One has to wonder if this was one of those "lose lose" situations where Parler got shut down at a very inopportune time financially, but where AWS, Twitter, Facebook, and others also suffered. For one, the public relations side of this is a nightmare. I can assure you from first hand experience that actual business vendors who use AWS are now realizing that they must live with the reality that their business could be taken off line within 36 hours... over politics. There was no good reason to do this when your entire business relies on the concept of consistency and dependability.
Obviously we have heard that Twitter and Facebook lost over 50 billion dollars in value since their great conservative purge. Perhaps their politics is more important than the bottom line, but there certainly seems to be some confusion if not remorse coming from leaderships of these companies. It's easy in principle to see how this works, but at the end of the day most Americans are still "for" free speech, not against it. Not only that, what business model decides to basically shut a large chunk of their own business. This wasn't well thought out, if it was thought out at all.
The reality is that allowing conservatives to post on twitter does not cause them to lose other clients. Having FB shut down accounts like #walkaway does not help them "keep" anyone. Liberals were not threatening to leave if they didn't own these entire mediums. The choice wasn't between liberals and conservatives, it was between having everyone involved with your business, or simply cutting out market share willy nilly. Nobody really cared other than liberal politicians, some media outlets, and the tech leadership themselves). It was a complete self serving move that only upset people and cost them money. It really made nobody else "happy" or made anyone else more willing to use their service.
We will see in six months or so how this plays out. But I suspect that Parler, Gab, and other social media platforms will prosper at the expense of those who believe that they hold a monopoly.
13 comments:
nice to see parler back. and fwiw, i'll be doing my best to steer clients away from AWS. they certainly make it easy. "Nice business you have here. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it. Now, your politics... your politics are reliably left, AREN'T THEY?"
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
Here's a former Facebook executive on CNN *explicitly urging that the same tactics that were used in cooperation with the US security state to remove ISIS from the internet now be used against "conservative influencers," to deprogram everyone to believe the CNN/liberal consensus:
Daily Caller
@DailyCaller
· 21h
Former Facebook insider Alex Stamos tells @brianstelter: "We have to turn down the capability of these Conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences... There are people on YouTube for example that have a larger audience than daytime CNN."
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1350871209332920322
Wikipedia:
User base
Parler has a significant user base of Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. The Anti-Defamation League wrote in November 2020 that "Parler has attracted a range of right-wing extremists" including Proud Boys; proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory; anti-government extremists including members of the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and other militia groups; and white supremacists including members of the alt-right and accelerationists such as the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division.
_______
Nice people on all sides.
from "Parler" Wikipedia
Content
Parler is known for its far-right and alt-right, antisemitic, anti-feminist, and Islamophobic content. Many posts on Parler contain misinformation and conspiracy theories. Parler has said they will not fact check posts on the platform, a decision BBC News says has allowed misinformation to spread more easily on the platform than on mainstream social networks. In particular, BBC News noted the presence of posts spreading the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as misinformation surrounding the 2020 US presidential election, COVID-19, child trafficking, and vaccines. The Verge noted in November 2020 that Parler had become a "central hub" for the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory relating to the 2020 US presidential election. The Forward and The Bulwark observed the presence of antisemitic conspiracy theories as well as others. Parler CEO John Matze told The Forward he was unaware of antisemitic content on Parler, but was unsurprised that it was there. He believes removing hateful content only further radicalizes people, saying, "If you're going to fight these peoples' views, they need to be out in the open.... Don't force these people into the corners of the internet where they're not going to be able to be proven wrong."
Extremism expert Chip Berlet said of Matze's opinions on hateful content: "I think he's full of it.... I think he knows exactly what he's creating, he's encouraging people who basically don't like other folks in the country... it's balogna, this is a place for people to fester in their own bigotry." Political scientist Alison Dagnes has said of Parler's stance on speech on the platform: "I don't think you can have it both ways.... There is no such thing as civilized hate speech."
Parler’s gone for now, the victim of a conspiracy to silence, but it will return. The fascists can try, but they can’t shut us up forever. Truth flows like water around obstacles. The Twitbookgram decided to start playing whack-a-prole to bonk unapproved ideas on the noggin and pretty soon too many heads will be popping up out of too many new holes. They will pop up on Gab, or Clouthub, or Dave Rubin’s Locals.com. People will find a way to be heard.
