Many people are willing to take a stand for their beliefs, many fewer are willing to nuke their RSUs.
They could justify it to a court, because "Facebook incubated the insurrection" or "Facebook broke our rules" not because "we don't like enabling our competitors".
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18206020/apple-facebook-i...
If the violations were serious enough, I think Apple/Google would consider some kind of temporary shutdown for the Facebook app if they thought they could weather the PR storm.
On the other hand, Facebook is not really a competitor to Apple, while Google very much is, so Apple has an incentive not to carry out an action that would strengthen Google.
There is only one logical conclusion and that is that Apple and Google will eventually boot Facebook off their platforms due to increasing amounts of risk associated with mobs and things that allow them to form.
how exactly?
According to Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit, they were warned for months about their content.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
There is a handy summary of this on Ars Technica as well. That article also says Parler was relying on volunteer moderation to clear their backlog of over 26000 posts.
You wrote that Amazon warned Parler about their content, but that's not what your link shows. It shows that Amazon asked a question about policies regarding specific posts, and Parler answered with their policies.
Also note that it wasn't removed. I'm not even going to repeat that post here, but absolutely no platform would keep this online if reported, so "very similar terms of service to other content companies" as someone up this thread claimed isn't exactly true.
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/read-amazons-letter-to-...
Or they were completely hands off? Which is it? Goalpost one or two?
The timing seems more likely due to a major public event than a backroom coordination.
But the platforms aren’t being honest about this – they’re claiming that it was about terms of use violations. I’m saying “stop pretending like this argument from the platform makes any sense and let’s have a real discussion about the ramifications of banning groups from a platform when they become political unpopular.”
And the real world violence significantly raised the stakes - both legal and practical.
I'm curious what kind of posts would definitely fall into this distinction. I see plenty of really distasteful, vile comments show up on Twitter. And AFAIK inciting violence is illegal. So the area between those seems to me like it would be pretty narrow.
My impression of Parler is more that they only deleted illegal speech of a particularly egregious nature, e.g. child porn.
Not so for better or worse. Multiple people have been banned from Twitter for calling a human rights litigation troll (and Twitter troll) a man (he is male).
https://nationalpost.com/news/free-speech-activist-lindsay-s...
https://mobile.twitter.com/bindelj/status/118726943929891225...
Calling a male troll “he” is definitely not illegal, yet you can be banned from Twitter for it. It’s not an incitement to violence, it’s not even borderline. Meanwhile that troll can ridicule one of the women in question for having a reproductive abnormality, so go figure. There’s a lot Twitter will ban you for that’s not remotely illegal, the gap is wide.
Before we had all this mess with real identities on the internet, nobody cared about your genitals when you wanted to be addressed with "he/him" or "she/her", they just did it. I wonder how we lost that.
He also engaged in other behaviour so vile I won’t repeat it here https://www.womenarehuman.com/male-transgender-trans-activis...
Do you still think anyone who refuses to pretend-along with this predator/troll and echo his self-image back to him should be banned from Twitter? And do you think the speech is illegal?
Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law. For example, when it comes to USA laws, Trump almost definitely did not incite violence. But lots of people would disagree with the statement that he didn't incite violence.
But the statement was "inciting violence is illegal". Which involves the law. That's a different question.
And an impeachment trial is not an Article III court. Nor is it intended to be. It is inherently a political proceeding and not a criminal trial. As such, ethics and morals are certainly at issue and the rules of Article III courts are not relevant.
Nor did the founders intend[0][1] them to be criminal trials. Which is why someone who is impeached and convicted is not immune from criminal prosecution in an Article III court.
Here's a lawyer's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwqAInN9HWI
Impeachment may be shaped like legal process, and the final act may be called a “trial” and supervised by the Cheif Justice, but its a political process, and the difficulty of proving things “in a court of law” is pretty much irrelevant except to the extent that comparisons to a court of law may be provide political rationalizations for actions in the impeachment or trial process.
(IIRC, one version of the bill of impeachment had a second article related to Abuse of Power with regard to the Georgia election call, but that was eliminated in favor of making the issues regarding the call part of the context for the insurrection charge, rather than a separate charge.)
Proving criminal liability is not required[0] in an impeachment trial.
"President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so."
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolutio...
According to the Ars piece, Amazon claims that Parler users were planning violent attacks openly on the site.
That may or may not be true. I guess we'll just have to wait until the archive[0] is fully released.
