Parler CEO says he was fired by board
reuters.com
reuters.com
this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide privacy.
if this was truly their mission, then their platform was already doomed, and a full housecleaning of most of the leadership should probably be done, not just the CEO.
I don't care what side of a political spectrum you come from, or whether you support the site's mission or what it became, these failures should be unacceptable in any company.
I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.
In some minority of cases, though, they would. Abusive ex sending you messages over discord? Yeah, those might be evidence especially when both parties are saying different things. This is the most common example I can think of, but I'm sure there are others. Heck, even if someone wanted to reminisce about days gone by... they should have the right to do so in conversations they were involved in.
They are actually deleted, unlike many other platforms. If not, the problem described here would not arise in the first place: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...
If I send you an email, same thing, if it survives for such a long time. Does Google/any ISP also own it?
If I send you a SMS, same thing, I bet it won't survive. Does the phone company also own it?
If I write you on a social network, do you and I own the message or does the social network own it? There are ToS that we might not have read.
While the receiver of a letter on paper certainly owns the letter she doesn't own its contents. The copyright of the letter remains with the author.
So you can frame the letter and hang it on your wall you violate the authors copyright if you publish it without authorization.
To the down-voter: could you please elaborate with what you got the problem so we could potentially discuss it?
i.e. John Does said, "Hello world" -> [Removed] said, "Hello world"
If you disabled the account yourself, then you should be able to recover it and then press the delete button yourself. If it was disabled for a TOS violation or for legal reasons then they might have a gdpr exemption to deleting the data[0] (NAL).
As for messages, those aren’t deleted - while this might be legal (anonymization is seen as compliant with the right to be forgotten) they really should make it an option, otherwise people end up using scripts which do it for them[1].
0: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
I use https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages, yeah. :)
Discord probably doesn’t do that though
The authors' moral right alone should allow any content authored by them to be un-published. Ever heard of a paper being pulled?
You example of bullying is top notch but what about doxing concerns? Plenty of people delete their "content" without being bullies.
e.g. purchase history, legal agreements, etc.
Deletion is another matter though.
Don’t worry though, if you request to have it deleted I’m sure they’ll remove the link to the S3 url from their database. :/
It is not logical to both present something as FACT and then also admit it is speculation.
If I flip a coin 1000 times it will probably land on heads at least once.
Thousands of huge corporations have continuously been caught up in data dumps, hacks, insider schemes, etc. Especially with data that has no liability. This case is statistically unlikely to be any different.
Now if I had made this up in a world where experian, Adobe, capital one, etc didn’t happen, then I could see where you’re coming from. But I’m not, this is the world we live in and it’s rightfully why people get upset when companies suck in yet more PII.
Anyone from DO reading this: I hope you shred those photos.
It was always the same script: first they purposefully confuse it with account deactivation and they confirm your removal, but formulated in a way in which it could also mean deactivated, then, after you answer to the ticket that what you meant is actual deletion, not deactivation, they tell you that they forwarded your request to someone who will delete your account and that they will write you once it's done. No change in approach changed their script in any way.
> Ich habe deine Anfrage an jemanden aus meinem Team weitergeleitet, der dich dabei besser unterstützen kann. Der entsprechende Mitarbeiter wird sich in Kürze bei dir melden. Falls du in der Zwischenzeit weitere Fragen oder Bedenken hast, kannst du gerne auf diese E-Mail antworten
... then I waited six weeks and back to square one, since I could always still login to get the deactivated message. The offer to answer on the same ticket again is apparently untrue. ..at least they never answered again on the same ticket.
What helped was not contacting support but instead pasting a comically formal erasure request (Article 17 of the GDPR) from the internet to dpo@airbn..
As far as I am able to validate, this did it.
1. As far as I was able to see, this:
> If you want to permanently close and delete your account, you can do this yourself through Manage your data.
is not true. There was only a button to deactivate the account. I think that they show different pages depending on the user country and just didn't add account deletion for German accounts.
