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Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#151

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

leesalminen wrote: post #6
cmeacham98 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler is basically a direct clone of twitter's basic features. They use different names but have features similar to that of Twitter's tweet/like/retweet. Gab's current iteration is a mastodon fork (although iirc they don't participate in the fediverse via activitypub). Gab is similar to Twitter like Parler but is less of a direct clone, offering other features Twitter doesn't have. Gab has been along for longer and…

> Both market to the (mostly American) far right, with their shtick being basically "you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other moderation". It’s incredible that supporting free speech is considered to be only important enough to the “far right” now to be worth marketing to. Free speech used to be something all Americans supported and defended.

These are bottom feeders who want to cash in on social media without the overhead of moderation. To MBAs that's a cost center that has to go. The "free speech" spiel is just their cover story to fend off government intrusion while the user base festers.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#152

Post by endymi0n »

bmarquez wrote: post #109
EdwardDiego wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much the same as /r/conservative on Reddit.

Except /r/conservative never claimed to be unbiased. After people started brigading and posting threats (examples are occasionally shown by moderators) they had to tighten up their moderation. In contrast, /r/politics claims to be about general politics but most content to the right of AOC/Bernie gets downvoted or deleted.

> most content to the right of AOC/Bernie gets downvoted or deleted

As Reddit has a user base that comes from the US less than 50%, this might have to do with the fact that the Overton window shifted so far to the right there that the opinions of AOC or Bernie would count as center-right pretty much everywhere else in the western world, with the Republicans being off the charts lunatic extremist right.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#153

Post by rvz »

pii wrote: post #39
leesalminen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both market to the (mostly American) far right, with their shtick being basically "you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other moderation". It’s incredible that supporting free speech is considered to be only important enough to the “far right” now to be worth marketing to. Free speech used to be something all Americans supported and defended.

I have the right to promote terrorism? Shit somebody should have told me sooner

Khamenei is that you? I thought you said something similar on Twitter a few months, years back but your main account didn't get banned for promoting terrorism.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#154

Post by baix777 »

lenkite wrote: post #114
baix777 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Break into Congress and kill the swamp creatures". This is a quote from Parler, and this is known as incitement, which is often illegal. The first amendment does not apply to child porn for obvious reasons, but it also doesn't apply to threats of violence, which isn't so obvious to everyone. To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.

I can cherry-pick several thousand twitter messages (probably more) that make this quote seem like a soft, fluffy teddy bear. But no one here accuses twitter of being a terrorist platform. Your last line is absolutely correct: To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.

Just because twitter has illegal content doesn't make what parler was doing any less illegal. Just because someone else breaks the law doesn't give you a free pass.

This is not a free speech issue on any social media.

Amazon had every right to stop illegal activity on their platform.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#155

Post by dagmx »

phroobster wrote: post #150
gizmo686 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adverse selection. If your differenciating feature is "you can say what you want without getting banned", your userbase is going to tend towards people who get banned on other platforms. In todays climate, that is mostly the far right. Compounding this is PR and network effects. Once they become known as the place for the far right, then more far righters go there, and more distant people avoid it.

Alternative viewpoint: platforms without censorship tend to be right wing because that is what succeeds in a free marketplace of ideas. Left wing ideas require censorship to thrive.

How many left wing dictators have there been?

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#156

Post by wwww4all »

gizmo686 wrote: post #132
mikepost001 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other mode“ For a non-American, could you explain how this is far right? Sounds pretty liberal.

Adverse selection. If your differenciating feature is "you can say what you want without getting banned", your userbase is going to tend towards people who get banned on other platforms. In todays climate, that is mostly the far right. Compounding this is PR and network effects. Once they become known as the place for the far right, then more far righters go there, and more distant people avoid it.

It’s mostly normal people freely associating with other normal people, without fascist establishment elite government control, like Twitter, Facebook, elite media, and most other social media.

Did you ever wonder why you are calling others far right or far left? Why are you referring to other American citizens with those terms? Who is pushing those terms that divide the vast majority of normal Americans? Who stands to gain?

The fascist establishment elite are getting richer by the second, while the lower classes are calling each other insulting names and fighting amongst themselves.