If it is true, that might be incitement, but it's definitely conspiracy. And since folks died, it's quite possible that at least some folks could be charged with Felony Murder (discussion here[1]).
But we obviously won't know until we can get our greasy little paws on all those messages, photos and videos.
[0] https://threatpost.com/parler-archive-amazon-suspension/1629...
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/felony-murder-and-storming-capit...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
That’s a filter bubble style of moderation and poor compared to Facebook/Twitter’s efforts for moderation.
The CEO also made it sound like they ignore context and instead only respond to direct threats of violence, allowing vague remarks on platform.
> In January 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Parler had increased its moderation team to 600 people, and began paying them. They also had begun hiring full-time employees to moderate the service.
It may be that Parler did too little too late, but I find it concerning that most mainstream news outlets are failing to report this.
Chance's are, they're probably not paying people to ban political content, since they can get their users to do that for free.
Later you say: "My intel may be false"
It's just curious to tell people to not spread false information and then admit you may be spreading false information.
Source? That’s the exact opposite of everything I’ve seen, including the CEO’s own public messages.
But having based its entire marketing around its terms of service being unlike other providers, with a particular emphasis on its greater level of tolerance for certain forms of political extremism, with predictable consequences for the community, it's obviously not in a position to use the "but we're no different from Twitter" defence
Note that "free speech" in the US is far from absolute. And there is some speech that, if Parler (or anyone else) doesn't remove it, they can be subject to criminal (e.g., child porn, setting up drug deals, etc.) and/or civil (copyright violations) litigation.
As such, anyone who claims they don't moderate is probably lying, unless they want to go to jail, get sued into oblivion or both.
as per articles linked below, you are wrong:
"Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
You have not provided any evidence to back up your claims, however.
Sounds like you answered your own question. Tech companies were lenient on hosting a questionable community, until members of that community tried to overthrow the government. For all the moderation the Parler admins allegedly did, it was an open secret that it was the hang out spot for right-wing extremists. Yet Parler was allowed to stay afloat until it became clear that doing so became an issue of national security. The riots happened. The cause and effect here are pretty clear. The Parler community did this to itself.
...
> it is not a neutral source of information
Why not?
Scenario. WhatsApp groups begin to be used as gathering places. Open secret. Bomb or explosion or storming of a government building ensures. Question: is it a question of national security to investigate and pressure to censor or eliminate the platform, and if not why not?
Scenario. The bomby extremist-y people on Parler make up .05% of user base. 99.95, while being mostly right-wing, aren't bomby or national security-threatlike. Question: is the tradeoff of punishing the platform by making it disappear, worth it as the only alternative platform to Twitter (which is relied upon by government, health authorities and journalists as the one true place)?
I have no problem with arguments in favor of censorship. I DO have acid reflux when I see the lack of nuance, the strong confidence and wording like "pretty clear."
No, censorship is never pretty clear and always warrants skepticism and conversation.
Arguing as of the two were equal two is lacking even basic attempt at nuance.
Parler was created because that content was booted from twitter, reddit and public facebook discussion. Literally. So acting like Twitter is the same is unfair despite Twitter deficiciencies.
> because anyone who cares an iota about fairness and censorship would prioritize the comparison.
Anyone who cares about fairness and censorship would first look at Parler moderation, then at Twitters one and only then made comparison. Not even looking at Parler and then claiming that "it is totally same and unbiased because that would confirm my pre-existing bias" is opposite of fair and opposite of nuanced.
Facebook moderates content only when it draws too much attention, but either way Facebook profits off said content as their algorithms promote it (because said content generates "engagement").
It's hard to say exactly what they moderate or how.
If you write in a less spoken language Facebook struggle to moderate you. Unless you’re trying to sell animals, because they spot that in seconds.
Facebook is happy to let bad content stay and profit off it unless said content carries a risk of bringing bad PR; I'm assuming this is the case with the "selling animals" thing because some animal rights groups escalated the issue to the media, and it is now the case with anything Trump- or election-related (not that I'm defending said content, but pointing out that its removal is for PR reasons as opposed to Facebook actually caring about democracy or discouraging violence).