2. Once an account is deactivated, you need to contact them through /help/contact-us/ to reactivate it, but since you are not logged in, it immediately forwards you to /help/contact-us/logged-out, which tells you to either login or just browse their fluffy web help labyrinth. Google told me to use terms@airbnb.com, which was how I ended up reaching support. Support was a dead-end though. They claim to do it, but they apparently do not actually delete the account.
3. Even if it would've been possible, they claim to want to "verify your identity for security purposes" prior to acting on your deletion request (which I could not do anyway, as the function was absent).
Hence, the GDPR method seems superior, given that it's actually available and they don't force you through an "identity verification", which is probably just there as additional friction to deter users from account deletion.
Exactly. They weren't really interested in true privacy or free speech, they were just using those keywords to attract customers.
I think you're taking an overly negative tone with someone who appears to agree with you.
GGP: It's a bad choice, but it saved a bunch of money.
GP: I don't think it even saved much money, percentage wise, did it?
And then your reply takes a very negative tone, as if the GP is suggesting that some amount of cost savings would have justified it. The GP is not suggesting that some amount of cost savings justifies what was done.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
And didn't exactly perform adequate moderation based on the rules they did have:
I had thought that what would kill them would be that those echo chambers rely on an enemy to be opposed to. Without it, they would just get bored and wander off. That's what they like about public forums such as Facebook and Twitter. They're not perfect echo chambers. They're opportunities to have their echoes amplified, then go off to fight the good fight against their dastardly foes.
Beating up on the left-wing trolls should be fun. Sure, some of the left-wing troll masquerade as right-wing trolls to throw people off, but really, it's hard to tell the difference. Poe's Law is more and more prescient.
Their moderation was to show post to 5 users and go with their decision. It was guaranteed to create bubble.
We should not use "free speech" as euphemism for "arbitrary racist, arbitrary inciting right wing speech". Free speech means those opposing right wing are equally unmoderated.
If anything it was less free speech than Twitter
Perhaps they aimed too high too fast (dunno, never even went there), but I just can't bring myself to make beginner-shaming a core pillar of my criticism.
Small or "beginner" web payment companies are required to think more responsibly about user data; the state of Parler in January 2021 was ridiculous and users who were effectively doxxed should be outraged.
Teach and guide them to not make things open to the public. Mentor the next gen engineers on security. For god sakes check a jwt claim...
What is it you think was wildly irresponsible exactly? Not stripping exif data? Facebook did that too. And has had many account takeover bugs.
There's beginner shaming and then there's going above and beyond with intrusive PII collection.
Clowns.
[0] As others pointed out in sibling comments, these people are not "beginners" by any stretch of the imagination.
They're clowns, and deserve to be laughed at as such.
The other security faux pas was that they did not scrub GPS metadata from images or videos at all.
it has no or almost no connection to job performance of the C suite.
FWIW, I agree there is zero question that he needed to be sent packing immediately.
Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stunts. Looking forward to whatever the new solution is.
I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do this and they are just toxic cesspools. The idea of an online "public square" that isn't that sounds impossible. How many public squares are reaching millions of people instantly?
Parler was more than happy to moderate speech, even political speech, as is their right as the platform creator. Their breathless claims about being free speech absolutists is absolute nonsense.
I'd like to know the answer to this, too. I wonder if the reason why they turn into toxic cesspools is precisely because the only people who use free speech platforms are the people who were kicked off the others.
If you accept that this is plausible, then is it feasible that the more reasonable folks that just want to talk about politics in a less divisive manner (or maybe not even politics at all!) might help bring down the temperatures if everyone was swimming in the same pool instead of just a few extreme viewpoints forced to move into the same swamp? (NIMBY!)
This would also be in keeping with that classically liberal axiom, "The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence." (Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the Democratic justice who is credited with creating the "Right to Privacy" in 1890: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Brandeis)
You don't have to wonder, we've seen this time and time again with virtually every open community. Without tireless moderation, the swamp grows.
