You don't even need to do that. The actual key to running an extremist / subversive / hate / unpopular website is NOT connecting the site to any in-person activities. As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. Sure, companies like Google or WordPress will ban you if they don't like you, but you can still get service from Cloudflare, major web hosts, or domain registration without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
Tbf, I don't think Parler ever saw itself as extremist. Obviously it was used by extremists, but as I've seen mentioned in other threads lately: When you create an alternative platform from the mainstream, the people who join it are either idealists, or are the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. And if you don't have the resources to moderate those extremists (or foolishly choose not to), the extremists take over.
I do not know if it was the original intention of the founders, but you can't ignore that the people who are/were funding it are influential far-right figures.
Ok, so to you, it seems obvious and accepted that Rebecca Mercer is far-right.
However, traditionally, the terms "far-right" and "far-left" have been reserved for people who believe violent government coup is a legitimate means to an end.
And lately, people have taken to calling more moderate conservatives "far-right" and "nazis" as a way to delegitimize their opinions, and make them sound beyond-the-pale.
Ideologically far right doesn't mean 'racists take over capitol hill'.
AOC could be considered fairly 'far left' she's not exactly a radical.
To the OP's point, I think Parler was trying to legit be an alternative where they didn't have Jack Dorsey in charge, but I'm doubtful if they were actually looking for the holocaust denying crowd.
I suggest probably their comfort zone would have been 'Fox News'.
I'm sorry if this comes across sounding harsh, as I don't know you at all, but your comment sounds like the opinion of someone in a lefty filter bubble.
Where I'm from, "far-left" and "far-right" means "people who think violence is a legitimate means to enact their ideology."
So that includes Nazis, the KKK, and communist revolutionaries. It does not include Rebecca Mercer or Breitbart.
Check out this data: [1]. Breitbart is only a smidge more conservative than Fox News, and Fox News is the #1 watched cable news channel in the country. That is called "mainstream." Presumably, the "far-right" would be "far" beyond the mainstream.
Are they though? Maybe I just lack some knowledge but it seems there's a trend where these definitions are shifting so that right become far right, and sometimes even people who would have been left are suddenly being called right.
That said I don't know much about these particular people.
They seem to be comfortably in the progressive group in terms on their politics, if not always their rhetorics which sometimes seems calculated to appeal to center or right wing voters. But you can pretty much completely disregard what anyone in politics says and just go by what they do.
They literally welcomed pro-saudi comment farms to their service as well:
“The nationalist movement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made it known that big tech is censoring them at rates we have never experienced in the United States,” Parler wrote in a post on its own account on the site. “Let us welcome them as we all fight for our rights together.”
Reminder: Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, ordered the assassination of a US journalist not that long ago. So, in a sense, Parler is really the social network of choice for dictators and extremists.
"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." - Scott Alexander [0]
Took me a while to get around to reading & finishing this, but this is a phenomenal article that could have exactly predicted what happened with Parler, and describes the current polarization in the US far better than I could. Thank you for sharing
I read it as, if it's just text and all anon, there's always wiggle room. Once you start allowing video and photo uploads, and real names, then your liability increases exponentially.
The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
That just shows how dangerous the "if you're not against us, you're with us" mentality can be.
Cloudflare has been quite neutral for now, but there are communities of people who daily devote themselves to harassing everyone from Cloudflare's support team to the mayor of Sammamish, WA (where Epik, one of Gab's webhosts, is headquartered) to try to get Gab deplatformed[1].
I can only imagine how many of these emails per day Cloudflare's support team is deleting.
This entire comment thread can be asterisked with “for now”.
GoDaddy kicked off AR15.com with no reason at all, they were fine with the content... until the moment they weren’t.
The problem has always been a TOS that is selectively and interpretively enforced. It’s just popular this week.
> I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.
ffs no joke! I was embarrassed for what Expensify did, and if my company used that service we would have dropped them in a hot second. IDK why “we’ll stfu and do our job” isn’t the default anymore.
> GoDaddy kicked off AR15.com with no reason at all
No, not no reason at all: "In response to content complaints on the ar15.com website, our team investigated and discovered content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence. As a result, we informed the site yesterday that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another registrar, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy told the Washington Examiner.
FWIW, ar15.com is hosted on AWS. GoDaddy was just the domain registrar. I gather ar15.com was temporarily removed from the GTLD name servers because they didn't move to a new registrar quickly enough.
Shut the fuck up and do our job hasn't really worked well once the capitol was attacked, those people were organizing in public in many social media platforms (not just Parler!) and people working at those social media companies shut the fuck up and did their job. And then that happened.
Are you saying that staying silent is the answer once you have people organizing to take down the government? How will your business operate once the government is down?
There has to have some limits somewhere. Yes we don't want everything to be political but obviously, there is a line somewhere, wouldn't you agree?
> Are you saying that staying silent is the answer once you have people organizing to take down the government? How will your business operate once the government is down?
