ah yes definitely much worse than inciting _actual_ mobs to promote _actual_ violence.
Oh but they only incite violence against the right groups. All good then. Great system.
Ergo, the supposed intention is probably manifestly meaningless.
For example, you can point to the use of Facebook as a tool of genocide in Myanmar. Facebook will not, and probably cannot do anything about that beyond removing their service.
It has nothing to do with any supposed "cancel culture".
Parler's entire point was being an alt-right platform, whodathunk the far right would be using it?
Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they are bad, evil, or wrong.
I don’t think this is a fair statement. From past interviews, it’s clear that the CEO of Parler and its founding team intended for it to be politically neutral and a destination for those of all ideologies. They may have attracted those on the political right, but that’s because Twitter is by default a bastion for the political left and naturally those seeking alternatives would have a different lean. But I don’t think that’s the same as the entire point being an alt-right platform.
Also, Twitter and Facebook definitely played a role in the riot story, and likely a much bigger role than Parler because of their scale. See https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-federal-authorities-a... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/13/faceboo... for more on that. But of course Apple and Google haven’t taken any actions against Facebook or Twitter. If the argument is that “most content on these services is fine”, that was also true of Parler.
Reference: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506
[1] https://nitter.mastodont.cat/pic/media%2FEq_b25LXMAEwtNZ.jpg...
[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/shinj...
https://gist.github.com/d0nk/ef4e58645d3250851491e4550cb16e2...
I don’t know if the moderation log is in the leaks, but that’s something that you could draw some conclusions from. So far all this is conjecture.
Open basically any media and you'll see three categories:
(1) Opinion pieces.
(2) Attempts at appearing neutral by allowing opposing views, but always together with a commentary provided either by themselves or someone else to clearly provide objections.
(3) Safe easily sharable info. Like cute / funny pictures you can send to your friends which will get people into the site.
Why is that a platform considered biased towards left thinking? Because it put warnings under probably false claims by far right presidents? The fact that it's only happened to Trump and Bolsonaro says more about right wing politics than about Twitter itself.
Well yes. The pattern holds true pretty much 100% of the time for most media platforms. Newspapers, reddit, etc.
The second question I think was already addressed.
It absolutely was not that at all.
1. https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-fac...
Whereas Parler is the opposite: they practically celebrate how little they care about undermining democracy with misinformation.
In my view, the more likely actual reason for the cancelling of Parler, as well as for their seemingly excessive hardware requirements, is that Parler wants a shot at competing with Twitter for real, and has convinced their investors that is possible. The latest chaos must be one of the best free marketing anybody in their line of business could hope for.
If realDonaldTrump moves to Parler, and some popular republicans already have, that would potentially bring in a floodwave of new users, and risking that kind of business opportunity by having underpowered servers would be professional malpractice.
Parler is also likely to face months-long DDOS attacks.
It's similar to when Cloudflare booted 8chan, after the latter was linked to the white nationalist terrorist attacks in Christchurch and El Paso.
I don't understand the rationale for your view. Why would slapping down a potential Twitter competitor be any concern of AWS?
In what universe is that not an insurrection?
It's not like they just protested outside and maybe broke a few windows with rocks or something. They actually broke through the police defense, broke into the building, and went looking for legislators, who had to be evacuated.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/11/capitol-assault-a-mor...
« “Hang Mike Pence!” the insurrectionists chanted as they pressed inside, beating police with pipes. »
I dunno, it certainly sounds like they were interested in doing something to Mike Pence.
Their goal was to stop the counting of the electoral college votes and cause havoc. They were trying to literally subvert the federal government and our collective voting system.
They very obviously didn't have a plan and were just seeing how far they could get. You are imputing too much direction and intelligence to these people.
> They were trying to literally subvert the federal government and our collective voting system.
The capitol doesn't work like a round of Capture the Flag in Halo; just standing there for a few minutes doesn't give you political power. Even the protestors were smart enough to comprehend this.
Nobody else is contending that the Capital is a "round" of capture the flag. You just brought that up for some bizarre reason. The timing of this directly lines up with when they were working to count the electoral college votes. More than a few people were violent toward the cops, and nobody has any reason to believe that they wouldn't have killed some Democratic congresspeople or Pence if they had been able to find them. At least one person did kill a cop and a dozen other cops were injured.