In other words, the majority of people who use free speech platforms have already answered your question: they've shown themselves unable to co-exist with (a much larger number of) reasonable folks and were kicked out.
Suppose that the dominant platforms (e.g. Facebook) are not free speech platforms. They boot off a hundred thousand people. 10% of them actually deserved it and are militant jackasses who ruin everything.
Now someone else creates a "free speech" platform. Everybody is allowed in. Well, 80% of the initial users are going to be a subset of the ones who got kicked off of the incumbent platform, and 10% of those are jackasses, so your platform is now 8% jackasses. That's a huge percentage and it's going to immediately turn into a dumpster fire because the jackasses will drive out ordinary people and become an even larger percentage. There are plenty of instances of this happening, e.g. Voat.
But suppose you go the other way. Somehow get a large number of ordinary users. Now the jackasses are only 0.5% of the users. Combine this with something like a voting system so that nothing is ever actually removed, but spam and fascism end up at the bottom of the feed where nobody sees them by accident.
That has the potential to work. The key is to somehow get enough users to dilute the jackasses before they take over, e.g. because the incumbents overreached and a large number of non-jackasses are moving in protest.
I’d love to see a decentralized free speech platform. I’m no blockchain evangelist, but it would seem like such technology could be used to build a real online “public square” as you say.
Exactly. Alt-left speech was not welcome on parler - only alt-right speech.
I will, however, point out, that much of the alt-right is terrified of the antifa boogieman... And that Parler, the platform of free speech was quite happy to ban anything that smelled of antifa... As well as much that could, be described as moderate leftism.
Its tolerance for speech only extends to a very narrow slice of the political spectrum.
Patterns of negative conversation defined by fewer quality reply posts get negative points and vice versa for positive or patterns to be encouraged.
As things evolve and how people respond changes these patterns can change.
With free speech, as defined now, low quality arguments hit the same bar as high quality ones.
Yes we should strive to emphasise high quality arguments (even though I fear this is a near impossible task programmatically) but this is not what free speech means.
Tldr: according to free speech the dummies and assholes deserve to be heard.
That we're even having such a high-quality discussion now really speaks volumes to the seemingly effortless way in which the HN team has developed into a great place to have such a conversation or debate. To be honest, I do not think that HN is always fair to everyone, but it does seem like the moderators do try to be.
With that said: Twitter and FB have wildly missed the mark.
Let me give this a shot. There are two types of content that need to be removed: (1) spammy content that readers themselves don't want to see, and (2) illegal content that society doesn't want anybody to see. I think these two need to be addressed separately.
Illegal content includes copyright infringement, violations of NDAs, libel, slander, perverting the course of justice (violations of court orders), incitements to violence, consipracy to commit a crime, exposing troop movements, and in general anything that directly causes damages which could be assessed and recovered in a court of law. Racism, sexism, homophobia, "hate speech", advocacy of violence, falsehoods, trickery, promoting very dangerous ideas, lying about (or being incorrect about) vaccines, lying (or being incorrect) about who won an election, offensive speech, and jokes of all kinds are, at least in America, all forms of protected speech.
Illegal content must be taken down when ordered by a court to do so. AFAIK the platform isn't responsible to take anything down unless ordered by a court to do so, but I'm probably just ignorant -- PLEASE dont take legal advice from some random armchair pontificator on the internet like myself. Section 230(c)(1) protects the platform as they are not deemed to be the speaker.
Most people are terrible judges of whether something is illegal or not. For example, many congresspeople think Trump's Jan 6 speech was illegal (it wasn't) because it incited violence (it didn't). It didn't even advocate for violence. The idea that it was illegal is so far beyond Brandenberg to be laughable if it wasn't so serious... but back to the point... Attempts to proactively take down illegal content will invariably take down some legal content, probably lots of legal content, which is why a true "ideal" free speech platform would not attempt to do this... one must have humility and recognize one's near utter inability to determine what is and what is not illegal to any reasonable degree of accuracy during times of political strife like we find ourselves in today. The popular opinion right now is that all of us should enact justice upon each other according to our own personal interpretation of justice... which is just nuts when you think about it. Let's leave law enforcement up to the law enforcement professionals.
