Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

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Re: Parler

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Jan 12, 2021 6:58 pm

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Re: Parler

Postby DrEvil » Tue Jan 12, 2021 7:22 pm

stickdog99 » Wed Jan 13, 2021 12:50 am wrote:How about if we break up all effective oligopolies?

Personally, I am not against limiting every corporate (and individual) entity to gross revenues of say $10 billion per year.

Of course, that would have the "negative" consequences of promoting and ensuring competition.


But how can they properly compete if they can't afford to buy off Congress?
/s

I'm all for this. No one should be too big to fail. And since so many of the right-wing shitheads are pining for the good old days I suggest bringing back the tax-rates from the good old days. Progressive rates with 90% on anything above, say, 10 million. And cap executive pay (total compensation, not just the monthly paycheck) at 10 or 20 times the lowest earner in the company (including contractors, like janitors and security).

If they don't like it they can take their own advice and move elsewhere.
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Re: Parler

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Tue Jan 12, 2021 10:11 pm

: Can we change the thread title to Parler and Free Speech Debate?

Jack, If you think it's necessary, go for it. I've already been accused by others of taking a position simply for sharing the OP for discussion so I'm not rightly invested in the title.
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Re: Parler

Postby stickdog99 » Wed Jan 13, 2021 3:23 pm

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-si ... nopolistic

How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler

In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.

The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.

Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.

It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

much more ...
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Re: Parler

Postby DrEvil » Wed Jan 13, 2021 4:59 pm

Parler already has a new host at Epik, the same company that hosts Gab.
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Zephyr Teachout and Glenn Greenwald

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 14, 2021 8:06 pm

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Re: Parler

Postby Laodicean » Thu Jan 14, 2021 8:22 pm

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Re: Parler

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Fri Jan 15, 2021 6:46 am



Yes... quite.

https://techbeacon.com/security/scraped ... itol-perps

Scraped Parler data is truly revealing

Richi Jennings Industry analyst and editor, RJAssociates


Beleaguered free-speech app Parler is down for the duration, as you probably know. What you might not know is that an Austrian lover of free speech managed to preserve “99.9%” of the posts from the service—even the deleted ones.

It was a simple matter of scraping more than 50TB of data via HTTP before AWS pulled the plug. I’m sure the site owners and their users are overjoyed that all this free speech has been rescued for posterity. It’ll make a fine record of their grand day out in DC last week.

It turns out that law enforcers are kinda happy, too. In this week’s Security Blogwatch, we learn learnings from lemmings.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: 50 in 720.
FBI adores IDORs

What’s the craic, Zack? Mister Whittaker reports—Scraped Parler data is a metadata gold mine:

While the site is gone (for now), millions of posts published to the site … are not. A lone hacker scraped millions of posts, videos and photos published to the site … before the site went offline on Monday, preserving a huge trove of potential evidence for law enforcement investigating [those] who allegedly used the platform to plan and coordinate the breach of the Capitol.

@donk_enby scraped the social network and uploaded copies to the Internet Archive. [It] could be a gold mine of evidence for authorities. … Most web services remove metadata when you upload your photos and videos, but Parler apparently didn’t.

Many of the posts made calls to “burn down [Washington] D.C.,” while others called for violence and the execution of Vice President Mike Pence.

And Andy Greenberg adds—Basic Bug:

A very basic bug in Parler's architecture nonetheless seems to have made it all too easy to … freely download every message, photo, and video posted to the site, including sensitive geolocation data. … In the days and hours before [its] shutdown, a group of hackers scrambled to download and archive the site … dozens of terabytes of Parler data.

Parler lacked the most basic security measures that would have prevented the automated scraping. … It even ordered its posts by number in the site's URLs, so that anyone could have easily, programmatically downloaded the site's millions of posts [a] cardinal security sin … known as an insecure direct object reference [or] IDOR. … Services like Twitter, by contrast, randomize the URLs of posts so they can't be guessed.

Dude. You’re getting it. Dell Cameron spoke with the pseudonymous Ms. Enby: [You’re fired—Ed.]

[She] began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6 … what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence … hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through. … The scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time.

Operating on little sleep, [she] began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. … The copious data may also serve as a fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days.

