome to prove me wrong.

As such I can excuse people for voting for Trump. Especially in a two party system. I suspect many simply always vote Republican and despite Trump's brash public persona they thought he was their best option.

One example of many:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/29/north-caroli...

> A federal court on Friday struck down North Carolina voting laws it said were enacted with “discriminatory intent”, targeting African Americans “with almost surgical precision”.

> Plaintiffs in the suit welcomed what one called “a stinging rebuke” to the Republican-controlled state government, representatives of which questioned the political affiliations of the judges involved and said they would appeal the decision to the US supreme court, because it “ignores legal precedent”.

How is this an example of Trump being racist? Wasn't this even before he was elected?

A Muslim travel ban comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769

> his other policies (open racism, open misogyny, anti-science, etc.).

The vast majority of people who vote for him do not think he has policies with these traits. Describing his policies as "open racism", "open sexism", etc requires definitions of those terms so broad that most of the American population (and the vast majority of the world population) would also be guilty of them.

Looking at his public statements about women I think it's clear he is a misogynist but mainly in his personal dealings. It's not really a feature of his politics.

As for racism I think the Muslim Ban was a case of explicitly racist policy. I know the Supreme Court disagreed, but frankly they are wrong on this.

Being a Muslim has nothing to do with a race. You have people of all races who are Muslims.

I don't see that it makes any difference. Is discrimination based on either acceptable? If not why does it matter?

1. You're moving goalposts

2. If discrimination by religion is not acceptable by your standards, why should discrimination based on politics be?

Goal posts? Maybe, but I don't think enough that it actually matters. I note you didn't answer my question.

Nobody is being discriminated against based on politics. They are being penalised for their personal actions as individual citizens.

I have commented on this in more detail elsewhere on this discussion.

It matters a lot, because words have meanings. Can religion (ideas) be changed? Can you change your race? Did Trump discriminate against Muslims or against specific countries? Does a sovereign country have the right to refuse entry to whom it pleases within the laws?

Looking at his public statements about women I think it's clear he is a misogynist but mainly in his personal dealings. It's not really a feature of his politics.

As for racism I think the Muslim Ban was a clear case of explicitly racist policy.

But there is a correlation wrt race and religion, so how do you distinguish?

Most neo-Nazis and white supremist are white, isn't any action targeting those groups also racist? of course not; but what's the difference between that argument and the so-called "muslim ban"?

I don't really distinguish, there are technical differences but it's not as though one is ok and the other is not. Would a religion-ist ban really be any more acceptable? Either you accept that each person should be treated equally as individuals irrespective of such characteristics, or you don't.

Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis. They are targeted for individual criminal acts they perform personally, or conspire to perform together. Some small groups have been outlawed in some countries, but only in the same way that criminal gangs such as the Mafia or other terrorist organisations are targeted. That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims".

The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act. Setting a bomb or shooting someone because you are a Neo-Nazi does not mean that if someone prosecutes you they are doing so because you are a Neo-Nazi. They are doing it because of the bomb or the shooting.

This is the mistake the MAGA crowd on the Capitol were making when they were surprised and shocked that the police didn't come over to their side. It's a characteristic of racism that it conflates group identity with individual identity, and it's also why I am vehemently opposed to far left identity politics which makes exactly the same mistake.

They may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but wing nuts generally are susceptible to the same cognitive failure modes.

> Would a religion-ist ban really be any more acceptable?

I don't really see religion as any more than personal/group belief; I understand America sees it differently, and privileges religious belief.

Is a religion-based ban more acceptable? yes, race is an immutable characteristic that does not determine or prescribe a persons actions or motivations - "religion" is a systems of belief that absolutely does.

> Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis

If the metric for hate speech is guilt-by-association with acts of violence, any ideology that promotes violence is hate speech. Neo-Nazi ideology falls under this category, and I believe "refusing entry" has a lower bar then outright bans on freedom of expression.

> That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims"

The Muslim ban was so-called by Trumps opponents. The ban targeted specific countries, and was not an exhaustive list of all Muslim nations.

> The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act

I'm not sure they are so different. Thought-policing ones own citizens is chilling, but I'm less certain about doing the same to refuse entry - we already filter based on a persons character.

>The Muslim ban was so-called by Trumps opponents.

Er, and Trump himself. Many times. It was really important to him that people understood that. He explicitly and frequently said it was his attempt to implement the explicit Muslim ban he promised in the campaign.

https://www.cato.org/blog/dozen-times-trump-equated-travel-b...

I agree religion is a choice, but 'Muslim' is simply a massively broad category. It includes many groups that are implacable ideological and religious opponents of each other, and says practically nothing about a person's actual likely behaviour or actions. As with all racism and other-ism the belief otherwise is nonsense on stilts.

Looking at his tendency to switch wives for a newer model is clear evidence that he has a lack of respect for the women in his life. But there is little evidence that his policy positions disadvantage women.

The travel ban was not something I see as racist. It was nationalistic and popularist. There was a terror threat and Trump actioned a broad travel ban to make his voters feel protected from that threat. Did it actually protect anyone, probably not. Did it unfairly disadvantage huge numbers of primarily Muslim people, yes it did. But the intent had nothing to do with them being Muslim, it had to do with their perceived link to terrorism. You could argue that it was racist to ignore the rights of all these foreign nationals but I think Trump's position was that he only cared about Americans. He was a strong nationalist but in my opinion not a racist.

I would usually agree that everyone who votes for a party that I consider to be evil, isn't necesseraly evil.

But if someone voted for trump 2020, it is very reasonable to say that that person is against democracy.

Following your line of reasoning, all Muslims are evil because a few associated Muslims did bad things.

> If you find out that someone is best friends with someone you despise, you will automatically assume the worst about them.

Or maybe your friend has knows them better, or understands them better, or compartmentalises

I don't like that my dad likes Trump but he's still my dad and I still love him.

It reminds me a little of the West Wing episode "The Supremes" where everyone assumes the conservative supreme court judge they are considering giving a seat is the height of evil only to find that he's a reasonable person who can actually make valid arguments from the right's pov as is not just "guilty because he's on the right"

> The host of a social media platform should be no more lumped in with the users of that platform than a phone company

Section 230 exists because even the legal system assumed guilt by association. Without it, sharing someone's false information would be illegal (such as the false dominican voting machine statements[0]). The phone company isn't liable because they're a public utility and don't moderate content - but congress didn't want the internet to be the internet to be filled with porn, so they created 230 which allowed them to remove some content without being liable for all content.

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/21/fox-new...

Social media platforms are by their design not neutral at all. They are deciding which users get megaphones and which doesn't, and they like to amplify certain voices over other to increase engagement metrics.

Lol, I love that quote ("your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"). It's very true, and not the least bit surprising. The only reason for free-speech focused social media to be a thing is because it is a pushback against bans and restrictions from Facebook and Twitter. But look who these platforms ban: for all the (in my opinion, laughable) talk of how these platforms are "biased against conservatives", last time I checked Twitter wasn't banning anyone for saying the minimum wage reduces overall employment, or that we should return to the gold standard, or that marriage should be reserved for unions of 1 man and 1 woman. They ban people for inciting violence, for repeating provable falsehoods over and over which can lead to violence, for targeted harassment. So your "free speech social media" is primarily for people who want incite violence, or lie over and over to convince people of provable falsehoods, or to harass others.

These platforms absolutely do ban or demonetize people for these reasons. Dennis Prager's video on the Ten Commandments was demonetized and the reason given? "It contains the word 'kill'. Dangerous for children."

They have extremely rigid standards for conservatives and very loose standards for everybody else. That's a real thing and it's something you don't see until you are one of those whose views are being targeted.

Ultimately, I predict that conservative discourse will take a similar path to MP3s: first, it will be targeted by the big powers-that-be. Next, technologies will appear that make it impossible to police or shut down. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them and the discourse will be brought back into the fold and corporations will once again make money off of it.

>”They have extremely rigid standards for people of one viewpoint and very loose standards for people of another.”

It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended.

My left-leaning Twitter feed has for years been regularly full of people complaining about how Twitter censors black women, activists, feminists and sex workers, while not doing enough against white supremacists, etc.

Probably the truth is that the standards are just unevenly rigid one day, loose the other, depending on who catches their attention. Policing hundreds of millions of active users is nearly impossible, and adding automated systems increases the risk of false positives.

No doubt that's true on the level of the average user like you and me. What we see for prominent conservatives, however, feels very unfair to me. Perhaps prominent members of other groups are targeted similarly--it wouldn't surprise me.

To be honest, every single time I dig in to a conservative complaining "they are singling me out for my views!!" I do more research and find that it is 99% bullshit. Not 100% bullshit mind you, because it's that 1% that is nominally true so they can leave out the rest of the context.

Here is a more complete discussion of Prager's charges of censorship, and in my opinion they are laughable: https://reason.com/2019/07/18/dennis-prager-who-boasts-1-bil...