The first issue, the spammy content, would then be handled the same way we handle email spam. Plug into the spam filtering service of your choice, subscribe to rulesets, or write your own. I don't know of any platform that lets you plug in your own moderation, and so that's where I think they've all gone wrong - they either get flooded with spam or antisemites and become nearly useless to nearly everybody, or else some moderation team thinks it is their role to filter spam on behalf of the community and the community gets pissy that they filtered the wrong things. These two extremes are both wrong. Users can filter their own content if given the right tools. BTW, Section 230(d) requires providers notify their customers that parental control protections are commercially available... it puts the onus on the users to solve this for themselves... even way back when that law was written.
I'm going to add a third issue, flooding. That has a content neutral solution: throttling.
Of course you are correct, but that doesn't make me factually wrong. You are talking about publishing illegal content. But (c)(1) "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
And I missed DMCA takedowns.
With this statement you are implying one of two things:
* You are very unhappy with AWS for de-platforming them
* You think AWS should not have been allowed to do so
If it's the first one, well, you are free to treat that however you like. Stop using AWS yourself, especially if you now fear AWS will do this to you. Don't do business with other companies that use AWS -- you can even block all AWS IPs at your firewall. Tell everyone how bad they are, and encourage others to boycott them too. If AWS continues to de-platform customers that don't seem to deserve it, this will get even easier over time.
If it's the second one though, that raises all kinds of tricky issues. If you run anything that allows user content, and a user posts something that hurts you, are you now obligated to host it (leaving aside illegal content and the tricky jurisdiction issues that go with that)? What if other major customers or users start leaving because you're hosting said content -- are you just supposed to let your site/business effectively die? Are you also forbidden from raising the price to that harmful user to $1-trillion-per-month (since that effectively is a way to "de-platform" them), and if so, what is the maximum price you're allowed to charge and who figures that out?
Twitter and Partler are content platforms, AWS is not.
They are an infrastructure, not a content company and there is a material difference.
Ford, GM and Telsa collectively refusing to sell to XYZ customers for whatever reasons gets out of hand very quickly.
'You can just use another service' generally doesn't work as an argument in oligarchic situations. If AWS style services were as varied as grocery stores, maybe, but they are not.
Asking a customer to stick to the rules they agreed to and eventually ending the business relationship when the customer chooses not to is hardly a 'partisan act'. Parler could have just done what AWS asked (even temporarily, to keep themselves online while looking for alternatives). They didn't.
"The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks." [2]
Apparently US authorities were happy to want Twitter to keep those accounts alive for some time as they could use them to track activity - the point remains it's wrong to the point of naive to believe that these decisions are not political.
Facebook was enabling genocidal activity [3].
It's incredibly hypocritical to look at the historical activities of ISIS on Twitter, Facebook and all of these platforms, and then to hear about the 'political violence' caused by Parler.
I don't like Parler, the hypocrisy is staggering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_social_media_by_the_Isl...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services.
Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.
AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use"
"Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless.
This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.
It's a lot cheaper and easier (and less likely to involve swat teams) than hiring some sketchy DDoS outfit.
The truth had come out, hadn't it? Even before the 2020 election, people had been mocking the network for arbitrary post removal and the requirement to show official IDs for at least some features.
Services that chose not to host Parler were exercising their freedom of association; they were _communicating_ that they did not wish to support Parler.
You have free speech, but zero freedom from consequence.
That's about the most Orwellian meme that is making the rounds and needs to be examined critically. Freedom to do a thing implies protection from consequence, or you're not free.
Also there were articles on HN about how the Capitol riots were organized on Facebook.
If signal gets deplatformed get your pitchforks. Till then I'm not worried. Also regarding the slippery slope, let it slide. If this is how we start regulating cloud services as utilities then so be it.
This is just false. Did you have an account there?
