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Not just "unable to moderate". Every platform has some content that they struggle to moderate due to scale issues. The issue with Parler is that they purposeful

Not just "unable to moderate". Every platform has some content that they struggle to moderate due to scale issues. The issue with Parler is that they purposefully attracted the absolute dregs of society, and now there isn't much else on it other than plans and threats of violence. They're a half step above Gab, barely. Edit: I'll note that Parler banned the DevinNunesCow parody account. They are fully capable of moderating when they want to, they just don't want to moderate calls for violence.

eropple 6y ago
Right. This isn't a "can't moderate, too much!" problem. This is a "won't moderate, the CEO says so" problem.
- bra-ket 6y ago
  That’s called free speech.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    There seems to be a common misconception around free speech: that it is limitless. It isn't. "As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building)." https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible-restrictions-on-expression https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible...
    - bra-ket 6y ago
      That can be very convenient if you want to silence opposition. Just use an “incitement” clause indiscriminately for the entire conservative platform. There’s lots of incitement of violence on Twitter but no one cancels/de-platforms Twitter.
      - eropple 6y ago
        Twitter has a professional moderation staff dealing with many orders of magnitude more content and, while they do not do a perfect job there is clearly at least some good faith effort going on there. They should still do a better job. Contrast this with Parler, who just doesn't give a damn. Complete abrogation of responsibility, except to kick off accounts that make fun of their "influencers" (shout outs to Devin Nunes's Cow!). Do you see the difference here? Do you see why there might be some, shall we say, recalcitrance to do business with the latter?
    - macinjosh 6y ago
      It is tragic this is the law. It explicitly removes agency from those who commit crimes. The rioters/insurrectionists were all bad people who made bad decisions on their own accord. The concept of incitement dilutes their responsibility. Trump didn't hold a gun to their head and make them storm the capital. Hell, he didn't even suggest it. IMHO, incitement isn't real. It's just spreading blame to people who just made sounds come out of their head. It's barely different than a thought crime.
      - Apocryphon 6y ago
        Incitement is a legal concept that has existed for centuries. You are free to make your opinion against it, but it’s been long-established and you’d have to do more to remove it other than reducing it to a “thought crime.”
      - Natsu 6y ago
        Legally, incitement is actually pretty constrained to immanent lawless action--i.e. someone doing something bad right now, not at some undefined point in the future, in clear terms. The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-impeached-and-removed-on-the-grounds-of-incitement/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
        ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        Interesting read. My TL;DR is that from their perspective, what Trump has said does _not_ constitute incitement of violence.
        mlyle 6y ago
        Trump has frequently amplified Lin Wood. On January 6th, people marched on the Capitol, injured many Capitol police members, and broke in while literally calling for Pence's head and having erected a gallows. On January 7th, Wood said "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." Is this incitement of violence? Why or why not?
    - notabee 6y ago
      Also, there is this standard. It's senseless to allow unlimited extension of a particular freedom to implode the system that provides those freedoms in the first place. Also related to the paradox of tolerance concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suicide_pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...
    - jeegsy 6y ago
      Given the history of this country, I would be very wary of supporting any idea based on Supreme Court precedent.
  - eropple 6y ago
    No, it objectively is not free speech! Threats and incitement aren't protected speech (Brandenburg et al.) and Parler's refusing to do anything about it; AWS cited 98 instances that they themselves provided Parler that weren't attended to. Got anything else?
    - verwyrelevant 6y ago
      What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts, not some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
        It has been, and its enforcement is then passed on to some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour. If people don't like how a specific person enforces this or interpreted a judge's rule, they must pony up the money to challenge in court.
      - tdeck 6y ago
        > What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
        agiroth 6y ago
        This is what the companies do who want to take down copyrighted content, and what governments do when they want to take down illegal content. Why should any other standard apply? Typically in such cases posts are placed in limbo - still present but usually inaccessible while legal questions are answered. Courts should be making these decisions, not companies interfering in other companies. Why? Because at the end of the day these are questions "the people" need to answer, not unelected managers at tech companies. A few people do not have the right to silence the voice of millions. That's what's happening, fundamentally, and it is being cheered, and you all somehow think this is going to end well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    You’re allowed to speak without being punished by the government. But when you act like a ass in my house, you hit the road.