Perhaps it’s not only law enforcement who’d be interested in the info. Camel Pilot wants your help to liberate a Nigerian legacy:

My first reaction was: Wow, a list of extremely gullible people would be a marketing dream.

But but but … censorship!!!1! Wheels Of Confusion turns it around:

Parler was in a profit-sharing scheme with paid "influencers" and actively banning left-wing content. All while advertising themselves as the "free speech" platform for people who were banned from Twitter.

They knowingly, actively cultivated and created a business model around fueling right-wing extremism that was too militant for other services. And no, being kicked off Amazon isn't censorship anymore than being refused a book deal from the major publishers is.

It turns out that AWS had been “repeatedly” trying to get Parler to do something about the content—or so it claims:

AWS notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement, requested removal, and reviewed Parler’s plan to address the problem, only to determine that Parler was both unwilling and unable to do so. AWS suspended Parler’s account as a last resort to prevent further access to such content.

This case is about Parler’s demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of … AWS content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens. There is no legal basis in AWS’s customer agreements or otherwise to compel AWS to host content of this nature.

The facts are unequivocal: If there is any breach, it is Parler’s demonstrated failure and inability to identify and remove such content. AWS was well within its rights to suspend Parler immediately for those failures.

Lest we forget, there’s a human person behind this story. Mata Hari worries for Ms. Enby’s safety:

Parler apparently has many military and ex-military members. … That's not the kind of people I'd openly flout about how I just screwed them.

Oh dear. But Properjob70 thinks it’s not as bad as all that:

Thankfully the young lady who pulled this off is over here in Europe. I suspect she's somewhat safer from vengeful [people] than in the States.

In related news, Joseph Cox notes more metadata malarkey—Another Muslim Prayer App Tracking Users:

The app sends notifications reminding users when to pray, shows them which direction to pray while pointing towards Mecca, and displays nearby mosques to users based on their current location. … Salaat First has more than ten million downloads. … The company collecting the location data, a French firm called Predicio, has previously been linked to a supply chain of data involving a U.S. government contractor that worked with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the FBI.

The leaked data itself contains precise latitude and longitude of app users, their phone model, operating system, IP address, and a timestamp. The data also includes the user's unique advertising ID [allowing one to] follow that person's movements through time.

Senator Ron Wyden [said] in a statement that "Google and Apple took a good first step protecting Americans’ privacy when they banned the data broker X-Mode Social last year. But … Google and Apple need to ban every one of these shady, deceptive data brokers from their app stores."

Meanwhile, ArchieBunker sees the silver lining:

Besides the armed insurrection it was also a super spreader event. Good to know we can do contact tracing on these … people.

The moral of the story?

Protect your object references. And throttle attempts to scrape. And strip metadata. And don’t render deleted objects.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby dada » Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:22 am

"Protect your object references. And throttle attempts to scrape. And strip metadata. And don’t render deleted objects."

Words to live by.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Disagreeing with dada

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:48 am

.

Is there a right to be forgotten? Maybe, for individuals regarding their past if they regret it. I think so. I hope so.

Not for the public square. The worst thing Twitter did was not to ban Trump. By their own stated rationales, on the charge of inciting violence, they should have refused him their platform many years earlier. Or they should have done so as soon as he was president and thus making quasi-official pronouncements as a governing executive. Certainly if theirs was the initial platform for his publications. (Allowing repetition of posts from the White House site would be a different matter. That's news.) At least they should have done so if they wanted to keep up the pretense that they are not a "governing entity," as Teachout puts it.

No, the worst thing Twitter did was to delete the public record of Trump's statements as originally made, which they had hosted for his entire campaign and term in office. It is an archive. This is erasing history. It is one of the things one can accurately be characterized as "Orwellian" in a credible sense.

Same goes for Parler. Should Amazon shut it down, as a site actively used by fascists for organizing violence? If so, why did they allow it in the first place? Couldn't they guess? But having thus been the platform for allowing Parler's users and owners to write themselves into a historical event, Amazon should not be erasing the public record. Make them move, maybe. Provide their cover-up, not.