> "Respectfully, senator, that's not right," replied Bhatia, explaining that those videos contained mature topics—murder, rape, etc. He reiterated that they are still visible to the "98.5 percent" of YouTube users who do not opt for restricted mode.

Who would have thought that another conservative story about censorship would turn out to be bullshit.

It’s not like the people parroting them have the impetuous to check though, it’s much easier and more comfortable to drone on about “YouTube blocking a video about the 10 commandments” over and over until it becomes your reality, where you’re persecuted.

Are you referring to Donald Trump?

Multiple studies have shown that Facebook and twitter do not censor conservatives. This has been well established and anyone who argues otherwise is either ignorant or arguing from a position of bad faith.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again...

> What we see for prominent conservatives, however, feels very unfair to me

I find this extremely ironic given that the slogan "facts don't care about your feelings" is attributed to conservatives in particular

All the "conservatives/libertarians" I've followed on youtube have been both demonetized and had videos suspended. It's a small sample size but all?!, what a coincidence. From the "left leaning" channels I follow I've not seen the same complain.

I don't follow anyone on facebook or twitter I can't vouch for those, maybe it's just youtube who does all the censoring.

Maybe if you name/link them we can decide if it was reasonable or not.

On youtube

Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Viva Frey, Academic Agent, Thunderf00t, 1791

In general "conservatives" seem to have a harder time following TOS on hate speech, bullying, racism, sexism etc.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/VerifiedHate?src=hashtag_click

> Multiple studies have shown

Are you talking about the two in this article, or alluding to more?

The studies:

1) https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/26/censorship-conserva...

"The findings demonstrate how a small number of conservative users routinely outpace their liberal rivals and traditional news outlets in driving the online conversation — amplifying their impact a little more than a week before Election Day. They contradict the prevailing political rhetoric from some Republican lawmakers that conservative voices are censored online — indicating that instead, right-leaning talking points continue to shape the worldviews of millions of U.S. voters."

2) https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-study-finds-facebo...

"right-leaning pages consistently earned more average weekly interactions than either left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages"

This doesn't seem to me to support that "Facebook and twitter do not censor conservatives";

The assumption seems to be that if conservatives are ultimately more influential, they mustn't have been censored. I'm also not sure how fine-grained the distinction of right/left leaning is.

If all conservatives voices are censored except for a few far-right/extremist voices that are amplified, does this balance out? Add a few more dimensions and you might come up with a different conclusion.

In any case, I'll need to see more before I agree it's "well established".

It’s weird to claim that YouTube has a bias against right wing media and then shrug and say well I have no idea if left wing media suffers equally arbitrary censorship or not. That makes no sense as a stance.

What happens at the margins is probably random and depends on which moderator was having a bad day. But the Trump ban is quite different, especially since they gave a formal and thought-out justification [0].

The tweets that they quote are simply innocuous. The ban isn't justified based on the tweets, and was either a panicked response to the news with no investigation or a very thinly veiled political move. I think the right wing has reason to claim bias from that one. What is the closest parallel with that involving a left wing figure?

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

It is disingenuous to say those tweets are "simply innocuous" without the context of what was going on and what the President did that very day.

I've posted this before, and while I agree that those are far from his most egregious tweets, given the fact of the insurrection at the Capitol, the ban doesn't seem unjustified at all. Especially since there are now many videos coming out from the insurrection of the rioters believing they are acting in accordance with Trump's wishes.

For the sake of argument, Ok. I'll not argue with that. I shall assume that the context of the situation justified the ban.

But why then did Twitter quote two tweets? The tweets do not support the decision. They could just have said "based on context off Twitter, we are banning Trump".

The fact that they didn't makes me think they were scrambling and not thinking clearly. Their reading of the tweets is bizarre. Or maybe they being dishonest about their reasoning.

Because those two tweets, and the video, were both offering tacit support to people violently attacking the US Capitol and continuing to promote the egregious lie and conspiracy theory of a stolen election that was driving the attack in the first place.

What made those tweets untenable was the changed circumstances of the attack on the Capitol and the knowledge that those engaged in it were relying on Trump's support and encouragement.

I dunno, the further we get from the Capitol Hill riot, the harder I think it will be to sustain the argument that "I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." can only be interpreted as "violently seize control of the American government". Those are going to be famous last words if ever there are any.

If you were going to put % chances that he was speaking literally, what would you put them at? Surely you'd agree there is at least a chance he was just stream-of-conciousness tweeting what he was thinking?

“There’s a million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump, your boss.”

https://youtu.be/270F8s5TEKY?t=151

I don’t think you can wave away the impact of Trumps words, even if he didn’t intend violence. His audience interpreted approval. That’s what matters. To disagree is to be deliberately ignorant or to argue in bad faith.

> ...even if he didn’t intend violence.

That is a totally unreasonable standard that would speak very clearly of a bias (if that is what Twitter thought, which I doubt). It isn't being applied to politicians at all evenly, it is only being applied to Trump. If the speakers intentions and literal words don't matter, and they are to be judged by the most extreme fringes of their supporters then no politician is going to be allowed to speak.

> These platforms absolutely do ban or demonetize people for these reasons. Dennis Prager's video on the Ten Commandments was demonetized and the reason given? "It contains the word 'kill'. Dangerous for children."

That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though. YouTube is notorious for their aggressive demonetisation of content.

In any event, there is a definite difference between demonetisation and censorship. Nobody is obligated to pay you for telling them what you think .

Well that's what you say but that's not true, to be marked as domonetisatised also lowers your view counts since the video stops showing up, it also might not show for subscribers. Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.

> That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though.

Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.

I don’t know this person’s political stance, but I can’t help but be reminded of this story. A woman shot YouTube staff when her channel was demonetized. I think people who view social media as targeting right wing views are seeing reality very narrowly. Politics don’t appear to be involved with this case.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/nasim-ag...

> Well that's what you say but that's not true, to be marked as domonetisatised also lowers your view counts since the video stops showing up, it also might not show for subscribers.

I understand these to be separate issues that get lumped together because Google changed the way their recommendation engine worked to de-emphasise the importance of subscriptions around the same time as advertisers started to care about where their ads played. Happy to be proved wrong, but I had a quick look around on the internet and couldn't find a reasonable source to contradict me.

> Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.

This might be right, it might be wrong, but it isn't censorship.

> Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.

I don't watch much 'left leaning' content, so I can't readily provide an example, but a lot of true crime and history channels are constantly having videos demonetised for touching on non-advertiser friendly themes. I know this because they constantly complain about it!

> but a lot of true crime and history channels

Thanks this was what I was looking for.

> This might be right, it might be wrong, but it isn't censorship.

This is to respond that youtube can monetize or demonetize as it pleases. Since it contradicts itself by demonetize for you and not for them.

>Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized

This is a false equivalence. For all the flaws of Antifa and woke culture, they aren't the ones advocating violent insurrection against democratic government in the United States and the murder of Republican law makers for being traitors to the cause. Not as satire or comment, but literally.

I would contend that it is not surprising that one of these sides is encountering more problems with posting guidelines than the other.

Bernie's campaign staff were calling for killing wealthy people. Does that count?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/another-bernie-staffer-allege...

You're relying on a highly edited video clip from Project Veritas, really? The constantly-cutting-clip is of some low level field organiser drunkenly mouthing off in a bar. Even the constant cutting of the video couldn't hide the fact that the guy was punctuating his musings with laughter.

Did they organise a militia, obtain weapons and ammunition, agree to meet at the Capitol and actually storm the Capitol, chant "kill him with his own gun" when they got hold of one police officer, and for real beat another police officer to death with a fire extinguisher?

Shit talking like that in private, in a bar in a heavily editorialised recording is one thing. I've been a student and Ive heard people brag about all kinds of stuff. Actually following through in the capitol with a violent, literally murderous insurrection is on a completely different level and it's frankly exasperating to me that you can't or won't see that.

> violent insurrection against democratic government

Is right leaning content for insurrection? Sorry I've missed that train. The "right/libertarian" I see censored is much tamer than that, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Viva Frey, Academic Agent, Thunderf00t, 1791.

>Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.

Is there a public notification of what videos are monetized? I'm unaware of one, and my quick check shows the poster gets one and some proprietary services that can supposedly check.

Without a public way to check, you would he unable to distinguish actual bias from which side complains more.

> actual bias from which side complains more.

It's complains sometimes side vs never complained side, in my pool of channels.

Demonetization standards are universally fairly strict yet arbitrary, and they are based on the desires of the advertisers. Plus, "YouTube won't pay me for my right-wing propaganda" doesn't make someone a victim.

It does make them a victim if content on the other side is not demonetized at the same rate for the same arbitrary reasons. When that happens, you wind up with well-funded speech that continues on one side, and the other side fades away (which is what partisan individuals would like to see happen to their opposition, but is unhealthy for society).

But the very fact of YouTube's existence ensures that sincere and effective political commentators do not need their speech to be 'well-funded' for it to be easily accessed by millions of people. And the aspects of political speech that do involve significant donor funds like paid TV slots are overwhelmingly not dependent on or supported to any significant extent by YouTube channel revenues.