However, it's clear they aren't acting in good faith and aren't actually interested in moderating bad content. Cybercrime-related Facebook groups which don't even attempt to conceal themselves are commonplace on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-... despite detecting them being trivial based on a simple keyword match.
does it really? "tries but fails to moderate extremism at massive scale" doesn't seem better than "makes no effort to moderate at much smaller scale". I guess the first leaves some potential for improvement in the future, but I don't expect a whole lot from facebook.
edit: I am not advocating for or against facebook being so large. What I am saying is there is a clear distinction between facebook and e.g. parler in terms of moderation.
"Just make it" is no longer as convincing a non-sequitor as it used to be.
I think we might be seeing the start of a total division of society along political sides.
The lesson the business world should take from this is: invest in your engineers.
Twitter had 30 engineers at one point, they weren’t deplatformed before becoming a better product.
Second, they've already found a new host (https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956315632/after-booted-by-big...), yet they announced they'll still likely go offline because that host can't provide all the engineering talent Parler relied on. They just need built up their teams and do the work to develop their internal infrastructure. They don't need to become a billion dollar company to do that.
I guess in this particular case, Gab vs Parler. Access to capital isn’t enough. Companies also need good legal advice, scale strategy and testing. Etc.
A teachable moment.
At $20 per hour, approximately 400,000.
I think the main reason these big social media and tech companies devote so many resources to moderation is their leaders are tired of being called into televised political hearings that sole purpose seem to be political grandstanding of self righteous politicians.
As a side note: as long as they (FB, YT, ...) can not moderate properly and automatically, they have not solved scale. They might have figured out making money but scale regarding social networks? - I do not grant them that achievement.
The "terms of use violations" or whatever BS they're referencing for booting Parler doesn't even enter into it, the action is based at least 99% on cost/benefit to the platform, not some sanitary inflexible set of rules.
Dorsey showed Twitter's rules mean nothing. Trump violates rules: "oh well he's an exception because he's a head of state [and he's the best thing that ever happened to engagement!]." Trump is losing power & allies are fleeing him: "sure he's still a head of state but this is the exception to the exception, so we're booting him [plus the tides just turned against him and dumping him is more palatable]." Soon we'll have the exception to the exception to the exception.
So let's not play dumb and assert that this is about some fixed set of rules, the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along based on "who is in power at the moment, what speech is unpopular at the moment" and above all "what will this cost us in dollars."
And the minute your speech is unpopular (I'm looking at you, anarchists, communists, and libertarians), out the door you go.
I think that's exactly what makes this such a complex issue. It's unprecedented. Never in the past have social media companies been suddenly used as an outlet for national leaders.
> the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along
Again, to the above point, this is obviously the case. There's no fixed set of rules to perfectly mediate this situation and appease everybody. It's going to be a bit fluid.
At some level, for these type of issues, intent doesn’t really matter, only results. I am sure big oil companies do t intend to cause global warming, however they put profits ahead of any concern for pollution. Same with Facebook. I am sure they don’t intend to be harmful and toxic, but at some level they put profits ahead of any concern for pollution.
This is how it always turns out: Orwellian
'At the end of Animal Farm, the pigs start to walk on their hind legs. This is significant because the animals have gone from saying "Four legs good, two legs bad" to the chant "Four legs good, two legs BETTER." Napoleon begins carrying a whip, and soon all the supervisor pigs are carrying whips. Napoleon also is seen with a pipe in his mouth. The pigs literally wear the clothes straight from Mr. Jones's closet'
When what all these people really mean, but obviously can't say, is, "We didn't think we would become the Orwellian overlords!"
Chomsky said it best, “Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”
Right now, there's an enormous liberal bias in Silicon Valley. The founders of these companies are more libertarian - some are even conservative, but their employees by-and-large are anywhere from left-leaning to far-left. That's fine. I don't see anything wrong with that. The resultant problem is with the helicopter parenting generation that produced these people, and their inability to accept things that make them uncomfortable.
But... its okay, because like all complex systems, it trends toward equilibrium, and now you're starting to see the system self-correct.
Exactly we need an elite social group to determine what is Orwellian.
Do you have an actual point?
Guns are mostly used to kill people. So we see them as tools only useful for that purpose. That’s why you can buy a set of knives on Amazon but not a 10 pack of Glocks.
Facebook is seen closer to knives. Parler was mostly guns.
That’s an incorrect statement. Let’s look at the evidence.
More than 50 million Americans engaged in some kind of recreational shooting in 2018 [0]. Compare that to 14,000 gun-related homicides across the country in the same period [1], mostly in certain high-crime communities [2].