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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Laodicean » Sat Jan 16, 2021 6:36 pm

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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Jan 16, 2021 6:56 pm

It’s time to re-decentralize the Internet. I’d like to just see the corporate spaces online stay corporate and therefor wither and die once people-powered communities flourish (and by that I mean, in a utopian version of the future where other factors have already transformed society for the better, like commons councils in every community, widespread worker-owned cooperatives in every industry, and reparations have all been created through grassroots movements) create their own spaces online.

It’s a thought borrowed from Tim Berners-Lee but I don’t feel like it needs to be something invented by an elitist, if even an old beard-and-suspenders dot com type. I like the idea behind Solid but I’d rather see a big base-built community organizer approach to invent an entirely new technology to replace the current Web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever we’re on. Fuck it.

Fuck Parker. Fuck any platform that protects fascists. In the future, no truly democratic community would harbor nazis if truly informed and free from old propaganda and lies.
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Have you lost your collective fucking minds?

Postby Harvey » Sat Jan 16, 2021 8:25 pm

Luther Blissett wrote:Fuck Parker. Fuck any platform that protects fascists. In the future, no truly democratic community would harbor nazis if truly informed and free from old propaganda and lies.


Cannot believe I'm reading this crap. Free speech is the protection of fascism?

How many of you actually read a single word on Parler? Once you've answered that, maybe we could talk about what Parler is or isn't. Anyway, your entire culture is already fascist. Mine too, but I'm not about to start crying out for censorship like a brainwashed idiot.

Think that's a wrap for me, Jack. Is it possible to delete my account so that I can't return to this cess pool?
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Re: Have you lost your collective fucking minds?

Postby DrEvil » Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:10 am

Harvey » Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:25 am wrote:
Luther Blissett wrote:Fuck Parker. Fuck any platform that protects fascists. In the future, no truly democratic community would harbor nazis if truly informed and free from old propaganda and lies.


Cannot believe I'm reading this crap. Free speech is the protection of fascism?

How many of you actually read a single word on Parler? Once you've answered that, maybe we could talk about what Parler is or isn't. Anyway, your entire culture is already fascist. Mine too, but I'm not about to start crying out for censorship like a brainwashed idiot.

Think that's a wrap for me, Jack. Is it possible to delete my account so that I can't return to this cess pool?


But he's not wrong. Every fascist regime started out with fascism being tolerated, until suddenly only fascism was tolerated.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Sun Jan 17, 2021 3:40 am

Cannot believe I'm reading this crap. Free speech is the protection of fascism?

How many of you actually read a single word on Parler? Once you've answered that, maybe we could talk about what Parler is or isn't. Anyway, your entire culture is already fascist. Mine too, but I'm not about to start crying out for censorship like a brainwashed idiot.

Think that's a wrap for me, Jack. Is it possible to delete my account so that I can't return to this cess pool?


Oh, the irony. For someone who takes such a strong stance on the ideal of free speech, even if it means giving nazis a platform, you certainly don't have much tolerance for those who express an opinion different than your own on the subject.

You think Parler and those who make up its ranks of members deserves a platform, fine. Let's hear your argument for why any particular business should be required to provide them that platform.

You're certainly intelligent enough to know that the first amendment is about government prohibition, not the divine private sector.

AWS, Apple and Google as monopolies that may deserve to be broken apart is a worthy topic, but it is distinct from the belief that any web hosting service is required, under the guise of free speech, to host a site that they find legally or politically problematic, or for that matter, for any reason at all. Does not a private business have a right to refuse service? No shirt, no shoes, no nazis, and all that. Are we back to the cake maker/gay wedding debate already? But in this case, I guess the right-wing thinks the baker should make the damn cake, because this time it's about what THEY want for themselves.

Interesting that even Pirate Bay can find server hosts, but no one seems to want the poor, downtrodden Parler.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of freedom -- you know where the door is. If you find RI such a cesspool these days because people are challenging your beliefs and opinions, you can see yourself out. You don't actually need your account deleted, you could just use your freedom to make a choice and then abide by it. In fact, my favorite disappeared posters are the ones who didn't feel the need to make a big deal about it, but I guess you want to slam the door so everyone knows you're leaving. To quote Marlo from The Wire, "Do it or don't, but I got places to be."
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