"We're in! We're in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!"
https://www.businessinsider.com/derrick-evans-capitol-siege-...
The "wrong kind of association" for creating a social media account?
Beyond that, if a platform is known for encouraging behaviour that you and your peers disapprove of. It might make sense for you to avoid registering there in case your peers get the wrong impression of you should the information leak. While not exactly social media, you only need to look at the fallout from Ashley Madison for why you might not want to sign up somewhere because of "the wrong kind of association".
Why social media would be the only forum exempt from this line of thinking I can't imagine.
I guess I was approaching that question from a different angle where "wrong kind of association" was from the perspective of Big Brother. So I probably made an incorrect assumption about what the parent comment intended.
I agree with you that there probably is an element of this in the parent comment. Linking your "Cell phone at a protest" to you is probably going to be at the behest of the government.
What the implications of social media and "big tech" are in our society is definitely a conversation worth having. It's just a shame that it's often only brought up in order to distract or deflect attention from bad behaviour. The conversation would be much more productive if it happened at a time when people weren't so inflamed by the issue of the day.
Perhaps another question to ask would be, "How fair is it that others are pigeonholed to platforms like this and undoubtedly get the "wrong kind of association"?
Are we reducing certain thoughts, beliefs and, dare I say, questions indiscriminately down to "crimethink"?
How sad is it that our free society has turned into this? So much for tolerance.
Some people have argued, based on this, that Parler was set up by the NSA to get data on people.
Hoovering up data from social media is certainly the sort of thing the NSA would do.
Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?
> Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?
The best way to get a bunch of white supremacists and insurrectionists to robustly, undeniably identify themselves might be to ask them to upload their ID. :P
The best method for target acquisition, sure. If someone is so perturbed by their reality being rejected by the mainstream that they're willing to sign up for an alternative to maintain their worldview, then running that alternative would be a fantastic way to identify people at risk of radicalization, domestic terror risks, etc.
And if we're being clear, the USIC has run companies with this explicit mission in the past. In fact, running a company to provide one service at face level while providing a different service to the IC underneath is the mode that yielded some of the biggest intelligence wins in Western history. See Crypto AG.
That said, no reason to run it themselves; they're well aware that someone else will end up running it for them, and with security nowhere near front-of-mind for any startup, they can just pick up the key from underneath the doormat and take the farm.
No, but it’d be a really good way to get behavioral data on people and use a government ID to tie that data to real identities rather than pseudonyms.
Of course they already have all government IDs. But tying it to a username helps correlate data across other services, and additionally if the user checks from mobile phone or other device, tying it to recent IPs could also be useful. OPSec could prevent some of that, but how many users are doing that?
Just a thought. Not an endorsement.
To me, the more realistic (and scary!) explanation is this thing is just one huge identity theft machine.
It's a interesting thought to entertain but Parler is most likely not this.
I'm not saying it's likely, but certainly possible.
Actually why the flying fuck would someone think it is a good idea to plan an insurrection on this site in the first place?? It's like opposite day opsec
Turkey and Russia are good examples of how this attack works. It relies on a large number of people, possibly even a majority, to overthrow the republic with a populist government with no rules the leader can't change or selectively enforce. The leader shuts down one threat to himself at a time, making his control permanent.
IMO the military is obligated to arrest Trump for treason, which was the turkish backstop, and after a few rounds Turkey finally missed the last time. So once it is used, you have to patch your system to drop privileges from the Presidents office for the next round.
One example would be cambridge analytica...
If they were so concerned with "freedom" why would they have the following in their terms of use?
“Parler may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason.”
<puts on tinfoil hat> Maybe the entire site is just an FBI honeypot for right-wing extremists? (It's obviously not an NSA honeypot, because they could afford to self-host.)
I saw what I assumed were bots posting a lot of garbage links to 'articles' like "Obama compound raided!" and "8 Democrats switch to Republican Party" (that actually happened in Feb 2020, but the link was to an undated rerun and the link was posted.. 2 days ago?).
The links were to such trustworthy sites as 'firstusanews.us' (made up, but all variants like that), and they all would throw "update your flash player!" malware popups.
Next to each of these links on Parler were view counts - 207, 412, 897, etc - of people who'd clicked the link to view the article.
I could not reply to the link with a comment like "this has malware" because... my account was not verified. Only 'badged/verified' accounts can comment on 'links'. AND... the only way to get 'badged' is to use the mobile app and take a picture of govt ID (driver license, passport, etc). This becomes incredibly lopsided "free speech" biased against moderating/critical voices.
It was literally a field day for bots to post malware garbage and have thousands of victims per day, and no ability for people to warn others.
On one 'article' I followed there were comments from people saying "I don't understand how Parler works" in the comments on the linked article. Indeed...