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Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

reuters.com

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Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#71

Post by dc2k08 »

threeseed wrote: post #46
anewaccount2021 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the US is becoming a risky place to host your infra. you can be deplatformed on a whim, as a result of petty internal ideological resistance anywhere in your supply chain. no infrastructure partner will go to bat for you, they'd rather forgo your money in favor of passing a regime's purity test you might also be subject to sweeping legislation that allows the US govt to act against you if you are not politically alig…

Anywhere with a strong, independent legal system e.g. EU, Canada, Australia, Japan etc would never tolerate an app like Parler being used to incite an insurrection. Any countries without one e.g. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia would also not tolerate it as it could equally be used to incite an insurrection. So very curious where you think this "safe" place is in the world.

Twitter and facebook tolerate the use of their apps to set up autonomous zones within american cities and incite users to riot, loot, commit arson and murder cops so why doesn't parler just use a similar hosting infrastructure to whatever they use?

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#72

Post by jimz »

asdf333 wrote: post #12

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327257161739677697 looks like there are some legit questions on Parler and its origins.

Unfortunately a lot of the arguments he makes are also... irrelevant at best and at worst does the sort of attribution of familial sin that is the hallmark of both our nativist immigration policy and the ugliest episodes in our country's history such as the Japanese internment post-Kuramatsu. Cold-War era communist regimes loves medals and fancy titles and in some cases one would be viewed as a liability without them. Also, in these states where almost all business is owned or at least partly owned by the state there are state functionaries everywhere, political cadres were run of the mill. In fact, switching out the backgrounds you can make these sorts of conspiratorial assumptions about lots of people, including me. My grandparents were actual Chinese Communist Party officials in the 70s and 80s. I currently live in the Vegas area where I trade cryptocurrency and work on projects that I've used an LLC as to legally avail myself to the protections they bring. Now, I also went to law school, became a public defender and then went into immigration, which got me blackballed by the Chinese consulate after I represented some dissidents in their immigration cases, including Falun Gong followers. Since you can't FOIA the Chinese consulate, all I need is to spin up a poorly engineered Twitter clone on a k8 cluster I already have running and I'm the Chinese version of this pair, bonus points if I post some Soros memes then? And 2 months later it is very much obvious that they should have hired $150,000 worth of engineers instead of bootstrapping their half-assed operation on AWS without a backup plan.

The fact is, you don't need foreign interference for radical right wing domestic extremism to make sense, they exist, they have existed, they will continue to. Russia was a FOMO investor, not the guy holding coins since they were $3 a pop, and very much opportunistic. The operation screams of a deranged naivete. They figured they could host a completely unmoderated site on AWS? Even soccer streaming pirates leave DMCA contacts on their pages for crissakes, not to mention directory traversal, not knowing what "bulletproof" hosting is (which probably cost less than AWS if bandwidth was really what they were worried about). It's not that suspicious that they went to a Russian host - Chinese hosting either plays by western rules on Alicloud and the likes or requires local police to issue a permit, and the best you can do is probably buy from a Russian reseller anyway - and getting hosting for free speech in countries where free speech doesn't exist requires just enough doublespeak that took them 10 whole days to figure out? it's inept that it took them so long, really.

With the caveat that obviously my sample is skewed, during my time as a public defender I've seen a lot of conspiracy cases and most of them are incredibly poorly planned out. This isn't exactly a conspiracy as your typical criminal conspiracy to steal a couple of big screen TVs from Walmart and then return them with receipts you found in the parking lot (this happened, we didn't go to trial) but it's certainly only a notch above that in planning out their platform and scaling and potential legal matters. If Russia is in such a dire state that they are throwing their dwindling funds (a country with NYC's GDP, 60x the pop, that mostly exports timber? Ouch) at an amateur hour production like this then we should just all start running shoddy Twitter clones on cheap VPSes because it sounds like the easiest scam in the world to pull from a nation-state. And maybe they'll buy the Brooklyn Bridge too.

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#73

Post by im3w1l »

Triv888 wrote: post #3
sethgoodluck wrote: post #2

Now 2021 is shaping up to be one interesting year... thoughts folks?

Free speech, from Russia...

It's pretty amusing. To quote an (in)famous xkcd. The private companies told the Right they were assholes and showed them the door. And now Russia is stretching out a hand and saying: you are welcome in my house.

And of course the Left is upset. The Right were supposed to become friendless losers with imaginary friends[0]! Not befriend other people! That's cheating!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25817605

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#75

Post by Gibbon1 »

im3w1l wrote: post #73
Triv888 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech, from Russia...

It's pretty amusing. To quote an (in)famous xkcd. The private companies told the Right they were assholes and showed them the door. And now Russia is stretching out a hand and saying: you are welcome in my house. And of course the Left is upset. The Right were supposed to become friendless losers with imaginary friends[0]! Not befriend other people! That's cheating! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25817605

The rights new friends seem to have a tenancy to poison their political opponents with nerve agents.

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#76

Post by dc2k08 »

vkou wrote: post #41
DeonPenny wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy amazon interfered when it banned a app simple because of the poltical leanings of the people on its platform. Yet it would never ban youtube or twitter even when violent foreign extremist those to communicate with the world. Do you mean that part.

1. Twitter and YouTube are both full of conservative content. 2. The difference between Parler, Twitter, and Youtube is that the latter two moderate their content. 3. Parler was banned because it wouldn't moderate violent content. Your interpretation of events is incorrect. Even Parler, in their legal filings, are not claiming that they were silenced because they were a platform for conservative speech.

Twitter and facebook both enabled the spreading of a fake news conspiracy in 2020 that the death of drug-addled criminal during the course of a difficult arrest in which a multiethnic police crew applied the protocol that had been signed off on by a black police chief was the result of anti-black racism.

Consequently sections of cities were burned, stores were looted, people were attacked and killed.

These riots, we were instructed to believe, were "mostly peaceful" and helped lessen the impact of covid19.

When is big tech and the mainstream media industry going to be held responsible?

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#77

Post by rebuilder »

hyko wrote: post #33
mjevans wrote: post #29

Democracy works best when critical thinking skills and public disclosure of information co-operate. