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70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

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Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#581

Post by cbozeman »

arbitrage wrote: post #544
stuckindider wrote: post #30

Where are the comments about how awful it is for people's private messages to be leaked? Or is this okay because the media told me these guys are the bad guys.

A lot of this "what about their rights" bullshit is likely a covert misinformation campaign by botters and operatives. Hate speech is not protected. Plotting and committing treason against the United States government is not protected. Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.

> Hate speech is not protected.

Yes it is. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. [1]

> Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.

This is incredibly dangerous and short-sighted. I can tell you've likely never been in a fight, or very, very few.

People who think this way need to be very fucking careful with their rhetoric here, because while they think they might be the Billy Badass who'll set the world 'right', there's a lot of other Billy Badasses out there who might just jerk a knot in their ass, either temporarily or permanently.

You might want to take a more reasonable approach and figure out why someone feels the way they feel first.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#582

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

malwrar wrote: post #333
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is: if you're going to host something like Parler, knowing that it is extremely controversial, why wouldn't you host it yourselves? The money they would have saved over using AWS (at the scale quoted in the previous comments) could have paid for the servers and the people to manage them. I suppose the deplatformers would have just gone after whatever data center they used, though, or if they'd…

> why wouldn't you host it yourselves Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAA…

> Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell.

I helped build one out, which was later acquired, but I wouldn't think it would take more than a couple of cages of equipment in a colo facility to host Parler, especially in these relatively early days. Maybe I'm completely out of touch.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#583

Post by nkrisc »

sn wrote: post #513
nkrisc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not gonna lie: I find it very difficult to be upset by this when the site was a haven for people who want to mass executions for people like me. For me, the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs." It's hard to decide where to draw the line.

I also fall in the category of parler "was a haven for people who want mass executions for people like me." I still think it's wrong to leak the data. Many of these people use twitter and gmail too - does that justify a leak from those services? If not, why not? There were and are legal means for law enforcement to access that data if they need to.

For what it's worth, I don't think that it is ok. I'm just acknowledging the conflict of feeling bad for innocents caught up in this and being glad that some real bad actors might be exposed.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#584

Post by boringg »

jeromegv wrote: post #519
liminal wrote: post #420

I see a number of people here describing Parler as "unmoderated", but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity in their posts. Then the most active users were paid for their content too [2]. This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform. [1] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 [2] https://twitter.com/donk_enby…

CEO mentioned on Kara Swisher podcast that he felt he had zero responsibility for the content on this platform. So this moderation is mostly a PR point.

I wonder how he would feel about Sect 230 getting rolled back. Parler would be down and out (that said it's down and out right now).

For clarity I don't support changing 230.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#585

Post by brandmeyer »

tw04 wrote: post #454
sanedigital wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to been on Reddit, specifically /r/politics? There are calls to violence all the time . Nobody bats an eye because it's calls to violence against the "bad guys."

I assume you've got some citations for that, right? I have been to r/politics and people get banned pretty quickly for calling for violence. I just went through the top 20 threads, and there isn't a single call for violence to be found.

Indeed. When evaluating reddit threads and content, its important to distinguish between highly upvoted and visible content, and content that was downvoted or deleted to oblivion. A -1000 call for violence in one subreddit is not equivalent to a +1000 call for violence in another.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#586

Post by ForHackernews »

surge wrote: post #516
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but no 'security researcher' is supposed to be gathering such a massive dataset in the first place. The moment you use a vulnerability to download any private information, even as proof of concept, you are on very thin ice - both legally and (in my view) ethically. If I were twitter user @donk_enby I would be very worried about an imminent visit by law enforcement.

It's also likely doing this as screwed up active investigations. Someone might have felt safe "deleting" messages on Parlor. Now that this is public, they're going to burn everything connected to it and it may ruin ongoing investigations. There's a reason Twitter keeps a lot of accounts active, they act as honey pots for law enforcement who can watch them. These hackers aren't the heroes they pretend to be.

Apparently Parler collects phone numbers and scans of government-issued ID. I suspect most people in a Western country would find it difficult to "burn" their legal name and birthdate.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#587

Post by Reedx »

liminal wrote: post #420

I see a number of people here describing Parler as "unmoderated", but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity in their posts. Then the most active users were paid for their content too [2]. This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform. [1] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 [2] https://twitter.com/donk_enby…

> but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity

Am I missing something? What are you referring to exactly? The mod tools screenshot doesn't support that assertion.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#588

Post by lern_too_spel »

cbozeman wrote: post #495
evgen wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a German saying that goes something like "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you've got a table with 11 Nazis.”

A saying from a nation with collective psychological trauma of over 100 years. No thanks. That's an idiotic saying. The person's comment above you is also idiotic. When Twitter is banning feminist women for saying something as so patently obvious as, "Men are not women." [1] then don't be surprised when people choose to make accounts at any available social media service because 1) people aren't creating blogs that g…

Twitter had a policy against misgendering and had locked her out of her account several times before banning her. If this is something Meghan thinks is worth getting banned over, that's on her. Most people just don't care what pronoun somebody wants to be called, so the non-asshole thing to do is to just use their preferred pronoun.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#589

Post by jefe_ »

It's interesting to me that the demand for Parler was almost exclusively the result of policies enacted by other social media platforms. Perhaps there was merit to the notion that letting groups operate in a contained area of larger platforms would have been favorable to outright bans. This would allow the larger platforms to monitor engagement, control spread, and quietly respond as they desired, no one the wiser. Instead they made very public proclamations of content restrictions and bans, which escalated some casual participants to more engaged participants. These participants then gathered on a new platform that promised the ability to say anything, so they started saying anything. But then some people started to believe anything. And then the beliefs turned into action, and then it became a real problem. But the outcome is in no way surprising. What is surprising is that the response now is the same response that started it all, more public bans and content restrictions. It's trivial to start a social media app (especially when security is not the priority), so in a few months another app will pop up, and it too will get out of hand, but what then? It seems like policymakers and thought leaders aren't thinking long term and are doing nothing to look at underlying issues.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#590

Post by awb »

julianmarq wrote: post #559
jabberwcky wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately you won't find much interesting commentary in a politically charged thread like this, best to just scan and pattern match the kind of exchanges occurring before moving swiftly along.

> best to just scan and pattern match the kind of exchanges occurring before moving swiftly along. How do you do that? I've noticed lately that HN commentary (at least in threads like this) has trended increasingly pro-censorship[1] lately, and it's pretty disheartening to read. Would rather do something like what you say, but I'm not quite sure what you mean. [1]: Which is a bit ironic, thinking about it.

> increasingly pro-censorship[1] lately

The US has always had limits on free speech.

> Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Incitement, sedition, public security and harm to others seem to be relevant to this discussion.

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