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It's unclear exactly what these graphs are showing. The axes are not labeled well - why does "relative" frequency matter? From my reading of this post, all the

It's unclear exactly what these graphs are showing. The axes are not labeled well - why does "relative" frequency matter? From my reading of this post, all the author is saying is that the rate of those posts went up over time, relative to themselves. But if they're still an exceedingly rare occurrence, that tells a different story. How frequently were they appearing overall? What percentage of all Parler users posted messages calling for violence explicitly? What percentage of all Parler posts did the same? These are the questions that matter more in my opinion. Until then, this claim seems like a leap: > It is clear that Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians to spread virally on the platform, either through gross negligence or willing ignorance. The recent NYT article that appeared on HN (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-parler.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-p...) mentions examples of posts being moderated and removed. So there is a non-zero amount of moderation happening, apparently? Let's also keep in mind, Parler is a 30-person company. How can they keep up with the deluge of traffic they received? If the answer to censored speech is "go make your own social network" but then people turn around to deplatform a small social network that does not have the funding, monetization, or staffing of a megacorp like Twitter or Facebook, then there is no viable competition for the big players. They not only have the competitive moat of network effects, they also are able to collude with each other to kill any new competition. And if these companies like Facebook and Twitter face no realistic competition, we should recognize that they are simply public utilities operating the digital public town square on the public's behalf. As such, they must be held to a higher standard and required to carry all speech that isn't illegal.

