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Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by bigmattystyles on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:12PM (#26145337)
I'm slightly left of center so parler is not for me - but I am curious and I like to see what's going on outside of my bubble. When I had to commute to work for instance, I'd listen to AM talk radio on the way in. It did nothing but reinforce my left of center world view. In any case, my point is that in this society we live in, merely having an account is seen as an espousing of the views. With parler's poor history of user data handling, there is no way I am even creating an account and risk having my (real-life) reputation take a hit. It's a sad state of affairs. Now, one might argue that I've just said I'm slightly left of center on hackernews, why don't I fear that - it wouldn't take much for someone who already knows me to tie my person to this account. I guess parler has a reputation as being (extreme?) far right and that's the difference. Again, it doesn't make much sense.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by ttt0 on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:20PM (#26145443)
> In any case, my point is that in this society we live in, merely having an account is seen as an espousing of the views.

You can even get fired for having an account there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922486

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by XorNot on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:25PM (#26145501)
And yet mysteriously I'm fairly certain that person didn't just "have" an account there...
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by throwaway19937 on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:47PM (#26148623)
I haven't found any evidence that she posted anything offensive.

According to (https://reclaimthenet.org/literary-agent-fired-gab-parler/) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924637) her Gab and Parler posts were mirrored from Twitter.

Newsweek's story on the firing (https://www.newsweek.com/literary-agents-firing-over-parler-...) doesn't mention any offensive posts on Gab.

None of the Reddit discussions I have looked at mention any offensive posts either; I would expect Reddit to find such posts if they had existed.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by ttt0 on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:26PM (#26145525)
I have no idea, but neither did the people who fired this person. It was purely on the grounds that he had an account there.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by cobraetor on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:55PM (#26147231)
She, not he.

> Colleen Oefelein, who identified herself on Twitter as an associate literary agent with the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, appeared to confirm her termination in a tweet on Monday morning.

> "Well thanks Twitter and @JDLitAgency," Oefelein wrote. "I just got fired because I'm a Christian and a conservative."

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by justinhj on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @07:39PM (#26161028)
"The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency was distressed to discover this morning, January 25th, that one of our agents has been using the social media platforms Gab and Parler."
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by vineyardmike on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:00PM (#26146580)
I had the same thought...
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by kenjackson on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:15PM (#26145385)
Actually it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot things I don’t want to be associated with. I’m also left of center and I’m not actually worried about having a Parler account, but there are a ton of websites that scare me way more.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by fao_ on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:18PM (#26145412)
I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.

I'm honestly not sure what I expected to be honest. I signed in once, scrolled a bit, recoiled in disgust and haven't been back.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by cobraetor on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:50PM (#26147175)
> I signed up for a Gab account purely out of curiosity. There was literally nothing but misogynistic, homophobic, racist, antisemitic trash content on the entire timeline.

That's interesting. The public timeline on Gab is visible to everyone (there is no need to sign in). I just took a peek at it right now and I don't see anything misogynistic, etc. Would you mind sharing some of its specific timeline content that made you think that?

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by crocodiletears on Thursday February 18, 2021 @03:40AM (#26177440)
I joined Gab very early on in its development, when the devs were still running it as a reskinned WordPress site.

It very much was exactly as the gp describes, though I've been told that the platform has become more tolerable as its community has expanded. I haven't check back however.

Gab's public feed shows a subset of the top and hot posts, most of them look pretty tame.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by throw0101a on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:33PM (#26145600)
An observation that someone on HN pointed to when the Parler take-down originally occurred:

> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

* https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by 14 on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:51PM (#26145804)
This comment actually shows why surveillance in a society is bad. You are altering you behaviours simply because of worry you may be judged and not for doing anything wrong but just for looking.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by x86_64Ubuntu on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:11PM (#26146010)
The jump to surveillance in society is quite a leap from the comment.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by red-montaigne on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:40PM (#26146330)
Not really. I'm in the same boat: I'm an independent who likes to get an omnivorous information diet, but I've regularly avoided looking into certain things I'm curious about because I know there will be a record of it and a bunch of data sellers providing a misleading snapshot of who I am and what I believe. What did Richelieu say? "Give me seven words spoken by an honest man and I'll find something in them to hang him?" In today's surveillance society it's intelligent to limit your footprint, which is exactly the chilling effect free speech and free society advocates are worried about. (Glenn Greenwald's "No Place to Hide" is a great read on the topic.)
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by noir_lord on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:51PM (#26146475)
I pretty much stopped caring - in a post-snowden world where we found out that merely visiting a linux forum gets you on a list[1] I figure I'm already on a good good chunk of them.

That and a curiosity about the world and history (particularly the cold war) means just the stuff I look at on wikipedia would look awful out of context.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-targets-linux-journal-as-e...