Themselves.
> There's zero evidence that they intended to do anything to legislators.
You mean other than:
(1) Many of them stating their imminent or thwarted intent to do so, either by chants, in interviews, in electronic messages, or otherwise;
(2) Them bringing weapons and restraints with which to do things to legislators;
(3) Them becoming increasingly agitated and violent at the prospects of targets of violence escaping, as occurred when people were evacuated from the Speakers Lobby shortly before the breakthrough where Ashli Babbitt was shot.
Not true. The mob physically attacked the Capitol police, repeatedly, with a variety of weapons. One of the policemen, who was struck in the head by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher, later died from his injuries.
Can you be more specific than "a variety of weapons"? Almost all interactions with the police seemed peaceful, bordering on friendly, barring the one who was hit on the head.
why would you need handshake if it's hosted on tor which uses .onion addresses?
Cloudflare already deplatformed people: https://tech.co/news/cloudflare-removes-service-8chan-2019-0....
Has the right come up with a new word for cyber bullying, or is that something else altogether? How can I inflict digital violence on someone?
Whether silencing millions of people or ruining a company counts as digital violence against someone is more subjective.
Let's not get carried away. Nobody's been silenced.
Eventually some of the people affected would just give up on trying to communicate with like-minded people online altogether, which I suppose is the point. Remember, though, we are talking about First Amendment protected speech for most of these people.
You may say that no one needs to be able to communicate online, and as long as someone can use the postal service then they haven't been silenced, but by that logic you could say that a regime which locks up its political opponents hasn't really "silenced" them as long as they are still allowed to write letters.
This fellow seemed to not realise he was living in a democracy and had been doing so his whole life.
He provided some examples to prove his points, and they were all from ages ago. He didn't seem to realise that the trouble we're going through now is a direct result of allowing hate-filled people to form bubbles within which their hate festered until it boiled over.
Without Parler (or any other safe space for these bigots and racists), they benefit from a broader range of views, and that's a better thing for society as a whole.
Conservatives seem to just not get democracy, and as a result see the Government as something distinct from themselves. In my country, the government is folk I (or my neighbours elected), and they enact policy I (or my neighbours) want. We can just as well change that policy in a few years time if we didn't want to. That's democracy 101.
If you live in a democracy, you don't fear your government, and you can trust them to regulate speech, because they'll do what you (or the majority of your peers) want... if not immediately, then in four years time at most.
Just because a law is passed in a democracy, doesn't mean it is moral. A law that requires all members of an ethnic or political minority to be arrested should be resisted no matter how "democratic" it is. (I'm not saying a voluntary boycott of Parler is equivalent to that, just that "living in a democracy" isn't, by itself, a complete justification).
> the trouble we're going through now is a direct result of allowing hate-filled people to form bubbles
If the problem is online bubbles forming, then maybe you should be objecting to Parler blocking criticism of right-wing views on its platform (in other words, suppression of speech is the cause of the problem, not the solution). However, to be against Parler banning left-wing hate-filled accounts but not Twitter banning right-wing hate-filled accounts raises the original concern that the person deciding which speech to ban might have political biases.
> Conservatives seem to just not get democracy, and as a result see the Government as something distinct from themselves.
To be fair, in many countries (particularly the US) the electoral system (not to mention lobbying) causes quite deliberate divergence between what the majority of the people want and what the majority of politicians want. Also, to steelman the view which you assign to "Conservatives", it's worth considering that societies should care not just about democracy but about liberty as well, since "we can pass this law" doesn't always mean "we should pass this law".
> If you live in a democracy, you don't fear your government
What a wonderful world that would be. As explained, not every democracy is as representative as you might hope, and not every person even in a perfectly representative democracy can feel safe from their government.
> if not immediately, then in four years time at most.
The Nazi party actually lost seats in the November 1932 German federal election, which was considered free and fair, but just two months later the party had seized power. Also, if we're making international comparisons, UK general elections only occur every five years.
Finally, to give a recent example of how "silence" is used in political discourse, let me give this example:
> High-profile barrister says 10th arrest warrant for Duterte critic showed the Philippines was trying to silence Ressa
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/19/amal-clooney-d...