Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

I mostly agree with this, that we should do more about hate and violence. And do it more consistently and transparently.

To the best of my knowledge, YouTube tries hard to do this. And Twitter has been trying to do a better job at this. And Facebook hasn't been particularly good about doing this at all. If I am completely wrong about this, someone should set the record straight.

Perhaps their position is evolving. I'd be curious to revisit the evolution of this problem 365 days from now and take another checkpoint.

This needs to happen. Parler is not a "social network" in the same way Twitter, Facebook or Reddit are. It is a radicalisation platform hiding behind a Silicon Valley style startup veneer. I signed up for Parler 6 weeks ago and what I have seen from the platform is frightening. It isn't dumb memes and gifs but hardcore alt-right propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Within hours of commenting on posts I was contacted about joining groups of "like minded patriots" (their actual words). This lead to Telegram and Discord servers dedicated to "their cause". These places are highly organised. Unique URLs with multiple 'decoy and delay' steps to find and remove people from sharing links with authorities for example.

They have detailed (probably some of the best tbh) guides on signing up for secure services like Protonmail for email, installing Tor and Tails to access Onion services (this leads to a whole other world of horrors), how to use Bitcoin to purchase what are essentially burner SIM cards and phones to sign up to other services, and advice on how to recruit your friends and family such as conversation topics and “gotcha” responses, manipulated media to share, psychological and emotional manipulation techniques, etc.

The techniques used are no different to what we have seen from groups like ISIS/ISIL over the past decade.

I support free speech but this goes beyond that IMHO. This isn't strongly disagreeing with government policies but clearly talking about murdering those they believe are wrong. I have seen people seriously talking about kidnapping and murdering politicians. Posting photos of their weapons. Sharing detailed instructions on homemade chemical weapons and IEDs from people who clearly have military knowledge of such things.

When ISIS was releasing daily videos of horrific murders everyone called for such recruitment platforms to be shut down. It wasn't a matter of free speech then and it isn't now. The only difference is that these are (mostly) white American and European people not brown people from the middle east. The message and methodologies used are the same though.

Parler is without question a platform for radicalisation and recruitment for "western jihad" as I have seen people un-ironically use. It needs to go and I fully support Amazon, Apple, Google and whoever else in shutting them down.

Note: I posted this yesterday in the mega thread so my apologies for repeating myself but I feel quite strongly about this and the mega thread was indeed mega so my post was most likely lost in the huge number of comments.

In the early noughties I really believed that free speech online would work with just a very light moderation. We tried that approach with a rather small online community for an Italian political party where already all participants had pretty similar ideas.

What I learned the hard way (as hard as having light PSTD) in the course of 3 years is that just doesn't work. You only need a handful of motivated people who won't stop at anything to push their agenda and narrative to create an extremely toxic environment which only favors the best liars and the most unprincipled people.

> In fact, if Section 230 was repealed than Parler would be exposed to liability for the violent coup content users posted on it and be sued.

Parler may still be liable for the violent coup content; liability for that isn’t exclusively, or even mostly, the kind of “civil liability dependent on status as a publisher” that Section 230 provides immunity from.

Agreed. This kind of situation is perfect for separating the true freedom loving (i.e. "you do what you want with what you own") from the conservatives (i.e. "you do what we want you to do"). Those who like freedom says "that's fine, it's their call" or even "I won't do business with them anymore because I disagree with this call", but the conservatives say that "it's wrong and the gov should intervene".