The CDC estimates there are between 500,000 and 3 million instances of defensive gun use in the US each year [3]. They also found that cases of self-defense where the victim used a gun resulted in less injury to the victim, on average, than in cases where other self-defense strategies where employed.
There are also obvious downsides to a society with permissive gun ownership, but overstating the case for gun control doesn’t move the discussion in a positive direction.
[0] https://www.nssf.org/research/nsga-participation-reports/
[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2019/01/gun-deaths-2018-america-mas...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/...
[3] http://www.ncdsv.org/images/IOM-NRC_Priorities-for-Research-...
> In addition to the restrictions on certain kinds of data collection,
> congressional action in 1996 effectively halted all firearm-related injury research
> at the CDC by prohibiting the use of federal funding “to advo-cate
> or promote gun control.”18 In 2011, Congress enacted similar re-strictions
> affecting the entire U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The
> net result was an overall reduction in firearm violence research
> (Kellermann and Rivara, 2013). As a result, the past 20 years have
> witnessed diminished progress in understanding the causes and ef-fects
> of firearm violence.
Additionally, "homicide" is not a sufficient tally of gun deaths. There are also suicides and unintended discharges.
Regardless, the original point is that guns are primarily designed to kill things. It would not be "effective" defense if that were not the case. 2A advocates do not defend their gun rights purely so they can enjoy target shooting.
This is an odd claim, given that the "salient point" seems to be a verbatim quotation of the linked report, which contains further citations...
> Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997).
Hunting for sustenance, depending on where you live
But we were talking about Parler and Facebook. I am sure some people have used Parler for things other than far right propaganda, but can you honestly make the point that it wasn’t its primary use case?
The truth of the matter is that, unless I was actively watching those conversations, I can't make any point about its primary use case.
I'm definitely not arguing it's not; but, I have heard a call to action to get Telegram taken down from the App Store because "that's where the alt-right is going now", but there's plenty of other conversation types going on there.
Just because you and I had no interest in being a part of the communities we know are going on in Parler doesn't mean that people of those persuasions didn't primarily have friendly conversations about knitting much of the time.
I'm not sure that we can go just by volume of conversation, either. I imagine the vast majority of Twitter messages are spewing hatred, too. Maybe not the top-level comments, but there are hundreds if not thousands of people that previously responded to most every Trump tweet in a way filled with hatred for him.
As I was not a member of Parler, I can't really tell what kinds of conversations that place was designed and had in a way that's meaningfully distinct from Twitter.
In the US, stabbings are the second most common cause of murders after shootings, and a higher incident of assaults. In the UK, stabbings are significantly more common than shootings, to the point they are establishing very similar regulations around knife purchase and possession.
An honest look at the data on violence would indicate two things:
1. Violent behavior and the tool used are disconnected. E.g. People with an intention to be violent will act violent regardless of which tools are available.
2. When someone is violent they'll use the most efficient tool available. E.g. Once someone has made a decision to act out violently they'll identify and use the best tool available to carry out their violence.
In effect, there are two ways to approach violence in society. You can try to reduce the number of available tools to carry out violence so people are restricted to their bare hands (note strangulations and beatings just barely trail stabbing in the US as a cause of murder). Or you can address the social issues that result in people acting violently at all, to reduce the incidence of violence and violence-adjacent behaviors in society.
Levering #2 is easier but less impactful, Levering #1 is harder, but has much wider positive impacts.
No matter what you do, violence will never be entirely eliminated.
I think assessing the data honestly and coming to the conclusion "guns are a problem" is either a result of bias or naivete, because it's not a logical conclusion following from the available data, either US-centric or globally.
No, it's because Amazon doesn't sell guns. There's also no reason to own 10 of the same firearm - it's not like you're setting your dinner table with handguns.
As for guns being "mostly used to kill people", that's just not true. My gun collection has only been used to kill paper targets and, occasionally, deer. Properly used they are no more risk to society than a kitchen knife, arguably less since there are more stabbings than shootings every year.
Banning Parler and banning guns both strike me as infantilizing and highly ineffective. Look at what all of the anti-gun rhetoric has done for gun sales in the US - the same thing will happen with alternative social media platforms.
This would make for an interesting dinner party. Does any of Agatha Christie's stories start out like this? Or one of those murder/whodunnit dinner theater type of events where the dinner guests are part of the play.