Let's dispatch with the second one first. Even if you bulldozed the entire city of DC and everyone who works there was permanently relocated to the North Pole by Santa Claus to make toys for little children forever, there would still be a government because there is a constitutional process for electing or hiring some other people to do it.
So what should platforms do about this? That's too narrow a question. It's what should society do about this? Step one, arrest the people breaking the law. Violence and calls for violence are illegal. At which point it's not clear that we even need a step two, because then the relevant people are in jail.
> At which point it's not clear that we even need a step two, because then the relevant people are in jail.
I know the US has the biggest prison population in the world, but you can't keep these people in prison for life. They will be released from jail at some point and start spreading their ideology again.
I hate to pull a godwin, but "let's throw the insurrectionists in jail and that's the end of that" hasn't worked out well historically. Let's just hope none of them writes a book while doing their time.
> I know the US has the biggest prison population in the world, but you can't keep these people in prison for life.
I think murdering a police officer is a capital offense. You don't get back out of jail after that one.
But even for the people committing less violence than that, and who in turn eventually get released, they only stay released if they stay non-violent. Otherwise they're right back to jail.
> I hate to pull a godwin, but "let's throw the insurrectionists in jail and that's the end of that" hasn't worked out well historically. Let's just hope none of them writes a book while doing their time.
So now we're abandoning even the premise of free speech?
If people are engaged in violence you put them in jail. If people are non-violently saying dumb things and you don't agree with them, you say your thing too.
> But even for the people committing less violence than that, and who in turn eventually get released, they only stay released if they stay non-violent. Otherwise they're right back to jail.
I am of the opinion that we should prevent violent insurrection rather than waiting for it to happen and then responding with jail time.
> So now we're abandoning even the premise of free speech?
Where did I say that? I'm not saying we should prevent all book publishing, but you do understand what historical precedence I was referring to right?
> If people are engaged in violence you put them in jail. If people are non-violently saying dumb things and you don't agree with them, you say your thing too.
If the dumb thing they're saying is that all politicians are satan worshipers and pedophiles, then it doesn't matter what "thing" I have to say to them.
> I am of the opinion that we should prevent violent insurrection rather than waiting for it to happen and then responding with jail time.
Responding with jail time is how you prevent it, through deterrence.
> I'm not saying we should prevent all book publishing, but you do understand what historical precedence I was referring to right?
Presumably the unconstitutional Son of Sam laws?
> If the dumb thing they're saying is that all politicians are satan worshipers and pedophiles, then it doesn't matter what "thing" I have to say to them.
I disagree. There are still things you can say and do to black pill the crazies.
Now, sometimes the only thing you can do to convince them is to do something, because just saying "no you're wrong" isn't much of an argument. Whereas, say, arresting and prosecuting everyone involved with Jeffrey Epstein would satisfy a lot more people that there isn't a vast international conspiracy of pedophile Satanist cannibals, as compared to the presumably truer situation in which a lot of powerful people were involved a major statutory rape and prostitution debacle and yet thus far have escaped prosecution.
> This entire comment thread can be asterisked with “for now”.
Which is true but its also important to not jump the gun so people can give coherent arguments for/against currents events.
Take Amazon for example, there is significant internal pressure to run the company based on a specific set of (for lack of a better word) progressive values but at the same time there is also a big part of the company that is customer focused and puts themselves in their shoes to try and deliver results and the politics of the day is just noise to them. Who will win in a few years time ? Can't say and the future is still unwritten.
Anyone can say whatever they want on the Internet, but if your violence words become violent deeds you’re at risk of being dropped. So - don’t be violent.
I think basically don’t use your platform to plan an insurrection and you should be fine. As soon as you start being used as the platform where violence is being organized all bets are off.
Your comment is short sighted and shows a possibly too eager willingness to accept the media and big tech narrative at completely face value. What if you are wrong?
At one point saying “We shouldn’t own slaves”, or “the Indian has rights to the land they live on”, or “women should be allowed to vote”, or “no taxation without representation” were all insurrectionist comments.
How do you propose we only stop “the wrong” insurrections? We should probably ask you first.
> At one point saying “We shouldn’t own slaves”, or “the Indian has rights to the land they live on”, or “women should be allowed to vote”, or “no taxation without representation” were all insurrectionist comments.
Uh, I don't know what you think "insurrectionist" means, but those are definitely not what it means. Actually, one of those comments was actually the law of the land at the time, as adjudicated by the Supreme Court--it was merely a popular politician who said that the Supreme Court had no actual power to enforce its will against him and did it anyways.
In the interest of pedantry, it's worth pointing out that the anti-slavery comments weren't the ones made by the insurrectionists, and even in the states that seceded, the unwillingness of Northerners to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act was arguably the more pressing threat, since it is highly unlikely that the federal government would have been enable to effect mandatory abolition on unwilling states but removing any codes enforcing the return of runaway slaves would have been well within its remit. That said, there was one notable abolitionist who provides half the cases in US history of people tried for treason against an individual state.