Sure, demonetization makes YouTube political commentary an unprofitable business model which is unfortunate for people who would like to earn a living from it, but free speech isn't about Google's advertisers owing anybody a living, and if people are only willing to express a particular view for click revenue then that political position has much bigger problems than Google,...

But it’s all about incentives. If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side. If they wanted a healthy ecosystem, they would either even-handedly apply demonetization policies, or demonetize all political content across the board. They are, unsurprisingly, doing neither of these things.

>they wanted a healthy ecosystem, they would either even-handedly apply demonetization policies,

Videos are demonetized because advertisers don't want to be associated with them. You can't just force companies to compensate what they view as an unprofitable position.

>If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side.

We've currently had well over a century of the far left, socialism, receiving almost no corporate or government financial support. Both groups have been openly hostile towards the position, yet it has somehow managed.

Videos are demonetized because advertisers don't want to be associated with them. You can't just force companies to compensate what they view as an unprofitable position.

That is absolutely not how demonetization works. Google doesn't take a poll of advertisers and ask if they think they should demonetize them. YouTube reviewers unevenly apply intentionally vague policies to demonetize videos, seemingly at random.

I'd argue that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is incredibly far left, and it has plenty of financial support. By today's standards, Bill Clinton during his Presidential years would be considered a conservative. Even Barack Obama has been criticized by the woke left for saying that cancel culture is toxic [1]. You have to be pretty far left for Obama to say you're too far left.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/obama-woke-meaning-mich...

> Google doesn't take a poll of advertisers and ask if they think they should demonetize them.

Advertisers don't have time to check every video, neither do YouTube reviewers. Advertisers set the guidelines, and they include many things common to the right wing narrative.

>I'd argue that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is incredibly far left, and it has plenty of financial support.

Note that I called the far left "socialism," and that neither Biden nor the Democratic party strongly support socialized healthcare, something common worldwide. The Democratic party isn't remotely far left, it's center left at best.

Advertisers set the guidelines, and they include many things common to the right wing narrative.

This simply isn't true. Google sets the guidelines, and they are intentionally vague so that they can get away with anything they want.

Here's the link outlining those guidelines.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278

The page is titled "Advertiser-friendly content guidelines," and they aren't overly vague. There's some uncertainty, and I'm sure the bots in charge make many mistakes that YouTube is terrible at correcting. It's still not some arbitrary attack on one side.

The demonetization policy is to serve their advertisers' priorities, not to promote the health of the ecosystem, and advertisers are unwilling to advertise against an enormous variety of content, including that put out by right wing, left wing and entirely mainstream commentators. It's also inconsistent precisely because it's reactive, defensive and not intended as debate moderation or any kind of evaluation of the actual merits of the argument.

And we're talking about an ecosystem for political opinion on a platform with low payouts here: the incentives are supposed to be convincing people of something you believe to be important, and thousands of politically active people are already prepared to donate time communicating with much smaller audiences than can be reached on YouTube. The health of political debate really doesn't depend on the representation of the sorts of opinions people are only willing to voice in return for a $5 CPM.

The right have been pushing this narrative that they are being unfairly treated by platforms such as YouTube for some time now (long before the capitol riot). I strongly encourage you to look deeper into this because it is not an accurate picture of what is really going on.

I don't know much about how often conservatives get "demonetized", because I don't follow any.

But I would suspect that the same (but opposite) goes for you, since I constantly hear about non-conservatives getting demonetized.

Can you point me out to those non-conservatives, I would like to compare them with the ones I've seen demonetized on the right.

Just about every vegan or entertainment channel complains about demonetized video(s) at some point.

That's a good point, I don't follow specifically vegan groups. Usually more on the left / right part of the spectrum.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17424472/youtube-lgbt-demo...

The problem for conservative outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.

But their word means absolutely nothing because they have zero credibility since they would be saying these exact same things no matter what.

If you always cry fire, you end up in a situation where people don't care if you are lying or that your house is on fire.

>. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them

Conservative media isn't 'the people' and these tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.

And the so called conservative media is a very tiny super elite spending a ton of money trying to pervert traditional values into a death cult for personal gain.

Indeed. "Conservatives" have for decades been complaining that Christians are being persecuted... meanwhile the vast majority of the house and senate identifies as Christian and no president has ever identified as any other religion.

To them, it seems, not getting everything they want qualifies as persecution.

While I do feel that conservatives pull out the persecution complex... using that as the entire basis for dismissing arguments seems disingenuous.

The problem for <i>feminist</i> outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.

>tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.

We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.

I have the argument that the policy implemented are inherently biased against conservative groups. For example, a policy about misgendering would disproportionately affect conservatives because they feel that sex is an immutable characteristic.

>using that as the entire basis for dismissing arguments seems disingenuous.

You are right. The tech firms could be more transparent about the rules they apply and which ones are violated. The ambiguity is indeed solvable, but considering the state of the world, it seems like a low moral priority to me.

>We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.

That's disingenuous. Your comparsions fails in five ways:

1. Its not about who gets hired, its about who is served as a customer

2. The violated rules of these firms are also defined as criminal behavior by law in all of the western world, so to 'serve the customer' you are talking about being an accessory in a crime. Even if public prosecutors don't make a habit of prosecuting companies when they are simply the platform, companies have an obligation to their shareholders to not take unnecessary risks.

3. None of this has anything to do with traditional or conservative values. Both the far-left and far-right have been creating a lot of propaganda suggesting that traditional values include racism, sexism, sedation, anti-semitism, etc.

4. The employees walking out is a realistic problem, because there is barely any supply of death cult members with the intellectual and educational background required to perform the job. I'm sure lots of people work at these tech companies that have traditional values, like a small government and low taxes, or a more family centric focus on life. But at this point those people are referred to as 'traitors' by the same so called conservative media

5. People's skin color isn't a choice. They are born with it. Your views on the other hand are a choice. There is accountability and liability. You can be an anti-semitic person and post a video about how to cook an egg without it being removed from youtube. You just can't express anti-semitic views on somebody else's platform. Not complicated nor an issue.

They didn't ban a former prime minister of Malaysia for stating "Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past". They wouldn't even remove the tweet. This was his response to a French school teacher being beheaded in Paris by a Muslim parent, angry that he was teaching freedom of expression includes freedom to offend.

They didn't ban Kathy Griffith for holding up Trump's decapitated head either. You wouldn't get away with doing that to Biden's head.

Mahathir's tweet was removed.

Note that his account wasn't banned.

I think you are, deliberately or not, leaving out important context (e.g. Twitter did remove the tweet from the Malaysian ex-prime minister), but regardless, even if I fully accept your point that Twitter and FB don't apply their rules fairly, you're still left with the fact that the only people who really need a "free speech" social media platform are folks that are mad that they can't demand the killings of millions or that they can't display fake severed heads. And literally every one of these "free speech" platforms (Parler, Gab, Voat) was immediately turned into a cesspool of conspiratorial rantings, hatred and racism.

Voat was probably my "favorite" of all. Literally the only reason it got any traffic were people were mad they could no longer post to r/fatpeoplehate.

twitter didn't remove it initially and must have done so only after backlash pointing out their hypocrisy. Opponents of Trump have had free reign the last four years to incite violence against him and his supporters. Once you label your opponents nazis you can say what you like as far as the tech giants are concerned.

Anarchists and socialists have been demonetized and banned in wide swathes for years. Crimeth!nc and others are banned from Facebook and Twitter etc.

You just don't see it, because it's outside of your bubble of interest.

Crimethinc and many Antifa groups are active on Twitter

https://twitter.com/crimethinc

So are many far right groups, individual examples don't prove anything.

There are some bans that do seem target at the right. https://www.newsweek.com/ron-paul-blocked-accessing-facebook...

Again, keeping with the theme of every single time I hear of some example of conservative censorship, I dig in and find it's 99% BS: https://reason.com/2021/01/11/ron-paul-says-hes-been-locked-... .

Ron Paul's page was never banned, blocked or censored in any way for people viewing his content. Admin rights on his page were mistakenly blocked, and reopened a few hours later. I in know way see that targeting the right, especially since I hear plenty of bitching from people on the left who also think it's some sort of conspiracy whenever they get blocked (e.g. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil... )

The coincidences keep happening to certain variety of people, especially those who do not belong to 'Corporate Left'.

It's kind of a truism these days that whenever people are blocked or banned on social media, they blame it on some underlying conspiracy to ban their version of political thought. Another commenter put it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25818108

"It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended."

For organizations that donate 95% towards one political party, some how they have managed to be extra-ordinarily neutral. If that is your thesis - I disagree.

This could easily be established with some examples showing these "accidents" are spread equally across the political spectrum?

I literally posted just a few comments up a story about people on the left complaining they were banned on Facebook from discussing racism. But anecdotes are relatively useless, another commenter posted an actual study showing there is no anti-conservative bias.