throwawaysea 6y ago
Also, kudos to this author for not logging personal information: > there is panic among the ex-Parler community that all their data, even private/deleted posts, have been scraped and archived — it has, just not by me. Furthermore, Parler did not follow industry standards in obfuscating EXIF metadata from uploaded images, so millions of users had their exact location logged. However, I am stunned that Twitter still has not taken down the tweets from @donk_enby, the person whom this post mentions with the location logging (example: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128). This account has been sharing datasets with the private information of all those Parley users widely and archiving it all over the place. Isn't this textbook irresponsible disclosure of personal information? Doesn't this violate all the rules of Twitter for doxxing? I've submitted several reports at https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information but it seems no one at Twitter cares about preventing privacy leaks and doxxing when it concerns their political enemies.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  The dump only contains information that people posted publicly on Parler, as per this: "only things that were available publicly via the web were archived. i don't have you e-mail address, phone or credit card number. unless you posted it yourself on parler." - https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832 If anything, the people on Parler doxxed themselves by posting all of it in public, it was all directly visible by everyone who used the site/app. EDIT: Posts that people tried to delete are also in the dump, because of Parler's choice to only mark them as "deleted" and not actually delete them, hence they were still visible to admins. They were publicly visible in the past and could just as easily have been archived then. Parler does have those people's e-mails and so on, but that is not in this dump. It will have to subpoenaed.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    So why is media treating this differently from when Zero Hedge posted the contact information of a head of a lab in Wuhan that was conducting research into coronaviruses carried by bats? In that case, the person’s contact information was also public and it was intended as such on the lab’s own website, since he was the public face of it. And yet Zero Hedge was attacked by news media and posts on social media as “doxxing” the researcher. Twitter even banned them “permanently” for it, only to reverse the ban months later. Another consideration is that even if email addresses and phone numbers aren’t in the dump, there is EXIF data with locations and orientation. If this person was at all ethical and responsible they would have stripped everything that could identify a person out. But she didn’t, because the same rules don’t matter when it’s a leftist (she’s a self-described “anarcho socialist”) is attacking political enemies from the right. And no social media or news media is taking this down or even describing it in negative terms. It’s hard for me to see all this as anything but shameless double standards.
    - KozmoNau7 6y ago
      I don't represent Twitter, nor do I have any influence on their decisions. I simply corrected your misconceptions about the data present in the dump. However, there is a big difference between posting the information on a single named person and in effect blaming him for the COVID-19 pandemic, based purely on speculation and hearsay about the supposed origin of the virus, and dumping the publicly available data from a website that provably hosted and tolerated (perhaps even boosted) conspiracy theories and incitement to overthrow the results of a democratic election. Zero Hedge does this a lot, they latch onto wild theories and present them as if they are factual. Their hit:miss rate is absolutely atrocious, they are not a reliable source of news. As for @donk_enby's political views, her profile says "Meiklejohnian absolutist. free speech as in free-for-everyone.", for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiklejohnian_absolutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiklejohnian_absolutism "Therefore, all speech, even criticizing the established government, is healthy to the life of democracy. In essence, this means that free speech must be protected not for those speaking, but for those who should hear what they are saying." This is not a left vs. right thing, it's an issue of Parler('s users) wanting to stuff the genie back in the bottle, they want to unsay what they have said and unpost what they have posted, because after the 6th it is extremely compromising for them to have said/posted it.
formalsystems 6y ago
Thank you for this valuable feedback. I have added a disclaimer as I believe I have not answered the questions you listed well enough, and I need to ensure whatever statements I make can be reproduced by others. The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language. Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way. Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Also, kudos to this author for not logging personal information: > there is panic among the ex-Parler community that all their data, even private/deleted posts, have been scraped and archived — it has, just not by me. Furthermore, Parler did not follow industry standards in obfuscating EXIF metadata from uploaded images, so millions of users had their exact location logged. However, I am stunned that Twitter still has not taken down the tweets from @donk_enby, the person whom this post mentions with the location logging (example: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128). This account has been sharing datasets with the private information of all those Parley users widely and archiving it all over the place. Isn't this textbook irresponsible disclosure of personal information? Doesn't this violate all the rules of Twitter for doxxing? I've submitted several reports at https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information but it seems no one at Twitter cares about preventing privacy leaks and doxxing when it concerns their political enemies.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
The dump only contains information that people posted publicly on Parler, as per this: "only things that were available publicly via the web were archived. i don't have you e-mail address, phone or credit card number. unless you posted it yourself on parler." - https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832 If anything, the people on Parler doxxed themselves by posting all of it in public, it was all directly visible by everyone who used the site/app. EDIT: Posts that people tried to delete are also in the dump, because of Parler's choice to only mark them as "deleted" and not actually delete them, hence they were still visible to admins. They were publicly visible in the past and could just as easily have been archived then. Parler does have those people's e-mails and so on, but that is not in this dump. It will have to subpoenaed.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  So why is media treating this differently from when Zero Hedge posted the contact information of a head of a lab in Wuhan that was conducting research into coronaviruses carried by bats? In that case, the person’s contact information was also public and it was intended as such on the lab’s own website, since he was the public face of it. And yet Zero Hedge was attacked by news media and posts on social media as “doxxing” the researcher. Twitter even banned them “permanently” for it, only to reverse the ban months later. Another consideration is that even if email addresses and phone numbers aren’t in the dump, there is EXIF data with locations and orientation. If this person was at all ethical and responsible they would have stripped everything that could identify a person out. But she didn’t, because the same rules don’t matter when it’s a leftist (she’s a self-described “anarcho socialist”) is attacking political enemies from the right. And no social media or news media is taking this down or even describing it in negative terms. It’s hard for me to see all this as anything but shameless double standards.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    I don't represent Twitter, nor do I have any influence on their decisions. I simply corrected your misconceptions about the data present in the dump. However, there is a big difference between posting the information on a single named person and in effect blaming him for the COVID-19 pandemic, based purely on speculation and hearsay about the supposed origin of the virus, and dumping the publicly available data from a website that provably hosted and tolerated (perhaps even boosted) conspiracy theories and incitement to overthrow the results of a democratic election. Zero Hedge does this a lot, they latch onto wild theories and present them as if they are factual. Their hit:miss rate is absolutely atrocious, they are not a reliable source of news. As for @donk_enby's political views, her profile says "Meiklejohnian absolutist. free speech as in free-for-everyone.", for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiklejohnian_absolutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiklejohnian_absolutism "Therefore, all speech, even criticizing the established government, is healthy to the life of democracy. In essence, this means that free speech must be protected not for those speaking, but for those who should hear what they are saying." This is not a left vs. right thing, it's an issue of Parler('s users) wanting to stuff the genie back in the bottle, they want to unsay what they have said and unpost what they have posted, because after the 6th it is extremely compromising for them to have said/posted it.

formalsystems 6y ago

Thank you for this valuable feedback. I have added a disclaimer as I believe I have not answered the questions you listed well enough, and I need to ensure whatever statements I make can be reproduced by others. The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language. Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way. Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.