I ran a crawler to collect posts and comments on Parler

> there is panic among the ex-Parler community that all their data, even private/deleted posts, have been scraped and archived — it has, just not by me. Furthermore, Parler did not follow industry standards in obfuscating EXIF metadata from uploaded images, so millions of users had their exact location logged.

However, I am stunned that Twitter still has not taken down the tweets from @donk_enby, the person whom this post mentions with the location logging (example: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128). This account has been sharing datasets with the private information of all those Parley users widely and archiving it all over the place. Isn't this textbook irresponsible disclosure of personal information? Doesn't this violate all the rules of Twitter for doxxing? I've submitted several reports at https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information but it seems no one at Twitter cares about preventing privacy leaks and doxxing when it concerns their political enemies.

If I do something illegal, it shouldn't take down everyone I ever happened to chat with, or who read or liked something I wrote once... even the Godwin's law protagonist had a few good ideas mixed in with his assured evil.

Free exchange of legal speech shouldn't arbitrarily be squelched because some corporation decides their advertisers wouldn't like it.

For example, a few years ago there was a great machining set of videos in which an M-16 lower receiver was machined out of a billet of Aluminum. Youtube decided that anything like that had to go, not for legal reasons, just because of... you know... whim.

There was nothing wrong with the video series, it didn't promote violence, it was just a well done documentation of all the tips and setups required to do a tricky bit of work.

The replacement that seems to be safe (for now) is to machine model steam engines and lathes from casting kits. Cool, but far less useful in learning the real thing.

[update] The idea of learning by watching is a lot less powerful when whole areas of study are excluded randomly, for "reasons" that are never fully explained.

If someone decided that hashtables and binary trees should be hidden from view, could you really teach computer science without them?

It's a filter bubble of the worst sort. It keeps you from even learning what you don't know, because it can't be safely mentioned.

By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.

You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.

It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.

The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.

The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.

Why are the folks in DC panicking so hard if he is already on the way out?

Can you feel the energy in the air?

Soon.