But even the conspiratorial mindset that "Oh look, this accident must be deliberate!!" is really annoying because it completely ignores the consequences of the mistake. Ron Paul (or anyone) not being able to post for a few hours is some big abuse of power, when none of his existing posts were unreadable? I've had power outages in urban settings that lasted longer.

Good catch I should have looked into that a little deeper. It might be a case of confirmation bias.

There is one point that Tim Pool made that I think still stands. you have to moderate such that all content is within the Overton window. Only the left and right have different views on what does and does not fit inside this window. For example right wingers want to argue about the role of trans rights in womens sports. Much of the left and Twitter consider this to be outside of the Overton window.

Griffin also apologized for it. And was still investigated by the secret service.

Griffin posted the image again last week...

Griffin may have apologized but has since rescinded that apology and subsequently published the image again. And as of this writing it’s been up for 2 months.

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/348388-kat...

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/524681-kat...

> Lol, I love that quote ("your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"). It's very true, and not the least bit surprising.

It's not quite true though.

It's what happens when you're the new kid on the block and the incumbents are appointing Witchfinders General to burn the heretics, because then rather than languishing in obscurity as you would otherwise, you get a huge influx of refugees and thousands of them are witches. Then if you let the witches chase off all the other refugees, you reach the undesired end state.

The way around this is to get big enough that most of your users are not witches. So the incumbents can do it already. Just stop having witch hunts. The witches can't take over when all the witches in the whole world are 0.5% of your user base, and other people only leave once the witches take over. It's a stable equilibrium.

But you can also get there another way, which is when the incumbents are hunting witches so hard that 95% of their refugees are innocent people. Then you just sit there and let everybody in, and your percentage of actual witches isn't so high that you're in trouble.

Unless anybody who tries to do that gets canceled before they can get a large enough user base to outnumber the witches.

People like witch hunts, though: that's the point. If a "big platform" was to get less witch-hunty, it would start to lose users.

Is there any example of this ever happening? A major platform losing a non-trivial proportion of their users for not censoring them?

The network effect is strong. That's the problem to begin with. If people would quit so easily then there would be a lot more platforms and competition and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

slashdot is a cesspool and a wasteland now. It is dominated by ridiculous nonsense, bots, spam, ascii swastikas etc.

Since when was it not? It died for much the same reasons as Myspace, not for lack of censorship.

And Slashdot has a moderation system that hides that stuff.

Let's follow that argument through to its logical conclusion. If the incumbents actually were hunting witches "so hard that 95% of their refugees were innocent people", the vast majority of the influx of refugees to new platforms would not be witches and they would not have to worry about getting a large user bases for witches to be vastly outnumbered.

Presumably this would be reflected in Gab, Voat and Parler being entirely normal discussion forums where people talking about storming capitols or Jewish problems would soon be shouted down by the majority userbase of perfectly normal people. Has this been the case?

> Has this been the case?

The only one of the three that reached the point of having enough users to plausibly get there was Parler, and they were forced offline almost immediately after that happened. On the basis of a list of misbehavior which was unlikely to have been representative.

They had 10 million users. I have a hard time believing that there are 10 million "insurrectionists" in the country and if there were we have bigger problems. Meanwhile the cherry picked examples weren't anything you couldn't also find on Twitter or Facebook.

There is something wrong with that quote - the point of calling things a witch hunt is that witches don't exist and that the people finding 'witches' are harming a community who haven't done anything. The language has drifted away from its meaning there to the point where it doesn't mean anything.

This isn't absolutely literal. Witch-hunt was a word used to describe McCarthyism, for example. And Communists certainly existed and some of them were working for Stalin. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United...).

McCarthyism has a section on its wiki page called "Victims of McCartheyism" and mentions hundreds imprisoned and thousands of people losing jobs. It was hunting a soviet threat to America which didn't actually exist, and doing tremendous damage while doing so. The article you link on the actual spies is listing maybe tens of names.

And under that section are listed names like Dalton Trumbo, who was literally a member of the Communist Party USA, which was effectively a Soviet puppet organization. The Soviet threat absolutely existed, and has been validated by both US counterintelligence records that have been declassified since the Cold War and Soviet records that came to light as well.

None of this is meant to excuse or justify the excesses of McCarthyism, but rather to explain exactly what McCarthyism was. The Hollywood blacklist were, by and large, a group of people who were “deplatformed” for being enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Stalin. That’s not inherently far off from what a lot of people would favor today.

Accusing members of a Communist party of being Communists isn't fairly described as a witch hunt. That is just run of the mill political repression.

I would agree. That’s actually part of the point I’m making—unlike witches, communists actually exist.

I would further state that I’m, in general, opposed to political repression, even if the intent is to repress totalitarian ideologies that entail violence and mass murder such as communism.

> The Hollywood blacklist were, by and large, a group of people who were “deplatformed” for being enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Stalin.

I think it’s more accurate to say that there were people enthusiastic about communism, rather than Stalin. Your statement is akin to stating that all republicans are enthusiastic about Trump. The Lincoln Project would suggest otherwise.

By that time, the international communist movement had been splintered between Stalinist and Trostskyite factions for a couple of decades. The CPUSA was not only Stalinist but actually funded and directed from Moscow.

... which begs the question: was Stalinism ever really a serious threat global capitalism? For me, part of the answer comes from looking into the reasons for the split between the Stalinists and Trotskyites, and how successful the US was in economically isolating the USSR and its allies.

As I stated, I'm not in favor of political repression, but Stalinism was an ideology that led directly to tens of millions of murders, so I'm inclined to take it seriously as a threat to basic human rights.

> There is something wrong with that quote - the point of calling things a witch hunt is that witches don't exist and that the people finding 'witches' are harming a community who haven't done anything.

10 years ago I would've agreed with you. The problem is Trump called investigations "witch hunts" despite them proving the existence of dozens of witches.

The term in OP is used in this recent context, where witches do exist, despite the witches' protests.

Twitter bans people for misgendering someone. 5 years ago that wasn’t even a word.

Who exactly is the fringe here?

Twitter won't ban you if you accidentally use "he" instead of "she"/"they". They might if you repeatedly misgender someone as part of harassment.

I assume the point is that they normally don't ban for harassment? (or at least they're doing a really poor job on it)

They do, or at least they regularly suspend and remove tweets for that. I get a bunch of "the person you reported violated the Twitter rules" notifications for many of my reports. (Note that spam reports never generate report notifications; as far as I can tell they just go to the "quality tweets" algorithm or even shadowbanning in extreme cases)

I assumed OP meant that Twitter is "over-sensitive" and bans you for just misgendering nowadays. I clarified that it doesn't action your account for that specifically but the underlying context, if it's part of harassing someone.

What are the other requirements for it to count as "harassment"?

I thought it banned for a lot more than call to violence (and mostlt calls to violence by right-wingers at that), including a number of right wing positions:

Doesn't Twitter ban people who define "man" and "women" in a way other than self identity and use the pronouns appropriate to that identification?

Doesn't it ban people who go on about how insert-minority is intellectually and morally inferior and should be removed from the country?

Try to find citations - original sources, not right-wing bloggers – for those claims. You’ll see that the first does not happen but the latter does when it crosses the line into racism (race is a legally protected category) and genocide, which is a call to violence.

The rules are not hard to stay within. The disturbing part is that many conservatives self-identify with these extremes.

Yet "the left" can openly suggest "killing all white men" and the likes without being banned.

> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.

Perhaps that's because the kind of digital utopian who would seek to build that community tends to apply UX ideas so out of date they have a fungus growing on them.

It's a great example of how the situation is portrayed, except witches don't exist. In reality, they're used to demonize anyone who isn't against witch hunts.

Nazis do exist however and they seem to really like Trump's rallies.

Obviously most Trump supporters aren't Nazis, but they also don't really seem to mind having them around.

And similarly there will be communists who think Stalin was a great guy at left wing rallies. We could just get rid of the labels and conclude that lots of people have authoritarian tendencies.

But the existence of some such people are being used at an excuse to dismantle democracy.

I would also argue that while not a Nazi, Trump is a Facist.

He pulled the same 'stop the steal' crap in 2016, but since then has done precisely nothing to prevent vote fraud. If he actually believed it was happening, don't you think he would try to do something to stop it? If it was me I'd make it the primary plank of my administration's policy, but no, nothing.

Firstly he knows it's a lie, but anyway if he did reform the electoral system he would no longer have an excuse when he lost because he would be responsible for ensuring the election was fair. The guy and his stop the steal supporters clearly have demonstrated that they have nothing but contempt for democracy or the institutions that protect it.

They don't even care enough to reform or improve the system. Where are their attempts to do so? Their only policy is to usurp power and suppress the democratic process, and that's a very familiar strategy to anyone who has lived under facism. Check out Arnold Schwarzenegger's articles and videos on this, the guy grew up in post-war Austria and knows what he's talking about.

Damn, that article resonates a little bit too well with today. And your quote is spot on with regard to a yet unformed set of ideas that I'm struggling to reconcile.

