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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

#431

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

lallysingh wrote: post #427
molbioguy wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is misleading. The ID requirements were there to provide a 'verified' account status similar to Twitter's blue check mark. It wasn't some arbitrary requirement. I bet Twitter requires this as well for the verified status.

They shouldn't have had verified status.

Couldn’t they have done both? A verified status for the same reasons Twitter does, and properly handled the information. It should have been a verified account once and complete destruction of the submitted data. It obviously should never have been kept indefinitely and unencrypted.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#432

Post by tolbish »

BlackFly wrote: post #363
tolbish wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not exactly the same. Being critical of Biden will not get you deplatformed. Supporting insurrections will. Those are not similar. Please vocalize your argument if you disagree.

It is exactly the same: Armed insurrections planned on Twitter/Facebook in the middle east (the Arab Spring): widely celebrated in the USA. Armed insurrections planned on Parler/Gab in the USA: better shut those down completely. The distinction between these two is precisely political, the view on the legitimacy of the conversation is premised on whether you view the government as legitimate or not.

How is the difference precisely political when all claims of a fraudulent US election were proven to be false?

Facts are a matter of opinion now?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#433

Post by rsynnott »

vkou wrote: post #216
motohagiography wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the insurrection narrative is as much of a farce as Kim Jong Il hitting 11 hole-in-one strokes on a golf course, because if you voice doubt about the absurdity of the claim, it marks you as a dangerous subversive. Everybody knows it, and they're just too afraid to say so because they're worried they will get put on a list. Some conspicuously unarmed people trespassed and even managed to bring camera crews.…

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…

Possibly even more apropos is the example of Julius Caesar. In his first consulship his supporters were able to intimidate the other consul into silence, essentially making him a temporary dictator. Once he came back from Gaul, the senate gave him unprecedented honours because they were scared of his supporters, and he effectively started ruling as a dictator (once he got around to actually declaring himself dictator for life, some senators did assassinate him).

It's hard not to see this through that lens; terrify the legislative body enough, and they'll break the constitution for you (in Caesar's case, make you sole consul, sidelining the other properly elected consul, give you a highly unusual command in Gaul, then make you effective permeant dictator; in this case, overturn the election, for starters).

If you want to be hyper-pedantic, it's maybe not a coup; it wasn't the military. Nor was Caesar's first power grab, though (and arguably not the others either; Caesar's supporters were likely a more immediate personal threat to the senators than his army).

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#434

Post by judge2020 »

kangaroozach wrote: post #331
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Moderation is highly subjective and Parler seemed to have limited moderation mostly to illegal speech. We have built an entire country on the premise of legal vs illegal speech and have very clear laws and systems in place for reporting and handling violations. If a company chooses to adhere to the law but not also impose their own biases when it comes to moderation, that is their right. As long as they are undoubted…

The issue with Parler is that they weren't purely banning on illegal vs legal speech, they were banning left-wing "trolling" which isn't illegal (even if it was actually trolling).

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

And didn't exactly perform adequate moderation based on the rules they did have:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26022229

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#435

Post by wellthisisgreat »

bzb6 wrote: post #333
wellthisisgreat wrote: post #265

How can people fall for this trap of discussing Parler incident as a transgression of free speech? It was a vile specialized platform that fostered very particular anti-social, frequently murderous behavior. They had plenty of time to prove otherwise and they clearly did not care or did not want to. Now they poison the actually good idea of free speech with their infantile appeal. In theory and in practice they are o…

Ah, so free speech is only a good idea when you agree with it. I get it.

No it’s only when it doesn’t involve calling for killing other people.

This argument of yours doesn’t apply to calls for murder.

Or you ok with people organizing to kill you specifically with “mah free speech” paradigm?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#436

Post by rsynnott »

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 mean, it was unlikely to work. But intimidating the legislature into abandoning the constitution (in this case, overturning the election) through violent action has a long, nasty history.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#437

Post by Spivak »

jaywalk wrote: post #422
foepys wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be with you if each message was end to end encrypted and/or exclusively physically stored on the users devices. But it isn't. It's on Discord's servers.

That doesn't change the fact that they still also belong to someone else who may very well want to keep them.

Or another way of saying this is that the optimization of only storing one copy of each message doesn't change user-visible semantics of each user having their own copy of their messages.

But I thought Discord, somewhat controversially, did actually let one person delete messages from all parties. Maybe they eventually caved because it enabled abuses/harassers to deprive their victims of evidence.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#438

Post by stickfigure »

MauranKilom wrote: post #417
stickfigure wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There was no real threat to democracy here. Killing elected officials going through the steps of a peaceful transition of power would have been "no real threat to democracy"? > 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. Just because the USA would not instantaneously have become a dictatorship doesn't mean that the…

> Killing elected officials going through the steps of a peaceful transition of power would have been "no real threat to democracy"?

Yes, that is absolutely correct. Even if the rioters got hold of some legislators (highly doubtful - the only one that got close got shot, and that was the end of that), it would not have changed anything material about our government. Our institutions are far, far stronger than that.

The only difference is that we'd be adding murder charges to the docket.

> Do you think Joe Biden would be president right now had they succeeded in storming the building (and had none of the officials been evacuated)?

Without question. This is a weird right-wing fantasy that somehow occupying a building is going to change government. It didn't even work in rural Oregon.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#439

Post by molbioguy »

germinalphrase wrote: post #426
molbioguy wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is misleading. The ID requirements were there to provide a 'verified' account status similar to Twitter's blue check mark. It wasn't some arbitrary requirement. I bet Twitter requires this as well for the verified status.

Could you post without providing that ID?

To the best of my knowledge, yes.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#440

Post by throwaway19937 »

tpetry wrote: post #267
judge2020 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their actual hardware requirements: https://twitter.com/GreggHoush/status/1351923104403116032?s=... I have a hard time this is their actual needs in terms of servers - their video ingest pipeline sounded like it was just throwing videos on s3, and it didn't look like they were doing any transcoding at all (plus not removing photo or video metadata). 73tb of ram for distributed pgsql also sounds excessive.

Wow, that are really high requirements. Stackoverflow was able to operate on a lot less servers in 2016, they had e.g. only 4 database servers. Is there any analysis why parler did have such high requirements? Or what they did exactly to have such a high bandwidth?

Quoting from https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/23/parler-llc-...

"Immediately before AWS shut down all online services, Parler had over 15 million accounts and approximately 1 million new downloads of its app per day."

My interpretation is that they didn't have the time or the staff to fix the scalability bottlenecks in the site.

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