People on HN are so much into 'technical' issues.
The notion 'The CEO must be fired' because he allows messages to be saved but the mission is privacy - is far too getting hung up on technicalities.
What the Parler CEO essentially wanted was a free and open platform, free from general intrusion.
That's it.
It's not a Singal, or Telegram - it's not about Snowden level security.
CEO's say all sorts of things all the time that are arguably inconsistent with the details of their reality, that's not a new phenom.
He's essentially saying he wants a WhatsApp/Twitter/Signal type platform, where people aren't blocked for arbitrary reasons.
He's not making statements about protection against state level actors.
And Parler does moderate anyhow.
His investors and board hired him to win, not to pick a principled hill to die on. Martyrs are cheap and nobody making investments can afford cheap things. The irony is Parler positioned itself as less radical than Gab, and it was that very position of bargaining with its platforms is what killed it. How can 4chan, Gab, and the even darker parts of the internet manage to persist online with hardly any money, but someone with Mercer level backing can't keep a site online? The lesson is an example of things we already know, which is that anyone who needs platform permission do to a disruptive startup is already dead.
We absolutely need alternative platforms, and our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play.
The only thing I am happy about is how fast the cycle is operating these days ie how quickly mindlessly ambitious self important people who get propped up through pandering to the right clubhouse get discarded.
Thats a good thing.
>look for entrepreneurs who actually know what they are doing
Um, with enough capital they usually make money either way and guess which kind are easiest to come by.
This is a lie, it’s just a question of whether or not he believes it or if he’s just saying what he needs to say to land another role. Parler moderated all kinds of people off the platform for a variety of reasons, including political speech. Anything they said to the contrary was no more than PR puffery, not reality.
Seems like banning communities that led directly to an insurrection in congress should be one of those tools, no? I mean, that part was a bit more than just "histrionics" by "sanctimonious pricks".
I know you won't buy this because of the environment that we find ourselves in, but I assure you that those of us on the left care JUST AS MUCH about civil liberties and free speech as you do. We do. I swear it.
We just don't think that forum moderation is really that much an infringement on them (I mean, you're posting this on a heavily moderated forum right now). And we're less willing to forgive or excuse the spillovers from speech into action that we've seen.
No one who posted on Parler should be denied a voice on other forums. They just need to do so in places where they can't get away with calling for real violence.
If you're going to apply a standard, at least apply it fairly.
Step 1: Hire huge moderation team.
Step 2: Write draconian terms of service that incorporated every possible offensive thing that any vendor might object to.
Step 3: Build an app that explodes with all the users that are delighted with the moderation.
Step 4: Profit!
That's not how Facebook and Twitter ("the free speech wing of the free speech party") were launched, but maybe those wouldn't ever have been able to launch today anyway.
Any parler type thing is only ever going to get the worst of the worst of possible users. The folks who get kicked off Facebook and Twitter aren't the people you want to build a business on
No, just violent rhetoric associated with a real world violent movement. I don't understand why that keeps not registering in these discussions.
I mean, even accepting your frame that we leftists have infested Big Tech and want nothing but to censor our political enemies: they've had years and years to do it, and didn't. And only when it got to the point where congress was actually attacked that a site had to be shut down. And it was just one site, and its users just moved on to Gab and such.
I mean really, if conservatives are so terribly censored... how is it you guys are so loud about it?
Tech companies make these grand unctuous gestures because it distracts from how awful they know they already are. Everybody knows. The Parler CEO failed to create an alternative platform because he thought he could bargain with people who are not only not-above mendacity and deception, but it is their stock in trade. He's just a coach who lost in the play-offs due to unforced errors.
Look into the history of Greek city states. A mob of civilians storming the chambers of government is quite literally how tyrants have installed themselves.
Some of those tyrants had to try multiple times, before the last attempt succeeded. They generally follow up by killing their political rivals, because people who come to power through violence rarely turn around and adopt a policy of pacifism.