It's not like Epik doesn't have its limits. They pulled 8kun and 9chan off. I find it weird that people act like it's a bulletproof registrar.

Always comforting to hear that a cesspit is not, in actual fact, bottomless.

As I understand it they only removed these after their underlying server provider banned Epik over it ...

They also still provide DNS for 8chan/8kun, and continue to host the daily stormer ...

Seems like they are only not bulletproof because they are a reseller and their vendors have limits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)#Hosting_of_fa...

As someone with an account, I don't suppose you could comment on whether I'm reading this article correctly - that the only MFA on offer is SMS based.

https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/enabling-disablin...

That would sure be interesting for such profile domains.

I have MFA enabled, so I authenticate with user/pass, then a OTP from an authenticator app, then an SMS code is sent.

Didn't a similar thing happen with CloudFlare? I seem to remember people (even here) saying that they were siding with Nazis because they took a position of "we aren't the arbiters."

They released a post saying they don't think there is any point blocking legal but nasty sites because their service is easily replaced. Its a lot easier to switch cdn than server host or get back in to the app store

It is, Monster specifies it was set up to be a bastion of the far right originally.

Almost as if reporting reality is secondary to furthering ideological narratives, and from Reuters no less.

Yeah it’s scary that “alt-right” is becoming doublespeak for freedom and privacy. Makes you wonder if it’s intentional, controlled opposition even, remove all freedom and privacy by vilifying a small group.

Other way around. Alt-right is attempting to co-opt "freedom of speech" the same way they've co-opted "patriot".

> Other way around. Alt-right is attempting to co-opt "freedom of speech" the same way they've co-opted "patriot".

This is it. Also, the main result of these efforts is mainly to stain the term try to co-opt. It only delivers a brief window of enhanced rhetorical effectiveness before everyone else gets wise, and starts treating those who use the term with a lot more skepticism.

I think you missed their point. Alt-right ceases to mean anything other than “bad people we need to stop”.

It's not right-wingers mocking people with "freeze peach!"

What's your point? "Mocking" is literally mimicking to make fun of. So, yes, of course it's not right-wingers mocking themselves with that phrase; it's people mocking the cries right-wingers are making.

Yes, mocking their affinity for free speech.

No, mocking their claim that it's about free speech.

I’m not sure I agree that if someone wants freedom of speech it means they are co-opting it. But it does seem like freedom of speech as a whole is being attacked because some people don’t like what a tiny fraction of people are saying.

Not scared of that at all. I think what you're looking for is a synonym. The "alt-" part of alt-right might be the doublespeak -- paleoconservatism genuinely resists the mainstream attempt to remove white supremacy from conservative platforms. The left's synonym is "deplorables", corresponding to approximately 25% of the American electorate -- not a small group at all. An effort to "remove all freedom and privacy" is hyperbolic, with only a few examples notorious in 20th century history. Are you expecting Parlor to enact a real-name-only policy?

The REAL left disagrees with the word deplorables - that was Hillary’s invention (and a stupid political move).

The real left is more concerned about economic and racial equity and fighting against he corporatocracy.

Sure, but the left leaning party that both exercises power and represents the left did use it. The left is responsible for that just as the right gets to own trump.

With that attitude you're already part of the alt-right and you didn't notice.

Or the alt-right is part of the left?

Honestly, not the same thing.

I think the “alt” part is in response to the current generation of conservatives who don’t really conserve anything because they are neocons.

Of course the left is very happy with the defanged right, so they call any actual conservative “alt”

That’s a good point: neocons separated conservatism from the political right. That wasn’t the consequence of alt-right ideas reaching the seat of power. Perhaps the part of the political right that’s not conservative and generally opposes democracy is kind of the home of the alt-right.

he sure does sound alt-right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Monster#Politics

Uhmmm... they’re very well known for this. It’s their bread and butter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)

If there is anyone far right on a platform, people will attempt to associate the entire platform with the far right to keep people away from it, thereby forcing the platform to kick those people off or lose business.

Then the scale shifts so that whoever is now furthest to the right is the new far right.

Often kicking anyone out who is not on the political left will be phrased not as censorship but as combating misinformation.

Did Google remove the link to the Parler site from its search results? I am sure I was able to just google it a week or so ago, when everyone became obsessed with it. If so, that's the level of censorship that doesn't get reported.

comes up on duckduckgo.com DEAD on google.com

DuckDuckGo uses Bing for search; which means the link is also alive on bing.com

How does that work? Does DDG have deals with Bing to allow them to do that?

Yes, they paid Microsoft to be able to access Bing's dataset.

I'm okay with this. Before, I was definitely using DDG less.

It's good to see Microsoft still keeping up the good fight.

"Dont be evil" seems like a distant alternative universe...

When Apple buys DDG later this year, it'll be back to the drawing board.

Yes, other search engines can pay for access to Bing's results. DDG isn't just straight Bing results, though, it compiles results from a number of different sources (including their own), with Bing being the primary source.

Yes they do.

The Bing API is actually open to anyone with a bank card but DDG has a specific deal to allow them to filter / sort results, to use ads not only from the Microsoft ads platform, and to skip the redirect link that records what the user click on.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis

For an esoteric term that I tried, the results are about same for the top half of the page, but then were quite different for bottom half. Which leads me to believe they use Bing but do not completely rely on it (at least not to order the results).

I thought DDG had its own search engine and used Bing for image search and a few other things.

DDG is Bing and Yandex.

According to Business Insider[1]:

"The results are aggregated from hundreds of sources, including DuckDuckGo's own web crawler, along with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, specialty services like Wolfram Alpha, and others."

DDG's help website[2]:

"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."

Clearly, they get their search results from a wide variety of sources including their own crawler. But it sounds like they do rely heavily on Bing.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-duckduckgo?op=1

2. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1

Comes up fine on https://private.sh too!

ooh that's a new one thanks

Look closer...

"Private.sh is a joint venture between Private Internet Access and GigaBlast."

PIA is generally regarded as not to be trusted since the sell off / sell out.

Private.sh is run by IFC and Gigablast.

That being said, the system is designed so as to not require trust in the front end. The JavaScript code is easy to read and ensures that queries are encrypted at the front end before passing thru a proxy to have its IP scrubbed. The engine then performs the query, encrypts the results and sends it back thru the proxy to the front end which decrypts and displays the results.

It's possible that extended downtime is enough to fall out of favor with Google's ranking algorithms.

They do trim sites quickly when they go down. During the SOPA blackouts, they turned this feature off for 24 hours to prevent dinging any participating sites.

Not that quickly. The fact that a site has many external links pointing to it would mean it would be very unlikely to drop out of search results for a very long time indeed.

I watched a CNN segment pressuring AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Roku, etc. to remove Newsmax and OANN from their broadcasting.

Politically you have folks on one side of the spectrum saying "your speech is disagreeable/fake/dangerous but you can say it"

Other side says "your speech is disagreeable/fake/dangerous and you should not be allowed to say it"

When avenues for open dialogue and discourse are no longer available, more violence ensues. I am surprised that otherwise well intentioned people appear to be missing this insight.

Ignoring ideology and human rights and focusing solely on practical effects there's 2 sides:

1. people who are already radicalized should have some place to talk so we can know what they are talking about and so they are more likely to talk instead of acting

2. people who can be radicalized - are, because there's places where they can encounter such ideas

I've never seen any scientific study estimating which effect is more important. From ideological POV I'm in favor of more free speech when in doubt.

I tend to agree.

What I neglected to say in my original comment was that the political camps tend to exaggerate the "dangerous rhetoric" of their opponents and downplay their own. This is especially true when the statements require some specific interpretation in order to be treated that way, since their plan spoken version is not in itself dangerous.

> I am surprised that otherwise well intentioned people appear to be missing this insight.

Because it's plain false. One of the lessons learned from the Weimarer Republic is that a democracy has to defend itself, that's the reason why modern days Germany has - by request and design from the US - laws to limit freedom of speech.

It is false because certain types of calls for violence and hate speech have the uncanny ability to mobilize people who would otherwise never think of being violent. There are psychological reasons why otherwise normal people can be drawn fairly easily to violence and de-humanizing their opponents. With a few well-designed suggestions at the right time you can easily cause lynchings like in the Reichskristallnacht.

Generally speaking, people in democratic societies far overestimate the force of their society's civility and culture. It takes but a scratch on the surface of society, and a threshold is reached that leads to a reign of terror. A recent example is the war in former Yugoslavia. Seemingly harmless family fathers in an advanced society started to torture opponents to death by raping them with steel pipes until they died of inner bleeding. They were encouraged by politicians.

Things like that can occur in any country within just a few months of conflict and unhindered "free speech." There are large groups in the US who dream of a violent revolution, openly advocate "race wars", and so on. It's very reasonable to take away their megaphones and social network speech amplifiers.

> that's the reason why modern days Germany has - by request and design from the US - laws to limit freedom of speech.