Once you leave their personal domains, the tech overlords become…irrelevant, and powerless.
Now, they can conspire, collaborate, and likely violate antitrust laws, though it is hilarious to assume that a Biden* DoJ will find anything out of sorts about that. The Democrat Party, and far too many Fredocon hacks in the GOP, are bought and paid for. They are happy to auction themselves off in a bidding war between Silicon Valley and Beijing. And there are a few remaining Muh Free Enterprisers who confuse capitalism and monopoly corporatism, and who are happy to surrender their sovereignty if their twisted principles so demand. But there is only so much the silicon villains can do. Eventually, some enterprising entrepreneur in Latvia is going to have a server farm no one in Cupertino can switch off.
They are shooting their wad, as far as the corporate tech censorship goes. It’s a hassle right now, but we will not be gagged. . . . Free speech, now and forever. No compromise, no exceptions, no excuses. It’s not enough to favor free speech – you must be affirmatively anti-censorship!
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/01/14/refuse-to-be-silenced-n2583120?141
Political scientist Alison Dagnes has said of Parler's stance on speech on the platform: "I don't think you can have it both ways.... There is no such thing as civilized hate speech."
but there is such a thing as civilized FREE SPEECH...
My Prime Principle is that I live as a free man, with the liberty to do as I please and think and say whatever I want. Anything else is a secondary and supporting principle. And purported principles that undercut the Prime Principle are history.
BUT NAZIS WILL GET TO SPEAK!
Yep. Communists too. People advocating weird perversions. And people who like seafood. They, like the Nazis, disgust and repel me. But free speech is not free if only the people who agree with me are free to speak.
I will offer an alternative to liberals on the issue of free speech. We can censor bad ideas like you want, but I get to be the censor. Now, you libs seem reluctant to accept this tantalizing offer, and for good reason. If I am censoring bad things, that means I am censoring you. I’ll start with your idiotic and poisonous SJW dogma. That’s illegal now. You put your pronouns in your Twitter bio and BOOM – off to Supermax. Then I’d ban advocating for socialism, along with all of the strains of the Marxist virus. This pathology killed 100 million people in the last century, so I think it’s more than fair to assess its endorsers as “violent insurrectionists.” Also, you can no longer say mean things about President Trump or his supporters. Oh, and what delights I would have in store for the garbage mainstream media!
if the left gets to be the arbiter of 'hate speech' the very first casualties will be freedom and liberty. and that is too high a price to pay.
Parler from Wiki:
Shutdown by service providers
On January 8, two days after the storming of the United States Capitol, Google announced that it was pulling Parler from the Google Play Store, contending that its lack of "moderation policies and enforcement" posed a "public safety threat". Also on January 8, Apple informed Parler that they had received complaints about its role in the coordination of the riot in Washington D.C., the existence of "objectionable content" on the service, and that they had observed that "the app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities," in violation of Parler's own guidelines forbidding such content. Apple requested Parler submit a "moderation improvement plan" within 24 hours or face removal from the app store. On Parler, Matze posted that Parler would not "cave to pressure", and accused Apple of being anti-competitive. Apple followed through with their warning the next day, removing Parler from the app store on January 9. Apple CEO Tim Cook later explained that in the company's view, "free speech and incitement of violence" do not have "an intersection". Cloud communications company Twilio ended service to Parler, which made the service's two-factor authentication system stop working; Okta also denied them access to their identity management service, resulting in Parler losing access to some of their software tools. In addition, the database company ScyllaDB terminated its relationship with Parler, who had been using Scylla's Enterprise database.
On January 9, Amazon announced that it would suspend Parler from Amazon Web Services, effective at 11:59 p.m. PST the next day. Echoing Google's rationale for dropping its version of the Parler app, Amazon said that Parler's failure to police violent content made the site "a very real risk to public safety". Parler went offline when Amazon withdrew its cloud computing services as scheduled. On January 11, Parler sued Amazon under antitrust law, saying that the suspension of services was "apparently motivated by political animus", and had been carried out with the intention of benefiting Twitter by reducing competition.