You can't buy guns on Amazon for the same reason you can't buy tobacco, liquor, lottery tickets, or cars on Amazon. Because these are all things which are regulated by the government in such a way as to be incompatible with Amazon's logistics and purchasing setup and customer experience. You can buy all of those things online (except lottery tickets), but just not on Amazon. Since Amazon sells other alcoholic beverages, they're hardly taking a moral stance about the dangers of alcoholism. They sell tobacco accessories so they're hardly taking a moral stance against tobacco, they sell parts for cars so they're surely not against private vehicle ownership, and yes, they even sell tactical gear and gun accessories (although crucially not gun parts... any more).
The reason you can buy a set of knives on Amazon and not a Glock is that knives aren't regulated with more than 84000 conflicting laws between different state, county, and municipal jurisdictions across the US, including differing restrictions on transfer and shipping, and knives do not have federal regulations requiring background checks. Regardless of your personal opinion around private firearms ownership, you should surely be able to see that the analogy you've presented is patently absurd.
There's a moral-political argument which can be made, sure, but that argument isn't the basis for why Amazon doesn't offer these products, and /that/ was the assertion underlying the grandparent's analogy. It's simply false.
Look, the point isn’t to talk about gun rights. The point is that Parler was the toxic runoff from 4chan, Facebook, and the parts of Reddit it deemed too toxic to keep. Facebook is 99.9% reposting of random memes. It’s 0.1% is doing a lot of harm, but by and large it isn’t obviously designed to be a white supremacy platform, it just happens to be used that way by a decent number of people. And that’s my point: guns are designed to kill things, not to cut salad. Knives are designed to be tools that are more often than not used for peaceful cooking, and sometimes misused to cause harm. Trying to turn this into a “guns don’t kill people” debate is pointless. It’s outside the scope of the analogy of why Parler was seen as a harmful thing while Facebook wasn’t.
I'm not sure that's actually accurate. I think it's strongly debatable as to whether or not Facebook ever had any positive intents as a platform. Arguably, Facebook started as a way for predatory men on college campuses to stalk attractive women and comment on their bodies, which I'd be hard pressed to classify as a positive intent. Developing from that, Facebook has taken as many actions as possible to drive user engagement, including actively spying on their users to do so. Not only is the spying itself user-hostile, but the actions taken to drive user engagement seem to greatly emphasize and create rage, lust, fear, and other negative emotions in their user base. I'd be hard-pressed to classify any of this as positive intent.
I think you'll have a difficult time, regardless of the analogy you try to shoe-horn into place, arguing that Facebook suffers from unintended consequences when their ragebaiting mechanisms lead to political extremism and violence, and that Parler was intending that a platform designed for free speech resulted in extremism. Probably the best argument in your favor would be to focus on Parler's genesis story, which seems to strongly indicate that it too was not formed for positive intents. I think a mostly honest take is that both platforms are negative in both their intentions and their outcomes and are directly toxic for a functioning democratic society. The only real difference between Parler and Facebook is that Facebook is socially entrenched and has a massive global user base and the revenue/wealth that comes from that, and Parler doesn't.
To your other point, I am not defending Facebook here. The question that was raised: how come Parler was deplatformed as harmful but Facebook wasn’t even though it’s arguably worse in absolute terms. My point was that it’s probably because in relative terms Parler was mostly seen as being used in harmful ways while Facebook is seen as mostly non-harmful with some harmful parts.
I stand by that assessment, as in why Apple and Google haven’t removed the Facebook app from their app platforms. I do wish Facebook would get reined in because it is not a force for good. I think there was a brief period of maybe 2-3 years when it was a net positive: when you could use it to simply connect with people you used to know and lost contact with. Initially it was a weird stalker platform as you said, later it turned into a combo meme machine (and a bad one at that) and a marketing platform. About the only parts of FB that I still find useful personally are its Marketplace which is an objectively better experience than Craigslist (though FB is ruining it with how it’s running advertising there that really messes up your searches), and Messenger (but only because I at some point connected with a number of people on there; I will likely be moving those conversations elsewhere since there isn’t anything special about the Messenger itself). It’s other two major properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, are useful for other things but also have their own major problems. Instagram I think is a flash in the pan until the current generation of users ages out of being cool and the next generation wants to move to a new platform simply because they don’t want to hang out with the old geezers. WhatsApp has a privacy problem by design and better alternatives already exist (Matrix, Signal).
