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Whether you agree with the censorship of Parler or not. Big tech showed it's hand. And how it is willing to organize, to ban competing services. I am getting

Whether you agree with the censorship of Parler or not. Big tech showed it's hand. And how it is willing to organize, to ban competing services. I am getting calls weekly on how to deplatform off AWS services. These are normal businesses, not social media or news organizations. Decentralization is going to happen.

allsystemsgo 5y ago
Lots of Big Tech apologists in this thread. I agree. Decentralization is the future.
larkost 5y ago
I don't see any evidence of coordination or organization. Rather they all saw a dangerously out-of-control situation where they could be found liable, or at least involved (in the court of public opinion) in armed insurrection. They all demanded some form of the same thing: moderate the dangerous conversations that were calling for rebellion and violence. But they did not demand a particular methodology (which you would have seen in an organized endeavor). If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising, and your response is to talk about free speech and how it is not your fault... then ya, you are going to loose business partners left and right.
- krona 5y ago
  If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising Did parler have particular features enabling these so called 'armed uprisings', beyond what e.g. Facebook also offers to its users for free?
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    Yes, they had the heavily advertised feature of not removing posts when you plan an armed uprising.
- jb775 5y ago
  Dude you drank too much of the communist media kool-aid. There was no "armed insurrection". That's all communist media BS. They literally didn't allow guns into the entire Washington DC area. What happened was big tech cutting communication channels because they didn't like Parler's politics. And they'll do it again the second it suits them.
  - cozuya 5y ago
    So the mob shouting "hang Mike Pence" would have.. had a pleasant debate with him, had they found him alone in the hallways of the Capitol? If not, what do you think would have happened?
  - rOOb85 5y ago
    Armed does not just mean firearms. You can be armed with....let's say a flagpole or fire extinguisher(both were used as weapons against the police by the insurrectionists)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - leereeves 5y ago
      The story that a Capitol Police officer was attacked and killed with a fire extinguisher was a lie. > Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes after defending Capitol on January 6, medical examiner says > the autopsy found no evidence of internal or external injuries https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-died-natural-causes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-die... > The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick's own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media's claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a... > Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his [supposedly] fatal injuries, law enforcement officials familiar with the matter said. > According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-charges/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-c...
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I really don't understand this perspective. There was a severe emergency situation which prompted this response! It's like watching the police lock down an apartment building in response to an active shooter, and saying "they've shown their hand, cops just want to keep everyone locked inside their home".
- saurik 5y ago
  I assume you mean the riot, for which all the organization happened on Facebook, not Parler?
  - jamespo 5y ago
    I guess that's partly why they're reinstating the app then
  - dataangel 5y ago
    Parler users GPS data was leaked, showing Parler users deep in the capital during the insurrection: https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-capitol-building-1846042905 https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca... These geniuses were posting videos on Parler showing themselves during the insurrection.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    "All" isn't an accurate description. Much of it did happen on Facebook, and in response Facebook swiftly put in place new policies to prevent the situation from escalating. Unlike Facebook, Parler was unwilling to enact emergency measures, so instead emergency measures were enacted on them.
    - saurik 5y ago
      FWIW, while I appreciate that you can technically pick at the word "all", if--as many people (I think correctly) believe--Parler was ancillary to the coordination (as in, without it existing the riot would certainly still have happened) but Facebook was key to it (as in, without it existing the riot might not have happened), I think the word "all" is appropriate, as that is how the word is used by actual English-speakers... think of the phrase "all of the nutrition in that meal is coming from the side of broccoli". Regardless, it doesn't seem like Facebook put in these supposed emergency policies anywhere near quickly enough, right? Here is an entire article talking about the nuances of blame here... I just really get the feeling like a big part of what happened with Parler was "big tech" realizing their own culpability and then having to organize around a scapegoat, lest anyone decided to come after them instead. https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-facebook-played-huge-role-in-fueling-capitol-riot-watchdogs-say/ https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-fac...
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Decentralization is going to happen. I wonder about that. If you think about it, Parler isn't particularly "decentralized", either. It isn't Twitter, but it is controlled and curated by a fairly arbitrary authority. In theory, if you didn't like Twitter's rules, and you didn't like Parler's rules, you could just move off to another competing service - if you or somebody else started one up (easy) and did the legwork of advertising it far enough that enough people used it to make it useful (hard). True decentralization would be something like Tor, I2P or Freenet, where all the users cooperate to share bandwidth and there's no plug to pull and no central dictator to ban content. However, truly decentralized services have been around for a long time now (I seem to recall installing Freenet once in the late 90's), and they have yet to catch on. As much as some of us fear the power of central planning, it seems as though the majority of people like knowing that there's nuclear kill switch that can be pulled if the communication platform gets to be too contentious.
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  Bitclout is actually quite promising as a decentralized service, but they do require a phone number at signup (or alternatively, a payment at signup) as an anti-spam measure.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
I'm surprised to see so many with agendas on here.. and by that I mean, blaming Apple. need we be reminded, Parler was used as a comms app for incredibly unsavory speech (being polite), and ultimately as an aid to some who wanted to try to overthrow the elected govt of the USA, not to mention calling for the Hanging/Murder of the Vice President of the USA (Its funny how the Law and Order group want rules bent for their own little adventures.) Free speech is one thing, but there's consequences for some of that "speech", and getting kicked of the apple platform is a fitting, if ludicrously light punishment for what was accepted as "speech" on Parler.
shadowgovt 5y ago
My prediction (extrapolating from other large human-built systems) is that the infrastructure of the web will evolve into a soft bifurcation of companies that can leverage centralized Cloud infrastructure and companies that can't (for whatever reason... Infrastructural load too weirdly shaped, application too risky for service providers to want to sign off on it, pissed off the wrong people, etc.). People in the out-group will build more ad-hoc infrastructure for serving their needs, and we'll have a bifurcation into basically the "cleanweb" and the "trashweb" that will somehow (probably by URL shape) bubble up into the view of the end-user. Things on the cleanweb will be average, safe, and predictable. Various deviations from user expectation will be punished (up to and including having your service provider yank a piece of your service Jenga tower out from under you if they're irritated enough about the offense). The trashweb will spawn some serious beauty and truly novel things and an awful, awful lot of scams, hatred, illegal transactions, and garbage. And most people will constrain themselves to the cleanweb but the trashweb will see a robust userbase.