You must decouple in person interactions from site content. So you can have a site filled with philosophy, historical analysis, generalized activism tips, technical information, etc but not a site that directly facilitates in person meetups or calls to action or plans real world activities.
My guess is they won't struggle too much to get the site itself back online (they at least claim it was "bare metal", so charitably just containers), but replacing the email service providers and other authentication / SaaSy bits will be a challenge.
I'm curious about how they'll handle SMS. I once worked for a place that self hosted a message gateway by co-locating a bunch of cellphones alongside their servers. It worked but probably wouldn't scale for their purposes. Our setup also assumed that customers were in the same country as the servers.
It is not that simple yes, however it is not too hard, especially if you are mostly only sending to registered users.
It is lot harder to setup a dc and get ISPs to peer with you than setup the app itself.
Honestly, I think they'd be happier too. They'd have less money and power, sure, but they'd also get less death threats, and a lot of the world (including world leaders) would hate them a little less.
I don't think they would care if Facebook and Twitter were each 1/10 the size of what they are today -- they'd still be billionaires and the companies would still be mind-boggling huge. They only care that the companies are much larger than competitors.
> Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.
I was not aware that "Remember the photographs from inside your home while you slept? Yes, that close. You will die a sudden death!", "We are going to fight a civil was on the 20th", "we need to start systematically assassinating #liberal leaders", or "shoot the police that protect these shitbag senators" were conservative political opinions.
I'm not sure I like the world where conservatives are making bed-fellows with pedophiles and ISIS.
Over this last week, I've talked to people who have un-ironically argued that companies should not be allowed to moderate content... even if that content is illegal!
It's like a whole section of the population is just learning for the first time that the internet is real life and it's not the wild-west it was in the 90s.
Fortunately being aligned with conservatism isn't grounds for deplatforming, as can be seen by the literal millions of conservatives on twitter who haven't been deplatformed. It's easy: you have a discussion about your political beliefs without telling the other person you're going to murder them for disagreeing with you.
Seriously. I laugh whenever someone cries about widespread censorship of the right. The most lucrative media career right now is to be an outspoken conservative. There are probably thousands of such pundits/journalists/analysts/bloggers/podcast hosts/commentators on pretty much every medium, and they all seem to be talking non-stop.
Similar to how every mainstream comedian is persecuted and telling "unfiltered" jokes that they supposedly aren't allowed to anymore, and they'll totally get into trouble for it later.
Can we please move on from the assertion and justification of the very real censorship push on the grounds that "they all deserved it" by claiming that all the people deplatformed were "telling the other person you're going to murder them for disagreeing with you"?
This is an intellectually dishonest take at best. I won't speculate on the other end of the spectrum.
I for one am disgusted at how servile about censorship readers of HN have been lately just because it was their percieved enemy who was being attacked, without understanding that this will be applied to $notenemy later. I've frequently complained about the state of "too many MBAs and not enough hackers" here but fuck the last few months really brought that out. Starting to wish I knew if there is a hn where the more anti-authoritarian types hung out.
The commenter claimed being conservative and no other attribute/thing was a sufficient condition to be deplatformed. That is an absurdly large claim and requires absurdly large evidence. You can go on twitter right now and find conservative opinions, including the opinions of those from Fox news, the most watched news channel in America.
“Fortunately criticizing Putin isn't grounds for being assassinated, as can be seen by the literal millions of people in Russia who haven't been murdered yet. It's easy: be nobody and have a discussion about your political beliefs in the kitchen with only close relatives.”
All well known recent deplatforming cases were done on a flimsy grounds for off-platform activities. They are very hard to defend.
https://prq.se/?p=colo Famous for starting the pirate bay, they're still in action and pretty much specifically provide freedom of speech hosting. I think it plays in the game the Parler investors wanted to play that they got shutdown and can't get back online. Fuels the "we've been censored" angle.
Parler was backed by very deep pockets with existing international connections. They could afford to purchase the necessary Russian friends to make this happen.
If you do social media, of any kind, you can't really rely to heavily on cloud providers. I know, Snapshot is a massive Google customer, but that means that they need to be rather careful.
Facebook and Twitter couldn't exist on AWS, unless Amazon chooses to enforce their rules very selectively. There is a ton of hate speech on Facebook, which is not censored, moderated and which clearly violate all sort of rule. Much of it is due to the language of the users not necessarily being English, or another major language. However, regardless of the language, the content can still easily be in violation of an AWS terms of service (and often Facebooks own).
If Facebook had been an AWS, Azure or GCP customer, they would have been shutdown long ago... Well they wouldn't, because the rules wouldn't really apply to them. I honestly don't care about Parler, Amazon has every right to shut of their service, they decide what customers they want on their platform. What I do care about, is that terms of service, rules for allowed speech is applied fairly and equally.