But yes Facebook is basically a mostly bad for society platform, it’s just bad in the sense that fast food is bad, not in the murder is bad. We tend to react to diffuse bad influences differently than to acute ones.
this isn't true. guns are used far more often for hunting animals than for killing humans, by multiple orders of magnitude. even more often, guns are used to shoot targets at the range.
Guns should be seen as just a tool, they should be legal but heavily regulated, they don't need their own Constitutional amendment. The basic premise of the Second Amendment became obsolete once the US had a standing army.
At some point you've crossed from hyperbole into just waging a culture war. Remember that the goal is to evolve both sides understanding in a disagreement, not shout loudly at the other person until they walk away.
So do I (although I might disagree to some extent on the reasonable people), yet I've experienced multiple direct threats against my life. This is in England, where it's supposed to be all tea and biscuits.
Parler was created because Facebook and Twitter wouldn't allow certain types of speech. Fundamentally that same speech that was banned from Facebook is what got Parler kicked from pretty much everywhere.
Parler knowingly allowed threats of violence, murder, and rape on their platform. Facebook and Twitter grudgingly booted the groups and individuals who made that same sort of speech off.
I do agree that Facebook is given too much latitude, but there are pretty significant gaps. Facebook is mostly used for speech of a more mundane sort.
Probably something like S/N ratio. Even though there was insurrectionist and para-insurrectionist activity on Facebook and Twitter, it was a far smaller percentage of the total, and they are more effective at moderating it (once it reaches their awareness). Parler's whole raison d'être was to capture people who got kicked off Twitter for posting that kind of stuff, so it stands to reason its proportion must have been far higher there.
If there's a problem here, it's that Google has grown to be so powerful. Nobody was ever concerned about Lifeway Christian Bookstores being extremely selective in whose products they would carry, for reasons that many would consider quite discriminator. Why? Because Lifeway has lots of competitors, and no effective way to compel people to only buy books from them.
Because there's good (or at least neutral) stuff mixed in with the bad stuff. The problem with every free-speech alternative to a heavily moderated forum is that it always ends up being 100% anger: there's never anything lighthearted to point to to defend it.
Facebook has better PR too.
The argument for Parler from at least some platforms seems to have been that they were unable or unwilling to police content after they had actual notice. Whether it is as sufficient or not may be debatable, but Facebook has at least visibly made steps to address the problem as attention has been focussed on it.
No, I mean actual knowledge of the content, by whatever mechanism.
Same reason tech firms are happy to "stand up" for democracy in small developing nations but won't say boo to China.
If you're looking to big business for some consistent moral principle, you're looking in the wrong place.
To be clear, what I mean is that they are demonstrably not "the law." This is a market problem and this was the market solution.
meanwhile what % of parler's stuff all those "bad" things are?
Facebook could have 100 times more violent content than parler, but it would be a much smaller percentage of content because Facebook is 1000000 times bigger. It's that simple really. Banning Parler is more efficient.
Also, Parler went out and sold itself as somewhere this was allowed, protected and encouraged. Facebook didn't, quite the opposite in fact.
I get your larger point, but the actual numbers you picked to illustrate it are just completely divorced from reality.
Parler caused 1 night of rioting.
How is that for percentages of content being objectionable?
That's one of my frustrations with this: these issues should be dealt with by police and governments and society as a whole. The total failure of those leaves us looking to Big Tech firms to do things they were never designed to do (change human nature, police speech AND make a profit). Things they really can't do without collaboration and intrusive behaviour. But enough of my hair splitting...
Re the percentages, Any platform over a certain size will have racists (and pedophiles and other illegal or undesirable users). The question isn't whether someone on Facebook is being racist. The question is whether Facebook encourage it and whether they effectively moderate it when it is reported/discovered.
Facebook is huge and has much less racism etc than Parler did exactly because they ban it and mod it. They're not perfect, but they're making an effort. That is all you can expect from a platform that allows user content.
Parler encouraged and refused to moderate the same content. That's how it grew from zero users up. That's how it marketed itself. It could have moderated, it removed all sorts of legal content that didn't fit its brand. But it's taken little to no action on violent right wing groups. Quite the opposite, it's encouraged and courted them.
Percentage measures are a measure of the effectiveness of the mods and the actions of the people running the platform and that's what we can reasonably expect. Absolute measures are at least partly just down to size of platform.
The also percentage matters because parler is small right now. If we ignore it because it's "only a night of rioting" what happens when parler has 330mil users like twitter? Or 2.7bn users like FB? You'll get a lot more than 1 genocide out of a mega-parlar...