allsystemsgo 5y ago

Lots of Big Tech apologists in this thread. I agree. Decentralization is the future.

larkost 5y ago

I don't see any evidence of coordination or organization. Rather they all saw a dangerously out-of-control situation where they could be found liable, or at least involved (in the court of public opinion) in armed insurrection. They all demanded some form of the same thing: moderate the dangerous conversations that were calling for rebellion and violence. But they did not demand a particular methodology (which you would have seen in an organized endeavor). If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising, and your response is to talk about free speech and how it is not your fault... then ya, you are going to loose business partners left and right.

krona 5y ago
If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising Did parler have particular features enabling these so called 'armed uprisings', beyond what e.g. Facebook also offers to its users for free?
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  Yes, they had the heavily advertised feature of not removing posts when you plan an armed uprising.
jb775 5y ago
Dude you drank too much of the communist media kool-aid. There was no "armed insurrection". That's all communist media BS. They literally didn't allow guns into the entire Washington DC area. What happened was big tech cutting communication channels because they didn't like Parler's politics. And they'll do it again the second it suits them.
- cozuya 5y ago
  So the mob shouting "hang Mike Pence" would have.. had a pleasant debate with him, had they found him alone in the hallways of the Capitol? If not, what do you think would have happened?
- rOOb85 5y ago
  Armed does not just mean firearms. You can be armed with....let's say a flagpole or fire extinguisher(both were used as weapons against the police by the insurrectionists)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - leereeves 5y ago
    The story that a Capitol Police officer was attacked and killed with a fire extinguisher was a lie. > Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes after defending Capitol on January 6, medical examiner says > the autopsy found no evidence of internal or external injuries https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-died-natural-causes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-die... > The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick's own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media's claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a... > Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his [supposedly] fatal injuries, law enforcement officials familiar with the matter said. > According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-charges/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-c...