Some applauded the technology companies' decisions to deny service to Parler. Others raised concerns about private enterprises determining what remains online. Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told The New York Times that he was concerned about neutrality when it came to Internet infrastructure providers such as Amazon AWS and app stores. Evelyn Douek, a lecturer and content moderation researcher at Harvard Law School, said to the Wall Street Journal that she thought an argument could be made to defend the infrastructure providers' decision to deny service to platforms who don't adequately moderate content, but wondered if similar amounts of violent content might exist elsewhere in platforms they were serving.
After the shutdown, users of Parler were reported to have migrated to other alt-tech websites including CloutHub, Gab, MeWe, Minds, Wimkin, Rumble, DLive, BitChute, as well as encrypted messaging services including Telegram and Signal.
Content scraping
Following the storming of the Capitol and just before Parler went offline, a researcher scraped roughly 80 terabytes of public Parler posts. The posts scraped make up 99% of publicly-accessible Parler posts, including more than 1 million videos, which maintained GPS metadata identifying the exact locations of where the videos were recorded. The researcher said her intention was to make a public record of "very incriminating" evidence against those who took part in the storming. The data dump was posted online, and the researcher has said the data will eventually be made available by the Internet Archive. According to Ars Technica and Wired, the reason the researcher was able to scrape the data so easily was due to the Parler website's poor coding and poor security. According to Wired, although all posts downloaded by the researcher were public, because Parler didn't scrub metadata, GPS coordinates of many users' homes had likely been exposed. As of January 15, 2021, Gizmodo had mapped out the locations of around 70,000 of the GPS coordinates linked to videos scraped from Parler.
_______________
They know where f'n and rat live?
rrb said...
The lying POS "pastor" jamesnewleaf (same as the old leaf) said:
Gab was among the platforms used to plan the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
this is a lie, although i'm not surprised wikipedia would advance the lie.
facebook was the social media venue of choice for promoting the antifa/blm-led panty raid
Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook should definitely be banned by lib logic. They are/were spreading the lie and were used to organize. Gab doesn't even have such a tool yet. Of course the highest percentage of lies to posts is led by the "pastor" who continuously spreads this shit.
But he feels he is right in his "heart".
ROFLMFAO !!!
But he feels he is right in his "heart".
pathological lying 'feels right in his heart.'
tell you all you need to know about him.
Hey "pastor"
has Hitler been whispering in you ear any more this morning ?
Does he whisper in English or German ?
ROFLMFAO !!!
damn the "pastor" is clever
Jack Posobiec
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1350277251250737153
Antifa supporter Daniel Alan Baker was just arrested for plotting an attack on Trump supporters on Inauguration Day.
He trained in Syria in 2017 with the YPG, was featured on VICE, and in 2020 participated in the CHAZ insurrection in Seattle, per DOJ documents
Wonder if he is one of the ones Kamala bailed out. Wonder on what platform he and his group were organizing...
Facebook and Twitter appear to have cornered that market with a big assist from Google and the MSM
Parler was home to hundreds of Senators, House representatives at both the Federal and State level. Most every "blue check mark" on the conservative side of the fence (Rush, Hannity, Tucker, etc...) were all on Parler. They had several million users.
On the flip side, there was no ISIS members or other international terror groups using Parler to plan attacks, as they have been doing on Facebook for years. There are no #AssassinateTrump, #KillPence, or any other violence threats against conservatives like what has been still (to this day) trending on Twitter.
It's not whether or not a social media app has bad apples putting up bad content. They all do and Parler likely had the least amount of that, both in real content and in percentage of content.
But in a liberal thinking world where #AssissinateTrump is perfectly acceptable but #WalkAway or #StopTheSteal is worthy of a ban... then there is simply no reasoning with these types.
By all means, go ahead and pipe your hate speech and calls for violence through the Russian servers. American law enforcement would never dream of monitoring that, right? And for sure the Russians won't have any use for it.
Oh yeah, big victory for Parler and Amazon is crying over their loss (for any cultists reading, that's sarcasm)
LOL.
Post a Comment