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Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

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Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#301

Post by kelnos »

Lammy wrote: post #206
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…

Just make your own website, as long as you've done it before and are intimately familiar with all the dangerous defaults built in to our collective tech. Perhaps they aimed too high too fast (dunno, never even went there), but I just can't bring myself to make beginner-shaming a core pillar of my criticism.

When said "beginners"[0] are responsible for the loss of tons of private user data, I don't think that's acceptable, understandable, or easily dismissed. Perhaps shaming is not the most appropriate response, but there should be repercussions. Legal and financial ones, preferably.

[0] As others pointed out in sibling comments, these people are not "beginners" by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#302

Post by teddyh »

rfrey wrote: post #171
dkdk8283 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even my extremely liberal anti-bias training tells me diverse points of view are healthy. What ever happened to sticks and stones bla bla? The power of twitter is unprecedented. Laws are out of date and it seems folks are hiding behind this fact to justify their own biased beliefs. Silencing opinion creates extremists.

It seems to me that there has a just been a giant experiment that has disproven that point of view. When it comes to extremism, at least in the early 21st century, sunlight seems to be a fertilizer not a disinfectant.

No, the fertilizer is ad-funded media, which gets clicks by fomenting outrage. They literally get paid to sow split and discord.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#303

Post by dannyw »

motohagiography wrote: post #62

Odd dynamic there as unfortunately, standing on principle means getting martyred, and the quote from the former CEO of, “Over the past few months, I’ve met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of how the Parler site should be managed” is not CEO level strategic. His investors and board hired him to win, not to pick a principled hill to die on. Martyrs are cheap and nob…

Free legal speech usually stays online.

It will be deplatformed from mobile stores, but even Cloudflare protects the reincarnation of TheDonald (patriots.win).

Parler, OTOH, constantly had threats of harm to elected representatives, or just democrats in general.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#304

Post by simonh »

91ffc269f090 wrote: post #291
johnisgood wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is so typical. My experience with Discord: I need to login to my account to be able to delete it, except what if I cannot log into it?! At first they disabled it, then I e-mailed them requesting them to delete my account, but all they did was a soft-delete, of course. All of the private messages are still there, etc. Even if I were to delete my account myself, it would still leave all my messages intact. I guess…

Now try the same with HN. You cannot remove your old posts.

I think this is spot on, when you post something to a communications platform you are publishing content. How can there be any expectation you can then un-publish it? Consider this in the context of bullying or shaming, should someone who sends me an abusive message have the ability to delete all trace of it afterwards?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#305

Post by vkou »

stickfigure wrote: post #234
vkou wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think coups work? Look into the history of Greek city states. A mob of civilians storming the chambers of government is quite literally how tyrants have installed themselves. Some of those tyrants had to try multiple times, before the last attempt succeeded. They generally follow up by killing their political rivals, because people who come to power through violence rarely turn around and adopt a policy of…

There was no real threat to democracy here. It's not like the police and military are going to take commands from some nutjob cosplayer just because they're wielding Nancy Pelosi's lectern.

I want to remind you that the military are supposed to take orders from their commander in chief - who, on January 6th, was Donald Trump.

Neither January 6th, nor in Athens would a mob rush the chambers of government to install God-King Billy Rando, who nobody has heard of. Coups only work when the person benefiting from them already has a large amount of civilian and political, and sometimes, but not always, military support behind him - but not large enough to win power through legitimate means.

Suppose that the mob compelled congress to affirm Trump as the winner. Do you really think the 'police' (Which police force? Would they have jurisdiction? Who'd be giving them this order? Nancy Pelosi does not give police forces orders...) would have headed to Pennsylvania avenue to arrest Trump? What if the part of the military that is supposed to put down civilian coups (Which part is that, by the way?) decided to sit this one out?

At best, events would escalate into an actual, successful coup.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#306

Post by jjav »

echelon wrote: post #198
bbreier wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is not a common carrier

At their size, they sure seem like it. What happens when AWS and Azure design their own silicon, outstrip other hosting providers, and then become the only hosts on the internet? Are they common carriers then?

This is a valid thought experiment to consider.

I'm old enough that racking my own boxes and hosting everything myself is both natural and easy (and cheaper and faster).

But working with plenty of young developers, most don't have any exposure or interest in setting up anything other than AWS services tied together.

So like it or not (I don't) we're rushing towards a world where AWS (maaybe GCP, mostly not) is the only way to build something.

It's good to consider the implications of this.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#307

Post by gcbirzan »

newman314 wrote: post #253
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…

FWIW, I recently found out that AirBnB now requires government id to be shared as verification after not having logged into AirBnB since 2014. I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.

GDPR requires such an option. You could try to use a VPN to appear to be from the EU.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#308

Post by fwn »

newman314 wrote: post #253
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…

FWIW, I recently found out that AirBnB now requires government id to be shared as verification after not having logged into AirBnB since 2014. I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.

You can't just ask Airbnb to delete your account. The procedure to delete the account yourself that's explained all over the internet does not work, at least in europe. I requested the removal of my deactivated account four times over the course of 8 months via their email support.

It was always the same script: first they purposefully confuse it with account deactivation and they confirm your removal, but formulated in a way in which it could also mean deactivated, then, after you answer to the ticket that what you meant is actual deletion, not deactivation, they tell you that they forwarded your request to someone who will delete your account and that they will write you once it's done. No change in approach changed their script in any way.

> Ich habe deine Anfrage an jemanden aus meinem Team weitergeleitet, der dich dabei besser unterstützen kann. Der entsprechende Mitarbeiter wird sich in Kürze bei dir melden. Falls du in der Zwischenzeit weitere Fragen oder Bedenken hast, kannst du gerne auf diese E-Mail antworten

... then I waited six weeks and back to square one, since I could always still login to get the deactivated message. The offer to answer on the same ticket again is apparently untrue. ..at least they never answered again on the same ticket.

What helped was not contacting support but instead pasting a comically formal erasure request (Article 17 of the GDPR) from the internet to dpo@airbn..

As far as I am able to validate, this did it.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#309

Post by vkou »

tomrod wrote: post #215
vkou wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. Exactly. Alt-left speech was not welcome on parler - only alt-right speech.

Alt-left isn't a thing in the US, perhaps you're falling for a false dichotomy. Alt-right is a euphemism for fascism/white supremism.

I'm not going to split hairs about the actual positions of radical leftists, because it's not really relevant to this conversation.

I will, however, point out, that much of the alt-right is terrified of the antifa boogieman... And that Parler, the platform of free speech was quite happy to ban anything that smelled of antifa... As well as much that could, be described as moderate leftism.

Its tolerance for speech only extends to a very narrow slice of the political spectrum.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#310

Post by Fogest »

simonh wrote: post #304
91ffc269f090 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now try the same with HN. You cannot remove your old posts.

I think this is spot on, when you post something to a communications platform you are publishing content. How can there be any expectation you can then un-publish it? Consider this in the context of bullying or shaming, should someone who sends me an abusive message have the ability to delete all trace of it afterwards?

There is nothing more frustrating than searching for information on old reddit threads and seeing that some useful comment that used to be there is gone because the user nuked all their comments via a script. I understand the privacy reasons but at the same time it does ruin a lot of content on sites and can force people to repost old questions to get the answers again.
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