A point that cannot be made too often.

Additionally, the US military governor banned newspapers and then gave out licenses for publishing newspapers only to people the Americans deemed "politically reliable".

In France nazi memboribilia and imagery are illegal, as is holocaust denial. That's not the case in the USA which protects free speech. What's interesting is that France has a much bigger problem with holocaust denial whereas in the USA its sort of laughed at. I still think the approach to permit free speech is better.

> What's interesting is that France has a much bigger problem with holocaust denial whereas in the USA its sort of laughed at.

Sure, you're laughing about the Proud Boys and the gazillion other armed neonazi groups, until they storm the Capitol. Obviously no problem whatsoever.

I'm talking about holocaust denial as a serious published phenomenon among intellectuals. Not trying to downplay the serious right wing problem the US has. Sometimes trying to oppress these viewpoints paradoxically doesn't work.

However, this is not proof that laws limiting free speech are the cause of holocaust denial.

It could be the other way around. Therefore places where there's no holocaust denial, need no laws limiting free speech.

Yes, but Germany rides a very fine line and tends to err on the side of not banning speech.

A few examples: - HAIG was an association of former Waffen SS members who tried their best to whitewash their past before disbanding. Was not made illegal.[1] - There is a long list of Nazi associated symbols that are illegal and not illegal in Germany. Much effort was made to not blanket ban anything remotely associated with Nazis.[2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIAG [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

I always try to remember that my brain is essentially the same as the brains of the Auschwitz prison guard’s and that there is nothing special about me that would keep me from doing what they did. It is only civil society that prevents humans from being fully, horrifically, human. Civil society is a rare, most precious gift and it must be preserved.

This assumes that there is a good faith characterization applied fairly to all speech which calls for violence.

What you see in the United States is that this characterization is applied in bad faith based on one's political motives, and ignored in other situations.

There appear to be situations where "you need to fight" is taken literally when the speaker is an opponent, and taken metaphorically when the speaker is an ally.

This is all happening outside of a legal process, so there is no mechanism to ensure that this is happening according to any standards or principles. If you bring speech laws into the conversation, those are applied within a legal system, which would be designed in some way to prevent the arbitrary application of standards.

Charitable interpretations of the words of favoured public figures versus the worst possible interpretation of similar, perhaps even more benign statements, by public figures who are opposed. If there is an intention for laws to police speech, then they ought to be applied fairly, else they are the whims of whomever is in power to apply and enforce them. The media corporations (legacy and new) don't seem to be applying an equal standard to all speakers, which is their right, but it is important to discuss what happens when they exercise their rights in this manner.

This is nonsense. There are places everywhere to dialogue. Having an app removed is not an example of lack of dialogue, it's the same is removing a dangerous product from a shelf. it is a _recall_. You're also creating the false equivalency that one of those political sides would dialogue when they do not. Their actions have become extremist. So kindly quit creating a victim out of an app.

Cancel culture is predominantly a left-wing phenomenon. To say it bluntly: "the left" labels speech they disagree with as violent and clearly wants it banned.

"Extremism" is in the eyes of the beholder. We saw 6 months of violent insurrection by BLM and Antifa, which were organized on Twitter and Facebook. Apple, Google, and Amazon didn't ban either apps. People on the left called them "mostly peaceful protests."

The Jan 6 events were organized, shared, and streamed on Facebook and Twitter. None of the Jan 6th events were organized on Parler, yet Parler gets removed. See the problem?

My comment was not about Parler though.

"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Saying it's online is misleading. It's just a static landing page.

Yeah, https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 shows the hardware they've been asking vendors to provide.

I've never run a high-volume social media site, but I have to say that 70-100 DB servers each with 4 TB of storage and 96 GB feels like a bit much.

(On edit: Corey Quinn estimates it as half a million a month on AWS.)

This seems extreme especially if they're going for bare-metal. Even a single one of these DB servers would handle a lot of traffic if they're bare-metal.

When it comes to running Postgres on 70-100 servers I'm also not sure, unless they're doing some sharding at the application level, I'd expect the overheads of replication and resulting network traffic to be insane if they're merely replicating across all of them.

Their whole website should be able to run on a handful of these machines; their main cost and resource usage would be hosting & converting uploaded media, not the DB of app servers.

Maybe they are trying to bring up multiple sites (ie. AWS regions) for redundancy. If you have 10 "regions" then maybe hardware requirements look a bit more reasonable (7-10 DB servers each, etc.)

Is needing servers with 96 vCPU's and 768 GB of RAM each...normal?

I'm a programmer, but I do mobile dev, and that amount of resources for a single machine sounds comically high to me. I thought modern websites usually had more 'normally' specced servers and just distributed the load across a ton of them?

These requirements are insane. By comparison, Stack Overflow had 25 servers in 2016 [1]:

    - 2 database servers (with half that RAM and 24 cores each)
    - 2 redis servers
    - 3 elasticsearch servers
    - 11 web servers
    - 4 load balancers
    - 3 service workers

[1]https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

Can anyone recommend a Coursera/EdX or other online resource that goes over the basics of designing and setting up such kinds of high-performance server systems ?

I honestly don't think you'll find a course that covers this. The SO devs (and others) have kept a blog going for years with the type of information you're after. The search term is "mechanical sympathy."

Language/framework also matters. You're not going to pull this off with a backend based on a framework that gives no damns about performance. Rust, C# (bleeding edge), Java and C come to mind as good candidates.

SO doesn't have the content requirements of a modern Social Network: images, video, and streaming are huge factors. Especially with modern smartphone capabilities.

I remember reading a few days ago that their code was atrocious. Perhaps this is an extreme example of the costs of never refactoring? I can believe that the cost of spaghetti code compounds quickly.

I can believe that the company who named resources sequentially, enforced no security validation for viewing posts/media, and didn't strip metadata from media uploads also didn't have engineers especially skilled in optimization.

I agree that the other points indicate bad engineering. But not stripping metadata can be a intentional. E.g. some smaller image hosters do that to preserve files bit-identically. Some forums with heavy emphasis on minimal moderation take the position that opsec is the poster's responsibility.

I wrote a program that ran on that type of computer once. It was real-time log analysis. There was a lot of data coming in, and there was a need for a globally-consistent datastore for the results. Solution? Put it all in RAM. If the single replica crashes, you can just read all the inputs again. Some extra capacity existed for that, and some other system already stored the raw logs to disk durably. The terabyte of in-memory data just made queries tolerable enough to run every few seconds and display in alert/chart form.

I didn't keep the system in this state for very long, but for version 1.0 it was just the thing -- idea to production in a short period of time. Eventually it did move to a more distributed system, as log volume (and usefulness) increased, and we had more time to deal with the details. It was mostly nice to not have to reprocess data after releases -- I could do them in the middle of the day without anyone caring.

My biggest worry when writing this was that 40Gbps of network bandwidth wouldn't be enough, but it was fine in the early stages. 40Gbps is a lot of data.

I'm not sure I'd say it's a great sign that you need a single beefy machine to run something, but it's a tradeoff worth considering. I found the distributed system version easier to operate, but it did constrain what sort of features you could add. I think we got it right, but it's easy to code yourself into a corner when you have encoded assumptions deep into the system. Best to avoid that until you're sure your assumptions are right.

Avery wrote up some details of the system: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190216 His idea, but I wrote most of the code ;)

To be clear (if the image is accurate), they weren't asking for one beefy DB instance with 96 vCPUs and 768GB RAM. They were asking for 70-100 instances with those requirements.

Sounds like it was written in Ruby.

I wonder if twitter used so much hardware when it was on rails.

Hey,

Your website's portal is down, I tried tweeting and email but I'm not getting a response. Just wanna make sure everything is ok

I don't know what 96 vCPUs means in terms of real cores, and my server knowledge is a bit old at this point, but here goes.

There's a benefit to running on fewer servers. If you can make good use of many core machines and gobs of ram, it makes sense to go up to at least reasonably large machines. For Intel, dual socket Xeon is widely available and not obscenely priced; for AMD, I haven't seen a lot of dual socket Epyc, but 64 cores in a single socket is quite a lot. 768 GB seems big, but if you can put it into one machine instead of 12 machines with 64 GB, that helps reduce maintenance and communications overhead.

I ran systems with dual Intel Xeon 2690v4, a total of 28 cores/56 threads, and we put up to 768GB in some of them; that was several years ago, you can get a lot bigger now.

Databases love ram, and social sites make a lot of queries, so it makes sense a bit. I don't know what their usage numbers are, or what their site looks like; I'm just guessing based on general description. The traffic numbers didn't look too big, but types of request makes a big difference there; serving media is relatively easy, serving comments threads and highlighting your friends is trickier.

(Serving media with transcoding is a lot less easy though)

Seems like a lot. I remember Stackoverflow posting their hardware setup in 2016 IIRC and it was just a handful of servers compared to this.

Quite: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

I'm guessing these aren't their current needs, but rather where they anticipate growing too.