There’s an old movie called They Live. When you watch it now, you can call it time shifted documentary.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#157

Post by Jach »

asabjorn wrote: post #147
glenngillen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the reason most privacy conscious people advocate for OSS solutions? Precisely because their security can be verified and not prone to some undocumented backdoor that is secure purely through obscurity. Also "many eyes make all bugs shallow" etc etc.

In the case of Gab "many eyes make all bugs shallow", but those eyes in this case had malevolent intent so the value of those extra eyes is dubious for a platform with as many high-skilled tech enemies as Gab has.

It would be wild if there was some coordination of an intentional vulnerability in Mastodon or one of its dependencies. I don't think it happened here but I can easily imagine the future of open source moving in that direction, i.e. trying to damage entities whom project maintainers don't like who use their liberally licensed software (which has no warranty). Already Gab exposed that federation is just another rake to step on and doesn't necessarily save you -- their wiki page has a section that sums up the immediate reaction after their switch: "Mastodon stated that most Mastodon instances had blocked Gab's domains, preventing interactions between these instances and Gab,[47] and that Tusky and Toot!, two popular Mastodon mobile apps, had already blacklisted Gab's domains and banned Gab users from using their app"

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#158

Post by jl6 »

stickfigure wrote: post #130
lenkite wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can cherry-pick several thousand twitter messages (probably more) that make this quote seem like a soft, fluffy teddy bear. But no one here accuses twitter of being a terrorist platform. Your last line is absolutely correct: To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.

> I can cherry-pick several thousand twitter messages I've heard this claim asserted before. I am unconvinced. Can you show me some examples?

https://terfisaslur.com/

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#159

Post by throwaway189262 »

bmarquez wrote: post #109
EdwardDiego wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much the same as /r/conservative on Reddit.

Except /r/conservative never claimed to be unbiased. After people started brigading and posting threats (examples are occasionally shown by moderators) they had to tighten up their moderation. In contrast, /r/politics claims to be about general politics but most content to the right of AOC/Bernie gets downvoted or deleted.

Right leaning content is downvoted because the US population leans left.

The centrist view, the average American, would be considered a leftist by conservatives. This is why they think they're getting brigaded everywhere. They are. Their beliefs are unpopular.

The only reason the US Republican party is viable while being so far right is structural voting advantages. That's why they've lost the popular vote almost every time for 30+ years. That's why 50% of senators are Republican when only ~43% of the populations votes R.

On the internet where these artificial advantages aren't present it's much more obvious that Republican policy is broadly unpopular, and conservative opinion is the minority. Or more accurately, the moderate left is actually the center, and the average Republican is substantially far right.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#160

Post by didibus »

mikepost001 wrote: post #17
cmeacham98 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler is basically a direct clone of twitter's basic features. They use different names but have features similar to that of Twitter's tweet/like/retweet. Gab's current iteration is a mastodon fork (although iirc they don't participate in the fediverse via activitypub). Gab is similar to Twitter like Parler but is less of a direct clone, offering other features Twitter doesn't have. Gab has been along for longer and…

"you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other mode“ For a non-American, could you explain how this is far right? Sounds pretty liberal.

The big social media platforms tend to find themselves in hot water when something approaching "hate speech" trends on them. So they have a tendency to regulate that content away.

The center and left in the US are normally not in favor of hate speech, while the right is more supportive of it.

What happens then is people who want to discuss hateful topics and post hateful speech can't easily do it on the current popular social media platforms, so they need alternatives. That's the market for Gab and Parler mostly.

At this moment, it happens that the far-right in the US has a very "hateful adjacent" messaging. They generally support and promote populist, nativist, collectivist authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded ideas. Those often overlap with hate of immigrants and non-white Christians, as well as hate of liberals and social democrats due to believing in their participation in demonic conspiracies. They also tend to suggest violent and authoritarian methods to get what they want, like killing their opposition or storming the capitol, and other forms of violent insurection. Thus they fall in the market category of Parler and Gab pretty strongly.

It's mostly the far-right aka radical right, the regular right in the US does not all prescribe to these and don't all have "hateful adjacents" messaging.

Also some more extremist current left movements also have "hateful adjacent" messaging, though maybe less so, when they do it's often targeted specifically at the far-right, most likely as a reactionary measure.

Also, there are reports of such left-leaning accounts being banned and censored on Parler and Gab, hard to say how true this is, but even if a rumor, it keeps the less radical right from trusting them. And so they are often considered to falsy upheld free speech.

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