That's the problem when you lower the floor with dragnets, you drown in your own noise.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by red-montaigne on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:03PM (#26146617)
Yeah that's one approach, you can just choose not to care. I'm sure I'm also on Linux lists and crap like that, but that doesn't mean I want to end up on a bunch of other ones. Particularly with the vehemence in American politics today, I don't want either side putting me on one of their enemies lists just because some site I signed up to check out got hacked and all of the user info got dumped. Seems easier to just check out, live my life, and try to be kind to the people in the real world around me. If I want a political discussion I'll go chat with some of my friends.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by inglor_cz on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @03:54AM (#26152163)
Do not think about dragnets as dragnets. Do think about them as a searchable storage of facts usable for future persecution.

Look at any authoritarian regime. Once they decide that a particular person has to be destroyed, they dig through their entire history to compile a dossier of Evil Things that person has said and done. You need searchable history for that, though. Or a lot of manpower. But databases are better for that purpose.

Similarly, if you can show that (unwanted person) said the N-word in 2004, you can probably get them destroyed today i the U.S. The hit piece just writes itself.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by mattnewton on Monday February 15, 2021 @09:31PM (#26150277)
I think it’s not just the NSA’s list that the poster is worried about- they are worried about being associated with violent nut jobs by polite society, and getting canceled.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by robin21 on Monday February 15, 2021 @09:49PM (#26150387)
How successful do you think a background check service for tech startups would be that gives you a percentage rating of how racist,homophobic,etc. an applicant is.

Could pivot to an “auto-cancel” saas if you will. You could even cancel people in bulk.

Jokes aside I’m sure there would be appetite for such a thing. Under the guise of “employee safety”.

And one of the first lists to check would be Parler.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by mattnewton on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:29PM (#26146213)
Not the original poster but, it seems pretty direct to me: everything we do online is logged somewhere online, for most practical purposes forever, and that’s the surveillance they are worried about.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by BuyMyBitcoins on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:37PM (#26146305)
I’m really worried about this and I think it’s going to be a massive problem in the next few decades if trends continue. Especially because society’s views on what is acceptable changes with each generation. What we say today may be perfectly acceptable now, but can be considered hateful or [xyz]-phobic in the future.

I try to tread carefully but even still, everything I have ever posted can be taken wildly out of context and used against me by some activist in the future.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by inglor_cz on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @03:51AM (#26152148)
This. People seem to forget how much has the Overton Window shifted over last 4 years, or 10.

In a 2008 interview, Obama said he wasn't in favor of gay marriage. Today, that would be cancelable offense for a random liberal person, and retroactivity is a thing in that culture. Brendan Eich was forced to resign in 2014 over an anti-gay-marriage donation from the same year of 2008.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by joshstrange on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @11:56AM (#26155953)
The difference being Obama came around on the issue and, as far as I've seen, Brendan did not.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by ConceptJunkie on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @12:17PM (#26156198)
That difference has no bearing on Obama not being cancelled in 2008 and Eich being cancelled in 2014.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by joshstrange on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @01:48PM (#26157304)
Not in 2008 but in 2014 yes it does. I don't disagree with the Overton Window moving. Obama informed us of his change of thought in 2012 [0] (still later than I would have liked). Eich never did that even in 2014 when he was called out for it.

I understand and respect that people's views can change and I'm more than willing to allow them to change their positions. Eich never changed, that is why he was "canceled". Also it's important to note this wasn't just an internet "mob" that "canceled" him, people who worked under him didn't want him in that position and spoke out about it.

[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/may/11/barack-oba...

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by ConceptJunkie on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @02:03PM (#26157475)
So, in 2008, it was acceptable by the public to take 4 years to change your mind, but in 2014, that was no longer acceptable.

As long as I understand what you're saying.

I think the real difference is that when Obama said it in 2008, no one actually believed him.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by Sunspark on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:43PM (#26147075)
Absolutely. E.g., looking at porn with a verified account. Just about everything has a database table of everything that an account has viewed which allows someone the opportunity to be judgey.

Fortunately, I am not a public figure.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by codezero on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:33PM (#26146267)
Maybe, but I see what they mean. The real life analog is just social/cultural pressure which is usually relatively local and personalized.

Online and with the general risk that your entire diary gets opened up - folks are cautious about their actions with that in mind. Also I think it’s that the judges are not local/personal entities. So they are difficult to reason with or explain context.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by jimbokun on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:51PM (#26146478)
How can you dispute we live in a surveillance society?

Everything we do or say, everywhere we go, is being tracked somewhere, unless you are extremely vigilant. And even if you are extremely vigilant, I'm sure you will slip up somewhere along the line.

Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by robin21 on Monday February 15, 2021 @09:52PM (#26150401)
Everyone makes fun of China’s “social score” system. But we are already there...except we privatized it. Permanent bans across all social media.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by vineyardmike on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:57PM (#26146547)
Not op, but i think the dispute is that its tied to the comment not that it exists.
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by meibo on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:18PM (#26145415)
Like having a Facebook account?
Re:Parler is back online after a month of downtime by senectus1 on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:40PM (#26148540)
heh, your comment is pretty much exactly me, AM radio station and all. except that i did create an account just so i could see first hand what was being said.

Trust but verify.