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

I really don't understand this perspective. There was a severe emergency situation which prompted this response! It's like watching the police lock down an apartment building in response to an active shooter, and saying "they've shown their hand, cops just want to keep everyone locked inside their home".

saurik 5y ago
I assume you mean the riot, for which all the organization happened on Facebook, not Parler?
- jamespo 5y ago
  I guess that's partly why they're reinstating the app then
- dataangel 5y ago
  Parler users GPS data was leaked, showing Parler users deep in the capital during the insurrection: https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-capitol-building-1846042905 https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca... These geniuses were posting videos on Parler showing themselves during the insurrection.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  "All" isn't an accurate description. Much of it did happen on Facebook, and in response Facebook swiftly put in place new policies to prevent the situation from escalating. Unlike Facebook, Parler was unwilling to enact emergency measures, so instead emergency measures were enacted on them.
  - saurik 5y ago
    FWIW, while I appreciate that you can technically pick at the word "all", if--as many people (I think correctly) believe--Parler was ancillary to the coordination (as in, without it existing the riot would certainly still have happened) but Facebook was key to it (as in, without it existing the riot might not have happened), I think the word "all" is appropriate, as that is how the word is used by actual English-speakers... think of the phrase "all of the nutrition in that meal is coming from the side of broccoli". Regardless, it doesn't seem like Facebook put in these supposed emergency policies anywhere near quickly enough, right? Here is an entire article talking about the nuances of blame here... I just really get the feeling like a big part of what happened with Parler was "big tech" realizing their own culpability and then having to organize around a scapegoat, lest anyone decided to come after them instead. https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-facebook-played-huge-role-in-fueling-capitol-riot-watchdogs-say/ https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-fac...

commandlinefan 5y ago

> Decentralization is going to happen. I wonder about that. If you think about it, Parler isn't particularly "decentralized", either. It isn't Twitter, but it is controlled and curated by a fairly arbitrary authority. In theory, if you didn't like Twitter's rules, and you didn't like Parler's rules, you could just move off to another competing service - if you or somebody else started one up (easy) and did the legwork of advertising it far enough that enough people used it to make it useful (hard). True decentralization would be something like Tor, I2P or Freenet, where all the users cooperate to share bandwidth and there's no plug to pull and no central dictator to ban content. However, truly decentralized services have been around for a long time now (I seem to recall installing Freenet once in the late 90's), and they have yet to catch on. As much as some of us fear the power of central planning, it seems as though the majority of people like knowing that there's nuclear kill switch that can be pulled if the communication platform gets to be too contentious.

diebeforei485 5y ago
Bitclout is actually quite promising as a decentralized service, but they do require a phone number at signup (or alternatively, a payment at signup) as an anti-spam measure.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

I'm surprised to see so many with agendas on here.. and by that I mean, blaming Apple. need we be reminded, Parler was used as a comms app for incredibly unsavory speech (being polite), and ultimately as an aid to some who wanted to try to overthrow the elected govt of the USA, not to mention calling for the Hanging/Murder of the Vice President of the USA (Its funny how the Law and Order group want rules bent for their own little adventures.) Free speech is one thing, but there's consequences for some of that "speech", and getting kicked of the apple platform is a fitting, if ludicrously light punishment for what was accepted as "speech" on Parler.

shadowgovt 5y ago

My prediction (extrapolating from other large human-built systems) is that the infrastructure of the web will evolve into a soft bifurcation of companies that can leverage centralized Cloud infrastructure and companies that can't (for whatever reason... Infrastructural load too weirdly shaped, application too risky for service providers to want to sign off on it, pissed off the wrong people, etc.). People in the out-group will build more ad-hoc infrastructure for serving their needs, and we'll have a bifurcation into basically the "cleanweb" and the "trashweb" that will somehow (probably by URL shape) bubble up into the view of the end-user. Things on the cleanweb will be average, safe, and predictable. Various deviations from user expectation will be punished (up to and including having your service provider yank a piece of your service Jenga tower out from under you if they're irritated enough about the offense). The trashweb will spawn some serious beauty and truly novel things and an awful, awful lot of scams, hatred, illegal transactions, and garbage. And most people will constrain themselves to the cleanweb but the trashweb will see a robust userbase.