    - agiroth 6y ago
      Your house is not the same thing as Twitter or Parler or Amazon or Apple.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        It’s private property. As is AWS. Granted a private home has some additional legal attributes, the point remains the same. Are you allowed to screech racist diatribes to call for a riot at my bar’s open mic night? Are you allowed to scream political speech in a shopping mall? Are you allowed to use the PSTN to organize your criminal enterprise?
        agiroth 6y ago
        You missed the point. Scale is what matters, not privacy. The Supreme Court has ruled that free speech on private property is still protected when questions of scale are introduced. There are circumscriptions on that, but it is still protected.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        Where does scale apply? I don’t recall some carve out in the constitution or in contract law. “Your home is your castle, unless a lot of Vikings show up” If I buy every ticket in Yankee stadium and turn it into a rally for Some political issue, is the management required to just deal with it? What law requires that AWS host people who want to overthrow the government?
        agiroth 6y ago
        https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ The more people are involved, the more interest the state has in private property. This is why for example we have employment and health laws.
Pils 6y ago
I think the recent NYT article on DLive laid out a theory that I find particularly convincing. > In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.” > The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0] Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users. It seems to have worked out for Reddit. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-mob.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...
- tedunangst 6y ago
  This seems like a poor week to execute such a growth strategy.
- tootie 6y ago
  Reddit made their bones with what I'd consider very high quality content. I used reddit before the Digg exodus and it was very techy and high-brow for the most part. Then came the cat pics and corny jokes. Then it spiralled.
cjohnson318 6y ago
Parler pulled down Lin Wood's posts floating the idea of executing Mike Pence. I guess even Parler has limits on what kind of crazy they want to be associated with.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  No, that was pulled off because Lin Wood didn't want to leave a paper trail. Fortunately, many have taken screenshots.
  - cjohnson318 6y ago
    Okay, I stand corrected, thanks. Also, what a stupid idiot that man is.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      I’d argue that he’s not stupid, I would argue that he is genuinely unwell. His private behavior, documented in a lawsuit by his former associates, paints a picture of a man whose behavior in private is as dangerous and unhinged as his current public behavior is. He called himself the second coming of Jesus in a private email, allegedly. He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
      - cjohnson318 6y ago
        You could argue that. I think that by 2021 most public figures should understand that deleting a post is not equivalent to not posting it in the first place. "In a deleted post..." is a common way to start news stories these days. He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.
dagmx 6y ago
Thank you for mentioning that Parler do moderate when it goes against their desired message. This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ebilgenius 6y ago
  And yet Amazon managed to get a plan out of Parler that promised to increase moderation of violent content manually with the help of volunteers. Whether or not that plan was workable is moot now, it seems.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    It is moot because the parler system has no accountability for the company or the "moderators". Parler can just say it was moderated by these random accounts and then try and wash their hands clean. The point is to have accountable, enforceable moderation. For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-john-matze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ). > Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
- bitstan 6y ago
  Google also runs an ISP. Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"? Seems like something a judge and jury should perform.. Democracy and all that.. Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback. The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
WatchDog 6y ago
> purposefully attracted the absolute dregs of society Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have. The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect). You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
  - WatchDog 6y ago
    That's a shame, I'm somewhat of a free speech absolutist, barring calls for violence and other obvious illegal speech. Looking into Parlers record on moderation, they don't seem to live up to their own values, removing content that doesn't violate their values, as well as failing to remove content that does.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      Kinda. I mean... look, they're just a partisan site. There's nothing new about that, their hook was that they looked like twitter and weren't a vbulletin or whatever. It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care. But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.

