Actually it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot things I don’t want to be associated with. I’m also left of center and I’m not actually worried about having a Parler account, but there are a ton of websites that scare me way more.
I'm honestly not sure what I expected to be honest. I signed in once, scrolled a bit, recoiled in disgust and haven't been back.
> 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...
That's interesting. The public timeline on Gab is visible to everyone (there is no need to sign in). I just took a peek at it right now and I don't see anything misogynistic, etc. Would you mind sharing some of its specific timeline content that made you think that?
It very much was exactly as the gp describes, though I've been told that the platform has become more tolerable as its community has expanded. I haven't check back however.
Gab's public feed shows a subset of the top and hot posts, most of them look pretty tame.
I try to tread carefully but even still, everything I have ever posted can be taken wildly out of context and used against me by some activist in the future.
In a 2008 interview, Obama said he wasn't in favor of gay marriage. Today, that would be cancelable offense for a random liberal person, and retroactivity is a thing in that culture. Brendan Eich was forced to resign in 2014 over an anti-gay-marriage donation from the same year of 2008.
I understand and respect that people's views can change and I'm more than willing to allow them to change their positions. Eich never changed, that is why he was "canceled". Also it's important to note this wasn't just an internet "mob" that "canceled" him, people who worked under him didn't want him in that position and spoke out about it.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/may/11/barack-oba...
As long as I understand what you're saying.
I think the real difference is that when Obama said it in 2008, no one actually believed him.
Fortunately, I am not a public figure.
Online and with the general risk that your entire diary gets opened up - folks are cautious about their actions with that in mind. Also I think it’s that the judges are not local/personal entities. So they are difficult to reason with or explain context.
That and a curiosity about the world and history (particularly the cold war) means just the stuff I look at on wikipedia would look awful out of context.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-targets-linux-journal-as-e...
That's the problem when you lower the floor with dragnets, you drown in your own noise.
Could pivot to an “auto-cancel” saas if you will. You could even cancel people in bulk.
Jokes aside I’m sure there would be appetite for such a thing. Under the guise of “employee safety”.
And one of the first lists to check would be Parler.
Look at any authoritarian regime. Once they decide that a particular person has to be destroyed, they dig through their entire history to compile a dossier of Evil Things that person has said and done. You need searchable history for that, though. Or a lot of manpower. But databases are better for that purpose.
Similarly, if you can show that (unwanted person) said the N-word in 2004, you can probably get them destroyed today i the U.S. The hit piece just writes itself.
Everything we do or say, everywhere we go, is being tracked somewhere, unless you are extremely vigilant. And even if you are extremely vigilant, I'm sure you will slip up somewhere along the line.