Density also matters. If I browse reddit, Facebook, twitter and parler randomly, how long before I see crazy conspiracy theories or calls to violence? That's what's concerning here as well: echo Chambers. All the others are much broader, but on parler you just got a very right wing, fact free and urgent set of inputs. That's much more likely to lead to someone being radicalised than the same amount of BS spread over a much bigger collection of cake recipes, kitten pics and funny gifs. That's the other reason percentages (a density measure) matter.
At least that's how I understand it.
Back to my soap box for a moment: I think we have a real problem with people who are not used to social media not having any BS filter. Thats the root cause of both the riots and the Burmese genocide (I assume that what you refer to, correct me otherwise).
We don't have a solution to that. Facebook et al tried to solve it by dilution and moderation. Parler saw it as an opportunity to profit off of and lean into. Those are 2 different business models morally even if its a difference of degree rather than ultimate outcome.
Pointing to the large size of ToS violations on Facebook and concluding that Facebook is a dangerous platform is akin to pointing out how many Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas get into collisions and concluding they are dangerous models of cars. They're perfectly safe cars there's just a lot of them on the road.
Call it the Alex Jones method. Promote a conspiracy theory and monetise the traffic via advertising views, affiliate links or actually selling products that mitigate the effects of conspiracy theory you pushed. All online advertising makes this profitable to anyone and that's what needs to be addressed.
Seems a far worse offender to me. At least Parler chats were public.
Google’s argument would be Facebook has shown good-faith efforts to respond to the problem, e.g. by freezing Trump. Parler didn’t or couldn’t. (Counterfactual: they weren’t given much time.)
In reality, a greater fraction of Parler’s users are engaging in criminal activity. By virtue of market share. (I reckon the number of problem users is higher at Facebook. Again by virtue of size.) And disconnecting hundreds of millions of voters from their kids’ photos is a good way to get slapped.
Great arguments for breaking up Facebook.
It's funny because if he did do the move earlier, he'd have hurt twitter where it counts - their stock price. But I guess the attention on Twitter was just too much to ignore.
This is a legitimate criticism even for people on the right about Trump. He knew these Tech Giants were questionable about uneven censorship, he’s been complaining about it for years.
So why in the hell wasn’t he posting to gab, parlor, bitchute, streamable, all the “alternatives” first, then the tech giants on automatically on delay? Someone could have EASILY set that up for him.
The media for the past four years set around salivating for the next Trump tweet. They would’ve had to say Parler, Gab, whatever. They would’ve had to show the logos. They would’ve had to make it more about the words in the platform.
You could be a diehard Trump supporter, and realize that this is largely his fault for not being smart about how his message got out. I really think he thought he was above censorship, they wouldn’t DARE... I guess he was right, just until until he lost power.
Yes. To be fair, Parler didn’t do much including after the backlash. But I’m not going to argue this is another advantage Facebook accrues due to its size.
Parler probably pays Google and Apple more for ads than Facebook.
Facebook on the other hand is doing the bare minimum :p
I really don’t think this is liberal vs conservative, left vs right. Mainstream social networks are full of conservatives. YouTube is basically Fox News mixed with Drudge Report once you start down that path. Even Reddit —- once you get past the post titles you realize that Reddit commenters are actually right leaning now. They look different than the stereotypical portrayal of gods and guns conservatives but the views are the same save a few social issues. Scott Alexander called them the “grey tribe” and I expect they’ll start being called the “new right” eventually. HN is basically entirely left-passing conservatives.
But then there’s this tiny subgroup of legit insane people who with nothing better to do than get angry at the internet all day and push conspiracy theories. They keep getting passed around and banned from social networks while more mainstream right-wing talking heads use them as the poster children for their victim complex.
YouTube seems more 'anti-woke' than 'right-leaning'. Those aren't the same, I don't think.
Please go into more detail on why you feel this way, or if you have evidence to support your view. You could be right, because both YouTube and Reddit are vast websites, and I admittedly stick mostly to tech and tech-related areas of both, so I may not be seeing it.
If you scroll through Parler, you barely had to go 1 meter before there's something aggressively violent.
I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events.
At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members.
So, if you want to deplatform people based on their political leanings, I guess you can go ahead and do that. But, the "reasons" being used to shut down Parler don't seem to be founded in fact.
how do you reconcile this opinion with the reporting that uses gps data from the parler data dump to place parler users at the protest and in the capitol building?