These numbers are insane, but the CEO of Parler is a former AWS employee, so I would guess he knows somewhat what he is doing.

Former AWS employee after being employed for <3 months.

Holy wow..

To me, this looks like the contents of an RFP where the submitter doesn't actually want any vendor to be able to meet the requirements.

I wonder if it is for the anti-trust lawsuit. Claim that nobody else can provide what they need?

This seems like a good guess

But wouldn't that be easily thrown out / defeated if they weren't consuming those resources on AWS? Which seems easy to prove in court...

That didn't stop any of the election lawsuits.

Yes it did, they stopped. They started, were clearly bullshit, and then died in the courts - exactly as the system intended.

It wouldn't matter for the anti-trust lawsuit, since they're alleging that Amazon conspired with Twitter to kick off Parler because Parler would steal Twitter's market share. (Well, trying to allege, because they don't even manage to allege that any further than "Amazon hosts Twitter" and implying there's no other reason Amazon would kick Parler off, despite spending half the brief complaining that they're being kicked off for being conservative.)

This is an absolutely bonkers amount of resources for the functionality and audience they have. We got our first 5 million users on 4 used PowerEdge nodes and our first 30 million with 2 bare-metal DB servers.

Good god what is Parler doing?

Seeing how their software is very far from being secure...it's probably very far from optimized, too.

They're running Wordpress, which is famous for scaling badly to the extent that there are large companies like WPEngine.com devoted to doing nothing except working around that.

How and why would you run a social network in Wordpress?

I'd guess that they hired any programmer they could find to do some PoC work (who made a horrible choice) then the rest is sunken cost fallacy.

A lot of people like the back-end admin panel of WordPress and its WYSIWYG feature, so a bunch of other people have created a lot of themes/mods/plugins around WP because of that.

If you run a small website it's all fine, otherwise you have to deal with performance issues and WP limitations because you've decided to build a social network on top of a blogging engine.

They're probably intending on selling their own services as an AWS replacement for people whom are 'censored'.

They erroneously hosted their free speech site on AWS. Smart people are not employed by the company.

The reason is that they're running their social media site using Wordpress (of all things, why?!?!?!), so it's probable that it will scale horrendously. The data breach happend with Parler was allegedly due to an exploit in one of the Wordpress plugins.

Ok, we've replaced website with home page in the title above.

A static placeholder doesn’t really count as “back online.” Their domain name found a home—that’s old news at this point. The jury is still out on whether (or where) they will find hosting.

I’m calling this one misleading clickbait. No, they are not back online.

I know of a web host who has tried to reach Parler to find out what resouces they need.

This whole ordeal motivated me to join the fediverse and I'm not looking back.

I've only heard of the fediverse and mastodon on HN. I can't help but think it's one of those things that ONLY has traction with HN types and that the mass of people and community that makes regular social media what it is today will never be seen over there.

Good. Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization. Hopefully whatever that makes regular social media "what it is today" _will_ never be seen over there.

>Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization.

My experience has been the exact opposite; in fact, the name calling and polarization (in particular polarized instances) is off the charts. This is compounded by the fact that some instances host certain porn others instances don't even want to cache, and many instances have block lists against the very permissive instances (not surprising, going by the Scott Alexander quote up thread as a testament to the kind of 'witches' in these instances).

There's some intelligent content on Fedi. Most of the content is just as vapid as regular social media, but written by a different group of people.

The internet at first only had traction by HN types, and we had the same hope for it.

As they say, ‘the future is now, albeit sparsely distributed’

That's not the case at all (thank god). Most of the posts I see on the federated timeline are LGBT-related and silly Twitter-like jokes.

I tried a GNUSocial site and got nothing but spammers and hackers uploading photos to my site. I ran out of disk space, and had to shut it down. Moderation of such a site with just one person is a nightmare.

Technical users seem to be the minority there, unless you choose an instance looking for them.

I've only checked out mastodon (which is supposedly part of fediverse) but it looks like a slower version of Twitter with a tiny fraction of Twitter's userbase - most of it already doubleposting on Twitter anyway. And most sites with it i've seen look like they want to sell me some service and feel faceless and soulless. I've considered at some point setting up my own instance for my own use since from what i can understand you can configure to 'fetch' messages from other instances, but (at least at the time) the system requirements for what is essentially passing around tiny snippets of text are so high that it is ridiculous. Then i thought perhaps a desktop client would provide the same functionality but the joinmastodon site has a bunch of them without any information about what they are, who makes them, if they're safe or whatever and the sites of a couple that i checked are again that "faceless, souless, perhaps trying to sell you something or sell your data to someone" variety.

So i lost interest.

The three first clients in the joinmastodon site:

Tusky: https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky

Fedilab: https://framagit.org/tom79/fedilab/

SubwayTooter: https://github.com/tateisu/SubwayTooter

All of them are foss and developed by a single person or a small team.

As for the system requirements. Mastodon might be a bit heavy but you could try another server software with activitypub support.

I wonder who they're hosting with now? Interesting that it wasn't reported. I'd assume the hosting company would want to shout it out that they "support free speech" or something like that.

Possibly the same outfit that hosts Gab: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad7dp/parler-finds-refuge-w...

I thought Gab was hosted on its own infrastructure, but used epik as its registrar.

I think Torba was gloating about it as one point.

Yes, Epik is just the registrar for Gab. They use Cloudflare as a DDoS/frontend, and have their own ASN, which is supposedly where everything is really hosted (https://bgp.he.net/AS42651).

Epik. But I wouldn't necessarily count on them to stay there. Epik hosts thedonald.win, and recently told that site it needs to get its content under control or it will be kicked off [1], so there are limits to what Epik is willing to host.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808529

> Epik.

It looks like Parler transferred their domain name to Epik (as a registrar), but are not currently using them for hosting.

As recently as a few days ago, Epik explicitly stated that they have no plans to host Parler (https://mynorthwest.com/2461882/sammamish-epik-parler/). That said, since the site is behind "ddos-guard.net," it's difficult to tell who their actual host is.

I saw a couple articles or so that said Epik was hosting it, but it is possible that those authors just saw that Epik was the registrar and confused that with being the host.

Little bit of history on DDoS-Guard:

- https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/ddos-guard/ (VanwaTech relationship) - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/15/8kun-8cha... (End of VanwaTech relationship)

Quick check... yeah, doesn't look like 8kun is using DDoS-Guard any more.

What company provides connectivity to Epik?

Based on what I saw on Parler during an admittedly limited review of it, I don’t think they have to worry very much, if actual content is the issue that got them killed in the first place. I didn’t see much of the “scary” content that some people claim was on there. There were more links to positive news about Trump and conservatives in general than you would find on a site like Twitter, but I would certainly hope that isn’t the kind of thing that will get you destroyed overnight by the world’s largest companies, even in the current anti-conservative environment. I have seen far worse things on Reddit, from both sides of the aisle - and last time I checked, Reddit was still online.

It appears to me that these companies colluded to kill Parler not because of widespread horrible content (because it simply wasn’t there), but rather because they wanted to strangle any chance of Trump being able to communicate on any form of social media until after Biden takes office. As an added “bonus,” they probably also prevented millions of people from jumping ship from Twitter to Parler, because after this week far fewer people will even care about the situation.

FWIW you can get a feel for the content right now - I can only assume Parker’s content is on par with thedonald.win, which is still up. Right now there is few literal calls to violence, but racism, conspiracy theories, and extremist views are the majority of the content.

Prior to the deplatforming that content likely was.. more violent.

I can only assume Parker’s content is on par with thedonald.win

I have never frequented either of them, and don't really have any desire to. I basically checked out Parler because CNN told me not to. But relative to Twitter and Reddit, it seemed pretty tame to me.

According to one analysis[1], it's anything but tame. The word cloud[2] kind of says it all.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/politics/a-very-disturbin...

[2] https://imageproxy.themaven.net/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.saymedi...

I had a {troll} account on there - so I was there everyday. I disagree with your assessment and certainly saw posts calling for violence with essentially every comment on the post supporting it.

When you first signup you get connected for a few big names like Hannity, and the content is like what you'd see on Fox News (or really, News Max to be honest). Once you get past that layer it quickly spirals.

Regarding reddit...they did take down /r/The_Donald (and prob others, don't know off the top of my head)

If you go into the darkest corners of any of these platforms, including Facebook, you’ll see objectionable content from extremists. But when I went on there, I just poked around, as an average user would. As you point out, there was a fair amount of news and commentary from well-known conservative networks and personalities. While the general rule holds true - if you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it - most people wouldn’t go searching to connect with extremists and wouldn’t find the “quickly spiraling” content you describe. I’m sure it was there, as it is on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook (in much larger numbers). But I would argue that they were no worse than the others.

There are plenty of calls to violence even on the front pages. But those calls to violence are always against "bad people", so it's like "good hatred".

...disagree. If you click on the comments on the well known conservative personalities that Parler sends you by default as an "average user', it's all right there. There's no need to search.