It's hard not to see this through that lens; terrify the legislative body enough, and they'll break the constitution for you (in Caesar's case, make you sole consul, sidelining the other properly elected consul, give you a highly unusual command in Gaul, then make you effective permeant dictator; in this case, overturn the election, for starters).
If you want to be hyper-pedantic, it's maybe not a coup; it wasn't the military. Nor was Caesar's first power grab, though (and arguably not the others either; Caesar's supporters were likely a more immediate personal threat to the senators than his army).
It really did make the US government seem far more fragile than I even expected.
Killing elected officials going through the steps of a peaceful transition of power would have been "no real threat to democracy"?
> It's not like the police and military are going to take commands from some nutjob cosplayer just because they're wielding Nancy Pelosi's lectern.
Just because the USA would not instantaneously have become a dictatorship doesn't mean that there was no threat to democracy. Do you think Joe Biden would be president right now had they succeeded in storming the building (and had none of the officials been evacuated)?
Neither January 6th, nor in Athens would a mob rush the chambers of government to install God-King Billy Rando, who nobody has heard of. Coups only work when the person benefiting from them already has a large amount of civilian and political, and sometimes, but not always, military support behind him - but not large enough to win power through legitimate means.
Suppose that the mob compelled congress to affirm Trump as the winner. Do you really think the 'police' (Which police force? Would they have jurisdiction? Who'd be giving them this order? Nancy Pelosi does not give police forces orders...) would have headed to Pennsylvania avenue to arrest Trump? What if the part of the military that is supposed to put down civilian coups (Which part is that, by the way?) decided to sit this one out?
At best, events would escalate into an actual, successful coup.
Can you spell out what exactly you are implying here? I don't feel included in the "everybody knows it".
Smh
It will be deplatformed from mobile stores, but even Cloudflare protects the reincarnation of TheDonald (patriots.win).
Parler, OTOH, constantly had threats of harm to elected representatives, or just democrats in general.
I believe they switched to only magnet links as it made it easier for them to be mirrored and switch around providers to hide from authorities without having to worry about all those files. Also most people likely use magnet links anyway.
Is tpb somehow worse than the other sites mentioned?
Some of it has do with the fact that when it comes to political speech you can not be moderate.
if you do you fall lock step in with one of the extreme's you painted by both extremes as the other...
For example many times, in the same conversation or talking about the same topic with different groups I have been called a Socialist, Commie, Nazi White Supremacist, racist, etc...
Political extremism seems to be the only political conversation left on the internet, this goes for both the "left" and the "right"
Some folks lie. Some platforms lie. If 'I promise I don't want to kill you' becomes the logical Kryptonite to get you out of any sort of jam, then it becomes nothing more than an exploit useful to people who want to kill you. All they have to do is say, 'no, you see, I'm telling you I don't and so you have to believe me' and then kill you, because they were lying.
Law is based on the idea that people can intend all these negative things and then lie about them and then go through a process to be held accountable: it's never about just taking people at their word.
Parler's just what AWS thought it was. Anyone trying really hard to obfuscate that is probably Parler-like themselves.
Thank you for proving my point.... If I do not agree with you then clearly I am alt-right extremist..
Sigh... there really is not point discussing politics in a rational way anymore. This is how extremism persists.
Nazis lie, and especially love to argue that 'oh, if you don't take me at face value and accept my word then that means I'm a nazi! You know you are just FORCING me to be a nazi, right? You're the real nazi, and when the revolution comes I won't be a bit sorry to gas you, because you're a MEANIE!'
So, is that what you are, or not? :) How not alt-right extremist are you, and can you prove it in any way, or is your only (rapidly provided!) argument 'you're doubting my word, and that means you're the real extremist and there's no point talking to you because you're the real extremist and everybody else should shun you, you irrational person!'
Is that not what you are? You're explicitly making that argument. I'm asserting that is a tainted argument and doubling down that I mistrust your arguments because this is how you're making them.
There is little point to engaging since you have me already threatening to gas you for some reason if I at all support a platform like Parler being allowed to even exist.