eropple 6y ago

Right. This isn't a "can't moderate, too much!" problem. This is a "won't moderate, the CEO says so" problem.

bra-ket 6y ago
That’s called free speech.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  There seems to be a common misconception around free speech: that it is limitless. It isn't. "As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building)." https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible-restrictions-on-expression https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible...
  - bra-ket 6y ago
    That can be very convenient if you want to silence opposition. Just use an “incitement” clause indiscriminately for the entire conservative platform. There’s lots of incitement of violence on Twitter but no one cancels/de-platforms Twitter.
    - eropple 6y ago
      Twitter has a professional moderation staff dealing with many orders of magnitude more content and, while they do not do a perfect job there is clearly at least some good faith effort going on there. They should still do a better job. Contrast this with Parler, who just doesn't give a damn. Complete abrogation of responsibility, except to kick off accounts that make fun of their "influencers" (shout outs to Devin Nunes's Cow!). Do you see the difference here? Do you see why there might be some, shall we say, recalcitrance to do business with the latter?
  - macinjosh 6y ago
    It is tragic this is the law. It explicitly removes agency from those who commit crimes. The rioters/insurrectionists were all bad people who made bad decisions on their own accord. The concept of incitement dilutes their responsibility. Trump didn't hold a gun to their head and make them storm the capital. Hell, he didn't even suggest it. IMHO, incitement isn't real. It's just spreading blame to people who just made sounds come out of their head. It's barely different than a thought crime.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Incitement is a legal concept that has existed for centuries. You are free to make your opinion against it, but it’s been long-established and you’d have to do more to remove it other than reducing it to a “thought crime.”
    - Natsu 6y ago
      Legally, incitement is actually pretty constrained to immanent lawless action--i.e. someone doing something bad right now, not at some undefined point in the future, in clear terms. The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-impeached-and-removed-on-the-grounds-of-incitement/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        Interesting read. My TL;DR is that from their perspective, what Trump has said does _not_ constitute incitement of violence.
        mlyle 6y ago
        Trump has frequently amplified Lin Wood. On January 6th, people marched on the Capitol, injured many Capitol police members, and broke in while literally calling for Pence's head and having erected a gallows. On January 7th, Wood said "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." Is this incitement of violence? Why or why not?
  - notabee 6y ago
    Also, there is this standard. It's senseless to allow unlimited extension of a particular freedom to implode the system that provides those freedoms in the first place. Also related to the paradox of tolerance concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suicide_pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...
  - jeegsy 6y ago
    Given the history of this country, I would be very wary of supporting any idea based on Supreme Court precedent.
- eropple 6y ago
  No, it objectively is not free speech! Threats and incitement aren't protected speech (Brandenburg et al.) and Parler's refusing to do anything about it; AWS cited 98 instances that they themselves provided Parler that weren't attended to. Got anything else?
  - verwyrelevant 6y ago
    What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts, not some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour.
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      It has been, and its enforcement is then passed on to some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour. If people don't like how a specific person enforces this or interpreted a judge's rule, they must pony up the money to challenge in court.
    - tdeck 6y ago
      > What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
      - agiroth 6y ago
        This is what the companies do who want to take down copyrighted content, and what governments do when they want to take down illegal content. Why should any other standard apply? Typically in such cases posts are placed in limbo - still present but usually inaccessible while legal questions are answered. Courts should be making these decisions, not companies interfering in other companies. Why? Because at the end of the day these are questions "the people" need to answer, not unelected managers at tech companies. A few people do not have the right to silence the voice of millions. That's what's happening, fundamentally, and it is being cheered, and you all somehow think this is going to end well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 6y ago
  You’re allowed to speak without being punished by the government. But when you act like a ass in my house, you hit the road.
  - agiroth 6y ago
    Your house is not the same thing as Twitter or Parler or Amazon or Apple.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      It’s private property. As is AWS. Granted a private home has some additional legal attributes, the point remains the same. Are you allowed to screech racist diatribes to call for a riot at my bar’s open mic night? Are you allowed to scream political speech in a shopping mall? Are you allowed to use the PSTN to organize your criminal enterprise?
      - agiroth 6y ago
        You missed the point. Scale is what matters, not privacy. The Supreme Court has ruled that free speech on private property is still protected when questions of scale are introduced. There are circumscriptions on that, but it is still protected.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        Where does scale apply? I don’t recall some carve out in the constitution or in contract law. “Your home is your castle, unless a lot of Vikings show up” If I buy every ticket in Yankee stadium and turn it into a rally for Some political issue, is the management required to just deal with it? What law requires that AWS host people who want to overthrow the government?
        agiroth 6y ago
        https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ The more people are involved, the more interest the state has in private property. This is why for example we have employment and health laws.

Pils 6y ago

I think the recent NYT article on DLive laid out a theory that I find particularly convincing. > In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.” > The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0] Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users. It seems to have worked out for Reddit. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-mob.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...

tedunangst 6y ago
This seems like a poor week to execute such a growth strategy.
tootie 6y ago
Reddit made their bones with what I'd consider very high quality content. I used reddit before the Digg exodus and it was very techy and high-brow for the most part. Then came the cat pics and corny jokes. Then it spiralled.

cjohnson318 6y ago

Parler pulled down Lin Wood's posts floating the idea of executing Mike Pence. I guess even Parler has limits on what kind of crazy they want to be associated with.

systemvoltage 6y ago
No, that was pulled off because Lin Wood didn't want to leave a paper trail. Fortunately, many have taken screenshots.
- cjohnson318 6y ago
  Okay, I stand corrected, thanks. Also, what a stupid idiot that man is.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I’d argue that he’s not stupid, I would argue that he is genuinely unwell. His private behavior, documented in a lawsuit by his former associates, paints a picture of a man whose behavior in private is as dangerous and unhinged as his current public behavior is. He called himself the second coming of Jesus in a private email, allegedly. He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
    - cjohnson318 6y ago
      You could argue that. I think that by 2021 most public figures should understand that deleting a post is not equivalent to not posting it in the first place. "In a deleted post..." is a common way to start news stories these days. He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.

dagmx 6y ago

Thank you for mentioning that Parler do moderate when it goes against their desired message. This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ebilgenius 6y ago
And yet Amazon managed to get a plan out of Parler that promised to increase moderation of violent content manually with the help of volunteers. Whether or not that plan was workable is moot now, it seems.
- dagmx 6y ago
  It is moot because the parler system has no accountability for the company or the "moderators". Parler can just say it was moderated by these random accounts and then try and wash their hands clean. The point is to have accountable, enforceable moderation. For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-john-matze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ). > Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
bitstan 6y ago
Google also runs an ISP. Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"? Seems like something a judge and jury should perform.. Democracy and all that.. Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback. The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.

WatchDog 6y ago

> purposefully attracted the absolute dregs of society Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have. The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.

newacct583 6y ago
> Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect). You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
- WatchDog 6y ago
  That's a shame, I'm somewhat of a free speech absolutist, barring calls for violence and other obvious illegal speech. Looking into Parlers record on moderation, they don't seem to live up to their own values, removing content that doesn't violate their values, as well as failing to remove content that does.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    Kinda. I mean... look, they're just a partisan site. There's nothing new about that, their hook was that they looked like twitter and weren't a vbulletin or whatever. It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care. But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.