How much call for violence do you see in the comment section on reddit's default frontpage as an "average user"?

They have a problem with thedonald but host thedailystormer and bitchute? lol

A DNS record lookup points to ddos-guard.net which provides both hosting and DDOS protection (like cloudflare) and is based in the Netherlands.

I don't think they care much about Parler or free speech for that matter. They might not care much beyond the likely big hosting bill they are being paid. Free market at work, nothing to see here.

ARIN Reverse Whois ties the IP block to LACNIC, out of ... *edit not Belize, when I checked Montevideo Uruguay

Looks like Russia to me (Rostov-on-Don). Where are you seeing the Netherlands?

344019, г. Ростов-на-Дону, ул. Максима Горького, д. 276, этаж 5, офис 11.

from https://ddos-guard.net/ru/info/contacts

It looks like the website is proxied via a DDoS protection company called DDOS-GUARD https://gwhois.org/190.115.31.151

It looks like the website is being served from an Ubuntu server running nginx/1.18.0 https://parler.com/404

The nameservers point to Epik, so at least the DNS is run by them. The actual host is behind ddos-guard, so they may/may not be hosting the data with them or another provider.

As Epik seems to focus on shared hosting, and LAMP stack style applications and parler was using a proprietary DB in the last offering, they might reasonably have the actual hosting somewhere else.

Edit: Typo

A proprietary DB? Do you know which one? I saw a tweet that I thought said they were using Postgres. Just curious.

Scylla Enterprise [0] [1], which is a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL database, though I think that they were probably using the DynamoDB API shim to talk to it. The non-enterprise version is open source, but fewer features.

[0] https://www.scylladb.com/product/scylla-enterprise/

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/14/it-could-be-neve...

A company owned by two Russian “businessmen.”

Well, if hosting Snowden makes the Russkis righteous, then hosting Parler must be fine, too. It seems that Americans who speak against narratives find friends there? Ironic, to say the very least.

If Snowden is to be believed --and I personally think he is-- he was transiting through Russia to South America after fleeing Hong Kong and we all remember the forced landing of the official plane of the President of Bolivia. That seems very different than the coziness of certain Americans and what appear to be members of the Putin regime.

Just pointing out that snowden's passport was cancelled on 20130622 and that he flew out of hk on 20130623. It's not an unreasonable speculation that he planned to wind up in Russia, putting on a convincing show in the process.

A better hypothesis would be that Russia was one of the only countries that would accept an arrival with a cancelled passport (and could provide a reasonable degree of protection against rendition by US agents).

I don't believe it is possible to fly from HK to South America without passing through the US or New Zealand, whereas Snowden probably could have travelled from Russia to Cuba if Putin didn't find it politically advantageous to keep him as a trophy.

Yes, your hypothesis is a better fit, and makes fewer assumptions. Perhaps the arrangements with Russia were made hurriedly while Snowden was hiding in HK, days prior to departing, as some reports suggest.

However, Snowden had been stealing classified intel premeditatively for a long period of time, and had contact with actors who had the knowledge and contacts to plan such a ruse in advance. Given his high intelligence and exacting personality, haphazardly leaking to the press from HK prior to obtaining asylum seems to be out of character.

I do believe strongly that Snowden would have told elaborate, pre-fabricated lies, if it were to his benefit.

> haphazardly leaking to the press from HK prior to obtaining asylum seems to be out of character.

His original plan, supposedly[1], was to remain in HK and fight extradition to the US. It wouldn't have taken the US government long to notice he was missing from his job and had travelled to Hong Kong without approval, so it was not particularly haphazard for him to start sharing his story openly as soon as he was in HK.

> had contact with actors who had the knowledge and contacts to plan such a ruse in advance.

It's not clear how the deal with Russia was brokered, but it's possible that the Beijing government didn't want to sour relations with the US by letting him stay in HK, as reported by the New York Times[2]:

> “Behind the door there was definitely some coordination between Hong Kong and Beijing,” said Jin Canrong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.

That also makes sense of the ridiculous story about HK rejecting the US arrest warrant request due to the US getting Snowden's name wrong.[3]

Having to arrange travel, on short notice, from HK to a country that could preserve Snowden's safety from US capture, and meet with approval from Beijing, would severely limit his options, even if there were no other concerns, and it is possible that assurances were given to Snowden about the possibility of onward travel, which were later broken. It would certainly have been unwise for Snowden to publicly call out that he had been tricked and betrayed by Putin. Instead, he claims that the US cancelled his passport to deliberately trap him in Moscow, so they could portray him as a Russian spy[4], which also seems to match what we know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-...

[3] https://www.news.com.au/technology/hong-kong-says-us-documen...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Russia

They're hosted by DDOS-GUARD CORP in Belize: https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/parler.com

Can a social media platform survive being banned from the duopoly of the two main mobile app stores?

I'd say a good amount of reddit users use their mobile browser rather than us the app because the app is terrible. So to me, the answer is yes.

I use the app. It's fine for reading comments -- which is most of the reddit experience.

Use the website just as a middle finger to reddit for constantly pestering me to use their app. The web still works fine thank you.

I use relay and it's awesome, no ads and just better than their own app.

They are making the mobile website terrible on purpose so people would get the app

I use the mobile browser versions of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I dropped the apps a long time ago. So yeah, one can easily survive without the app stores.

I doubt it. A small number of developers and enthusiasts might use the mobile versions, but most people won't. Google and Apple are currently gatekeepers and they're apparently cooperating.

I see a lot of people arguing about whether or not there is a bias to conservative accounts being banned. Is there a way to get the information about what accounts were banned (via their API maybe)? That would be the obvious way to decide if it is true or not. Though I guess they will delete a lot of the data associated with such accounts.

Anyone else notice the label above the monitor (in the video) with a 4 digit pin clearly visible? Top notch security...

This is why a good, working web app is important even if you also publish a mobile app.

Rosa Parks should have just started her own bus company.

Odd Go (game) allusion, but it keeps suggesting itself to me these days.

In Go, the object is to get two 'eyes', or _meh_, which stabilizes a structure.

Often getting two _meh_ first is almost (but not always) the same as winning. (IIRC; I haven't played in years.)

OK, so the punchline is: everyone has two _meh_ now.

Every group. No matter how ridiculous.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from social consequence. It doesn't apply to private institutions. Ever. End of discussion.

What should be discussed is whether or not Twitter and Facebook have crossed into the "public utility" domain. I mean, twitter literally facilitate and handover a POTUS account that reaches hundreds of millions of you Americans.

It feels like Americans won't do that though because the idea of talking to the other side is unimaginable.

But twitter and facebook have incredible power over the public, and I don't think it's crazy to suggest a regulator

I think what people don’t really get is that Facebook, Twitter, etc are basically broadcast mediums. They’re not really individual communication tools, nor are they just public utilities like phone lines or internet services.

Instead in many ways they’ve replaced TV for how many people receive news and information about the world. One or few people are able to broadcast information to millions and even billions.

If we look back to the role of the FCC for example, we see the concept of Broadcast licenses. These licenses have also come with content restrictions notwithstanding the First Amendment which have held up in court. On top of that you’ve also had the FCC established rules that limited national shares of broadcast ownership in order to ensure diversification in media.

All of this has suddenly been sidestepped online, and it seriously needs a rethink ASAP.

I'd argue here that they're basically the public square of our time, just that law is slow to move here.

the difference between a government and a private institution is just the amount of power they have. There are places in the world run by unrecognized militia, who of course do censor free speech when they can. It's still censorship, although they are not "true governments". So, if we have a monopoly (oligopoly) on the control over flow of information by big tech, this is effectively censorship. And if the laws don't apply to them formally, then maybe there should be new laws for that.

They are part of the public domain, but there is no oversight to their power and little public recourse.

I'm betting they host on Mindgeek then get some racks from Oxide on the downlow and Brian Cantril gets all ranty.

What does this mean and why is this Brian guy allegedly throwing a fit?

It's a bit of a weird comment but I've had similar thoughts about what the Oxide Computer Company is doing could be a good use-case for Parler. They're doing some awesome stuff around providing software to help manage on-prem infrastructure. They also have a fantastic podcast [0]. I don't claim to know what Brain Cantrill (one of the founders of Oxide) thinks about Parler's situation or their content but from some of his talks you can tell he's an incredibly ethically conscious person, so the commenter above is likely assuming he's not a fan of Parler.

[0] https://oxide.computer/podcast/

Bryan has talked about how he supported it when Joyent dropped 8chan and, if my memory serves me right, that he wished they'd done it sooner. In the same conference talk he muses on the responsibility of platform owners/providers.

Yes, it was actually Gab -- and I talked about it in a talk on ethics on software engineering.[1] As you indicate, that talk captures my feelings on the matter, so I'll let it speak for itself...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wtvQZijPzg#t=29m52s

Ah, yes. I must've skimmed an article a little too quickly. Thanks for the great talk, that certainly made me reconsider some things when I first watched it.

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