I am sure you also take the "Hate Speech is not Free Speech" point of view when it comes to free speech protections, so any debate we have the subject will not go well since you will simply continue with Ad hominem's and there will be nothing of substantive value
For the record, I am left-libertarian or geo-libertarian that support free speech absolutism, though i am sure you do not care much about my actual world view.
This is of course a bipartisan trend, but as far as I can tell affects Republicans more.
It was absurdly poorly run--literally on Wordpress with very little security and obviously no bug bounty program. They probably have never even heard of the concept of a bug bounty.
All around disappointing. The next iteration, if it is to work at all, will require a complete mindset switch.
It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.
That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.
I can imagine Parler also might have some problems attracting the kind of talent needed to run a site like that.
Naaah, plenty of fash-curious engineers out there.
As the saying goes, "one backup is zero backups."
Granted, given Parler's mantra they should have known they would be particularly vulnerable to getting kicked off AWS, but I'm highly skeptical that many Silicon Valley darlings (and I've worked at some) would have been able to spin up something quickly on a completely new hosting platform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outag...
Genuine question
Are there any tools for hosting large volumes of user generated content in a decentralized permissionless way?
Even if you have to pare down the front end and reduce reliance on some infrastructure concepts, is there any way to do it right now?
Nope. Since Web browsers don't speak any fancy decentralized protocols you either need a centralized/censored gateway like ipfs.io or everyone has to install client software which kills adoption.
It's fine to use k8s and containers, but don't lock yourself into Lambda, SQS, etc.
You should be able to spin up anywhere.
Really great technical work all around.
They ran the numbers and figured it would be cheaper to run a social media platform to attract their target constituents rather than try to scrape it (like they did with Cambridge Analytica) or attempt to buy it.
Hence the ID requirements.
I don't care about Parler, but this is getting bad. Voted for that angry guy? Sorry, you're off my Contact Management platform and your business is frozen, while you try to recoup from being booted from those 12 other services.
I think some regulation is probably in need.
Now imagine all of those services say "nah, you're done". All of the sudden you need to roll your own everything. You have millions of users and no access to fractional development of load balancing, crafting emails to avoid spam filter, best practices in 2FA, well organized chat permission systems. It's the true nightmare scenario for a modern company.
If you say "they should have anticipated being de-platformed", well they probably never would have made it as far if they had focused on that.
Need slack? Install an irc server (i assume this is for internal use). Need email, install sendmail and thunderbid, need a 2fa provider? TOTP is literally five lines of code.
Yes its all annoying, yes it will be rough around the edges, yes it will slow velocity, but no, missing them will not make your business intractable.
At least you would have some reputation intact. Now he is just the guy that failed, couldn't recover and will have a hard time going anywhere.
"A Linux system administrator with five years of system deployment and management work experience"
Previous job included hyperscale things like:
"Designed, managed, and maintained a commodity-based hardware platform with twelve supermicro servers"
That's, uh, interesting.
If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all.
That coupled with their multi-million dollar monthly infrastructure bill and I'm scratching my head. The site seems like it was built by outsourced lowest bidder contractors and they scaled by throwing blank checks at the problem.
This is non-sensical. AWS certainly knew they were a customer, and they were the ones that kicked them off. Plus, Cloudflare has deplatformed other customers before, don't think they would have wanted to touch Parler either.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...)
It's also been a lie from day one. Parler policed things that didn't fit into their definition of free speech. Just like Twitter et al.
After the data leak there should be zero trust in their name no matter what the moderation story is/was.
I think I say a lot of somewhat controversial things, but they let it fly because I am not popular.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/19/bb-parler-moves-...
"In my country, we can have freedom of speech. I can stand outside the White House and shout that the president is an idiot, and nobody can stop me".
"So what," replies the Russian, "In Russia I can also shout that the president of America is an idiot and nobody will stop me".
I don’t know if that’s really true. At least not in the Bay Area, which holds the lions share of internet companies from hosting to CDN.
