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Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

381–390 of 520 posts

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#381

> 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.

Paypal does the same. They ask for government id and bank card to close my account (with zero balance).

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#382
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare even supports sites like thepiratebay if I recall correctly. It does make me respect them more and makes me happy to do business with them.

even?? Is tpb somehow worse than the other sites mentioned?

TPB has been subject to a decade or more of direct actions by more than one government. Their resilience is fairly impressive.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course you own it and they will own it. While the receiver of a letter on paper certainly owns the letter she doesn't own its contents. The copyright of the letter remains with the author. So you can frame the letter and hang it on your wall you violate the authors copyright if you publish it without authorization.

No idea why this is being downvoted, because it's correct. You can't publish letters without permission. This has been tested in court many times. What you can do is sell the physical object. That belongs to you. You can also burn it or destroy it - which is an interesting edge case. This really comes down to different kinds of ownership. The whole point of copyright is that creative/cultural/intellectual property ri…

Am I correct in assuming that uploading it online for others to see or displaying it for personal non commercial use would be covered under the Fair Use Doctrine?

Also, how does it work if a whistleblower gives a journalist letters that they received from someone else? Is the journalist not allowed to publish them in an article?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#384
post #63
post #51

I wonder how much damage that disastrous interview with Kara Swisher did (for the site and for Matze). I have no sense of this. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... )

Honestly, probably not much. Since day one they've been vocal about not policing any of the speech there. That's the selling point. I can't fathom anyone on the board not knowing that. It's more likely they felt, "you job is to keep the company going, and if that means policing speech, do it," and he failed.

> vocal about not policing any of the speech there.

It's also been a lie from day one. Parler policed things that didn't fit into their definition of free speech. Just like Twitter et al.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#385

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…

I'm OK with this. Private messages have shared ownership. You weren't sending them to yourself. Yes, there might be identifying information in the content of the messages. Yes, in the majority of cases it wouldn't make a difference. In some minority of cases, though, they would. Abusive ex sending you messages over discord? Yeah, those might be evidence especially when both parties are saying different things. This i…

I send myself messages in Slack all the time so I don't forget something.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#386
post #151

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…

He is saying what he needs to say to get the next clubhouse of impatient, misguided rich people to fund "vision". Standing on principles my ass. The only thing I am happy about is how fast the cycle is operating these days ie how quickly mindlessly ambitious self important people who get propped up through pandering to the right clubhouse get discarded. Thats a good thing.

It’s just too bad they keep getting recycled into the clubhouse. If investors really wanted to stop propping up mindlessly ambitious self important people, they need to stop giving them money and maybe look for entrepreneurs who actually know what they are doing.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#387
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps Parler wasn’t a true free speech platform, ie one that moderated only the legal bare minimum. But, even if it’s true that it was friendly to only end of the political spectrum, at least it was a competitor to Twitter. The elimination of the sole significant direct competitor to Twitter, even one that represents a subset of views and not all speech, is the problem. It means there’s a tech oligopoly.

I’d love to see a decentralized free speech platform. I’m no blockchain evangelist, but it would seem like such technology could be used to build a real online “public square” as you say.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#388
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The problem is that twitter and Facebook already exist and do their jobs well enough and have moderation Any parler type thing is only ever going to get the worst of the worst of possible users. The folks who get kicked off Facebook and Twitter aren't the people you want to build a business on

That is asserting unsettled matters of fact.

Twitter's moderation has become partisan enough that it might be desirable to build a business on people they have kicked off. Notably Trump - while he was supremely unpopular on the left, opinion polling suggests he is leaving a more popular legacy than, eg, George W Bush. Maybe even George H.W. Bush. That is a pretty decent foundation for a business.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#389
post #244

> 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…

I do not believe any private posts were archived by the security researcher. From my understanding they were able to access all public posts, including ones that had previously been deleted (which was the bad part). The other security faux pas was that they did not scrub GPS metadata from images or videos at all.

That's correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Content_scraping

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