Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 520 posts

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#161

Post by skynet-9000 »

newacct583 wrote: post #145
22c wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large amount of insurrection planning was performed in Facebook groups. If you're going to apply a standard, at least apply it fairly.

Those groups all got closed, so far as I know, many of them long before the 6th. Do you have specific one's you're worrying about? It's fair to argue that Facebook should have done more, or did the wrong thing, but they were pretty transparently trying to clean things up at least. Parler wasn't banned retroactively as punishment, they were banned because they were continuing to do no meaningful moderation even days a…

So, the path to success for Parler would have been:

Step 1: Hire huge moderation team.

Step 2: Write draconian terms of service that incorporated every possible offensive thing that any vendor might object to.

Step 3: Build an app that explodes with all the users that are delighted with the moderation.

Step 4: Profit!

That's not how Facebook and Twitter ("the free speech wing of the free speech party") were launched, but maybe those wouldn't ever have been able to launch today anyway.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#162

Post by jackson1442 »

dralley wrote: post #142
skynet-9000 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use" "Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless. This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know…

>"Always abide by your host's AUP." These basically say things like "your users may not use the services to offend others." That's literally impossible to abide by. In fact, it appears to have been a company-ending event in this case, which makes it a devilishly simple attack: post something you know will get everyone worked up, et viola: you just killed a company. The way you're wording this sounds very much like yo…

The problem with Parler is not that the users didn't abide by the policy of "your users may not use the services to offend others." The problem was that the administration side refused to attempt to enforce any semblance of rules on the platform.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#163

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jerrysievert wrote: post #80

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide…

When Parler praises "free speech" they're really just using that as a cover for running a cheap Twitter clone with no investment in moderation. They exist to extract profit with minimum overhead.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#164

Post by wsatb »

skynet-9000 wrote: post #126
jerrysievert wrote: post #80

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide…

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. I've always felt like Parler was just a lazy attempt to make some cash by pulling some users away from Twitter claiming they could do what they want, it was never more or less than that.

I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do this and they are just toxic cesspools. The idea of an online "public square" that isn't that sounds impossible. How many public squares are reaching millions of people instantly?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#165

Post by beaner »

skynet-9000 wrote: post #126
jerrysievert wrote: post #80

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide…

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

The solution clearly is that speech should be restricted, or even better, that you should not be allowed to have thoughts that are in conflict with the intolerant parts of today's zeitgeist.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#166

Post by [deleted] »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #105
eganist wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). Doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny

Russia only really has a problem with speech when it’s against them. People slagging the US is fine by them.

[deleted]

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#167

Post by kickopotomus »

echelon wrote: post #148
judge2020 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS provided multiple times over evidence of violent content that was against their policies and asked Parler to step up moderation, which didn't happen. AWS arguments: https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349200096345296897?s=20 > Parler itself has admitted it has a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violates its (minimal) community standards that it had not yet reviewed https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349…

I wonder whose side the FSF would take. Amazon shouldn't be making these decisions, and certainly not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements. This should have been litigated in court prior to taking deplatforming actions. Imagine if Amazon was a Chinese company and Parler hosted information about the plight of the Uyghur people. Community websites have the right to enforce rules. I'm not…

AWS is not a common carrier. They are a hosting company. There are hundreds (thousands?) of hosting companies to choose from and you are not even required to use one to host a website on the Internet. You are free to host your website yourself on your own hardware.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#169

Post by hundreddaysoff »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #138
babelfish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Silicon Valley darlings run disaster recovery exercises simulating setting up a datacenter from scratch in less than 24 hours (not that Parler should be compared to any of these companies, clearly)

I think you're overestimating the ability of many "Silicon Valley darlings" to recover from what happened to Parler. First, at least these days, most Silicon Valley darlings are pretty heavily tied to whatever cloud service that hosts them, so disaster recovery exercises mean spinning up another project in a different AWS availability zone, not moving from AWS to GCP or whatever. Granted, given Parler's mantra they s…

Just curious... in your experience, are most "Silicon Valley darlings" also more apolitical and pragmatic than this CEO's statement seemed to indicate he is? Or do they run the gamut?

Just curious as this was my overall sense when I lived in the Bay Area and it would be consistent with a lot of the corporate "censorship" of various diverse viewpoints that's going on now.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#170

Post by skynet-9000 »

manquer wrote: post #134
lettergram wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler didn’t even have an events section, it was also fairly difficult to discover content and from what I saw very corporate-like (ie moderated well, mundane posts, etc). Twitter or Facebook on the other hand, ive seen people call out to riot and burn down cities. Literally, there was a Facebook event to riot in my town (person who planned it was arrested). It led to millions in damages, and I feared for my life. I…

Apart from the lobbying power of Facebook Twitter size company, it is pretty hard to deplatform them. On a purely technical level Facebook runs their own infra. They would be hard to deplatform. The only people who are probably capable of doing that is the l3 type service providers. Even there Facebook , google own investments in undersea cables. Also the size of their deal value to the vendor makes a huge difference…

This is true.

Apple can't get rid of Facebook or Google Maps, no matter how much they hate them, but they can easily get rid of pesky startups while claiming to be standing on principles.

Not much of a moral victory there, though! (even if you believe they were right to do so, which I do not.)

Post reply on HN