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...
Guilt by association is something we should avoid. It looks an awful lot like a witch hunt.
Anecdata from HNers in this thread suggests otherwise, and unless you can show evidence that all 4 million users conspired to storm the Capitol building, there's not much of a leg to stand on there.
No, assuming that they exist at all (which seems unlikely given the nature of the incident: peaceful people interested in just “wandering around…sucking on their soda pops” don’t tend to casually hang around riots involving violent clashes with the police, use of chemical irritants on both sides, gunfire, etc.) they aren’t, except to the extent that some of the former may not have been identified yet and moved into the latter category.
Anyone who illegally entered the building and is identified is being charged.
2. The gps data shows them being inside the Capitol building.
Just some examples of those non-existent violent posts
My example and personal experience does so.
Producing a bunch of bad posts that they had not yet deleted also doesn’t prove the claim.
Just as the never-deleted “Trump severed head” picture doesn’t prove evil intent by Twitter, et.al.
Perhaps they just hadn’t gotten to them all. Perhaps their user-driven moderation scheme didn’t scale.
I’m getting fairly tired of being impugned by generalizations; I personally didn’t join Parler to plan evil; I just didn’t want to be on a site where everyone seemed to hate me.
So, I am a counter-example that invalidates the wildly general claim.
That is all.
They are easy to find for every platform.
Which is it? Facebook optimizes for engagement.. Parler optimizes for free speech.
Why did Parler optimize for free speech? Is it because some of the members were being banned from the other platforms for extremism?
Did Parler gain network effect because of those certain members moving over to the platform?
You have to think deeper about the whys here.
So, in my experience, Parler’s primary purpose was unlikely the planning of evil.
...until someone up in the food chain will either shut that down too or force them to disassociate with you.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/25/21532883/paypal-cuts-tie...
> Keep some spares in a closet for when the feds inevitably come when someone uses your unmoderated platform to plan crimes.
Section 230.
It is not. The “free market argument” does not account for entrenched monopolies who buy up - or shut down -competitors long before they can become threats.
Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism.
That's the first time I've ever heard that. Generally, libertarians will state that the existence of monopolies is an outcome of government intervention.
It’s those icky conservatives now, but the same mechanism will be used against more people tomorrow, as needed.
https://www.newsweek.com/amy-coney-barrett-preference-defini...
Is there a regularly updated official list somewhere of newly-considered-offensive words so one can proactively update one's vocabulary?
https://static.attn.com/sites/default/files/allhousesmatter....
And then there is Tor. If you really want to live outside of any moderation, outside of even basic laws, then setup a Tor hidden service. If you aren't going to put in some basic effort to protect yourself (ie what ThePirateBay does every day) and instead run strait to the courts, then I have little sympathy.
The browser makers will find a way to make it happen if they need to.
Vk is very popular and has scaled well.
Intent matters. Did FB purposefully tailored their site's pitch for such characters? Did they have enough mods to delete stuff or algos in place? I suppose in groups barely anyone would report posts as not appropriate.
Many of my friends signed up. There was never hateful or violent rhetoric in their feeds, nor mine.
You can be removed from these platforms at any time, with almost no appeal. That's a significant flaw, not a design feature. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are the public square for the Internet now. I don't personally like it; I hate it... but that's the way it is. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe its time for everyone to build their own website, host their own video and audio, etc.
I agree with you on censorship and honestly there's no right way of doing this. What if someone in a certain position used Twitter to call for another gathering to "save our country" fight and show "our strength" and then we have dead senators and army boots in the ground? You can say we want no violence right after saying "fight like hell for the country" but... Maybe a timeout was the lesser of evils?
The phrase of 2020 was "too many". An arbitrary line.
There are "too many" unarmed black men being killed.
There are "too many" fake news stories being posted to Facebook.
There are "too many", "too many", "too many". We have to do "something" -- and this is something.
What asinine thing to say. First, does that mean there's an acceptable number of unarmed black men to be killed every year? But what this is trying to do is play yourself off as a moderate. "You know, I don't think we should be doing censorship... but there are just TOO MANY"
No. You're an authoritarian playing to scared people who want the problem to stop, and don't care what it costs.
I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it just because Facebook has other uses, because they're bigger or because an app store that doesn't have a Facebook app will experience a huge backlash from consumers?