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Parler CEO says he was fired by board

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Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#501
post #462
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a clearly partisan act Asking a customer to stick to the rules they agreed to and eventually ending the business relationship when the customer chooses not to is hardly a 'partisan act'. Parler could have just done what AWS asked (even temporarily, to keep themselves online while looking for alternatives). They didn't.

ISIS had Twitter accounts in which they showed beheadings and other things [1], largely as a recruiting tool in order to bring young Western Men to Syria to commit atrocities. "The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has…

You can definitely make the case that the large moderation infrastructure fielded by gigantic social media companies has been anywhere from imperfect to outright irresponsible.

The difference is, there was actual moderation. Parler, a tiny (2 orders of magnitude tinier than Twitter) appears to have had no moderation infrastructure at all.

Even the data in your first reference seems to suggest that Twitter alone has probably moderated more accounts than Parler has actually had.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#502
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The docs today claim one is able to self-delete - https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/240/how-do-i-deactivate-...

That page isn't new. There's several problems with it:

1. As far as I was able to see, this:

> If you want to permanently close and delete your account, you can do this yourself through Manage your data.

is not true. There was only a button to deactivate the account. I think that they show different pages depending on the user country and just didn't add account deletion for German accounts.

2. Once an account is deactivated, you need to contact them through /help/contact-us/ to reactivate it, but since you are not logged in, it immediately forwards you to /help/contact-us/logged-out, which tells you to either login or just browse their fluffy web help labyrinth. Google told me to use terms@airbnb.com, which was how I ended up reaching support. Support was a dead-end though. They claim to do it, but they apparently do not actually delete the account.

3. Even if it would've been possible, they claim to want to "verify your identity for security purposes" prior to acting on your deletion request (which I could not do anyway, as the function was absent).

Hence, the GDPR method seems superior, given that it's actually available and they don't force you through an "identity verification", which is probably just there as additional friction to deter users from account deletion.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true though. By volume, GoDaddy is actually a bigger host than AWS by a factor of 2. The HN crowd vastly overestimates how big AWS is compared to less sexy options.

The difference is that AWS hosts big clients and makes big bucks in return. Godaddy's hosting had 300m in revenue[0], while AWS did nearly 13 billion[1]. 0: https://www.zdnet.com/article/godaddy-q3-revenue-beats-expec... . 1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/aws-earnings-q4-2020.html#Bo... .

It's definitely true that AWS customers spend more than Godaddy customers, for sure. But I still reject the idea that you have to use AWS (or will in the near future). There are literally hundreds of hosting providers out there, thousands if you include places that will run your own hardware. In my own career only half of my jobs have depended on AWS in any capacity; the rest used other hosting providers or self hosted.

In a very real way, a founder today has more options for hosting than they do for catered lunch.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, Google deplatformed Parler by blocking their app from the Play Store, and on the other hand it continues to be "cool with" 3rd-party content on Youtube which is "openly calling for violence against and murder of elected officials". https://youtu.be/jRLH8E_CpP0?t=205 For the record, I'm absolutely fine with Google deciding what content stays and what content goes when it comes to their hosting infrast…

That is not what "openly calling" means.

Fair enough. But can we at least agree that the line between the 2 examples is so fine that the monologue comedian on a satirical TV program had to run his joke by his lawyer's lawyer in order to make sure he was standing on the right side of it?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#505
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya know, if that's the banner you want to march under… then so be it. Nazis lie, and especially love to argue that 'oh, if you don't take me at face value and accept my word then that means I'm a nazi! You know you are just FORCING me to be a nazi, right? You're the real nazi, and when the revolution comes I won't be a bit sorry to gas you, because you're a MEANIE!' So, is that what you are, or not? :) How not alt-ri…

No both of your comments are akin to Running up to someone and say "So when are you going to to stop beating your child" There is little point to engaging since you have me already threatening to gas you for some reason if I at all support a platform like Parler being allowed to even exist. I am sure you also take the "Hate Speech is not Free Speech" point of view when it comes to free speech protections, so any deba…

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Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're getting downvoted at least in part because people disagree with you (I didn't downvote FWIW), but you're also factually wrong about Section 230 protections. Section 230 doesn't give blanket immunity to publishing illegal content: it only protects against civil violations, not criminal.

> Section 230 doesn't give blanket immunity to publishing illegal content: it only protects against civil violations, not criminal. Of course you are correct, but that doesn't make me factually wrong. You are talking about publishing illegal content. But (c)(1) "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information conten…

[deleted]

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not showing your ID that’s invasive, it’s the fact that this is now probably stored on a bunch of different systems and handled sloppily. There is no PCI standard for IDs. Just a super sensitive document loaded with PII that they’ll dump on S3 somewhere because it’s “required for business”. Don’t worry though, if you request to have it deleted I’m sure they’ll remove the link to the S3 url from their database. :…

> it’s the fact that this is now *probably* stored on a bunch of different systems and handled sloppily. It is not logical to both present something as FACT and then also admit it is speculation.

Probabilities are still facts.

If I flip a coin 1000 times it will probably land on heads at least once.

Thousands of huge corporations have continuously been caught up in data dumps, hacks, insider schemes, etc. Especially with data that has no liability. This case is statistically unlikely to be any different.

Now if I had made this up in a world where experian, Adobe, capital one, etc didn’t happen, then I could see where you’re coming from. But I’m not, this is the world we live in and it’s rightfully why people get upset when companies suck in yet more PII.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#508
post #493

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's called the paradox of tolerance. If we tolerate ALL views without limit, eventually the intolerant will take advantage of this, and overrun the tolerant. Tolerance is like free speech, there are healthy limits that must be in place to safeguard participants. What happened at Parler was not simply political speech, it was clear and detailed planning of violence.

I couldn’t disagree more with you. I can’t understand how we have extremely intelligent people coming to this conclusion.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they could properly handle the data, they would have.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not free speech. That could be called something like "quality speech". With free speech, as defined now, low quality arguments hit the same bar as high quality ones. Yes we should strive to emphasise high quality arguments (even though I fear this is a near impossible task programmatically) but this is not what free speech means. Tldr: according to free speech the dummies and assholes deserve to be heard.

I think HN strives to achieve this (as you point out, very high bar) and does a pretty good job with it overall. I do believe that dang's and the moderator teams' light touch has really aided a free-ranging discussion among people of wildly divergent viewpoints, and I for one appreciate this dynamic. That we're even having such a high-quality discussion now really speaks volumes to the seemingly effortless way in whi…

I think any mildly political topic disproves your point.

Technological discussions mostly stay high quality but any politics(-adjacent) topic turns into an obvious struggle of moderation and quality.

The same goes for Twitter but the balance of topics is heavily skewed towards the latter.

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