It’s actually remarkably hard to run any kind of website of note and not be at the mercy of some company based out of SV.
Parler isn't even half bad compared to some of the hosted content on the rest of the clearnet.
The reason this is possible is because of 1. Cloudflare for media content and 2. Colocation for everything else. I don't know of an instance of a T1 or T2 data center "deplatforming" any servers that weren't directly operating illigally and had to be told it was illigal by law enforcement.
Perhaps individual companies that you contract with to get that data centers internet line, sure, but again there's plenty of companies that don't care who you are and/or like parler. I know of one in New York that offers very affordable pricing.
Not even Oracle, who are desperate for any cloud attention and were buddy buddy with Trump are taking Parler's calls.
https://twitter.com/GreggHoush/status/1351923104403116032?s=...
I have a hard time this is their actual needs in terms of servers - their video ingest pipeline sounded like it was just throwing videos on s3, and it didn't look like they were doing any transcoding at all (plus not removing photo or video metadata). 73tb of ram for distributed pgsql also sounds excessive.
Is there any analysis why parler did have such high requirements? Or what they did exactly to have such a high bandwidth?
Instead, Parler has spent weeks with just a single static (and perhaps handwritten?) HTML page.
Just as dark patterns, predatory business models, and enablement of antisocial behavior harm other product domains, Parler incubated a disease that spread to, and diminished the value of, other social media.
If you cannot bring yourself to label bad things with forthright labels, you will not be able to keep them from damaging the value of what you create in technology.
Americans arent very forgiving to terrorists and terrorist sympathizers, and that applies to parler members just as well as taliban members
Did everyone on Parler do what they said? No. Did some? Yes, we have captures of their posts and video of them doing it. When people with bad intentions never encounter any push back, they're emboldened and escalate their speech and actions. Parler has been warned for years that allowing this type of content to run rampant will encourage more, and encourage even more extreme statements, which eventually lead to actions. Eventually it happened. And then other independent, private organizations had every right to decide not to do business with them, and proceeded to terminate their relationships with Parler as is their right.
If all the people who peacefully used Parler are upset, they should blame Parler's poor management, as Parler's board clearly did.
The power of twitter is unprecedented. Laws are out of date and it seems folks are hiding behind this fact to justify their own biased beliefs.
Silencing opinion creates extremists.
Now they poison the actually good idea of free speech with their infantile appeal. In theory and in practice they are on the wrong side of history and everyone involved is less and less redeemable as they try to flip the situation and present themselves as victims of oppression.
Sure bad apples / users exist but calls for violence on Parler were systemic and we have proof now.
This argument of yours doesn’t apply to calls for murder.
Or you ok with people organizing to kill you specifically with “mah free speech” paradigm?
The simultaneous attack from Google, Apple and Amazon was unprecedented. It should not have been planned for. The PirateBay for instance was slowly attacked at expected places with lots of warnings over years.
The security issues were meh compared to other security breaches and even then normally no one would even care a few days later. Metadata was not removed for baby users and something published but deleted was still around....
Wasn't well moderated, back to children who weren't around on all the big sites at the the beginning. Youtube, Reddit, Twitter.
The fact HN thinks this is all normal, that's scary.
He was fired due to a war from a section of the population who didn't want any speech from that site online. Pick your reality I guess.
AWS cut off Parler's service after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). It seems highly unlikely that they had a better relationship with either Google or Apple.
> He was fired due to a war from a section of the population who didn't want any speech from that site online. Pick your reality I guess.
Accountability ends at the top. Would you be happy with his performance if you were Rebekah Mercer? Replacing the CEO also makes it easier to try to build a relationship with another cloud service.
Parler's CEO was lacking in at least the following areas:
He didn't keep the site up - excuses don't matter when you're the CEO.
He failed to keep service providers happy with Parler's content moderation. His public statements about moderation (see documents at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a... ) also made relationships with AWS, Apple, and Google much harder.
The security issues didn't help with their reputation. I agree that other services have had comparable issues.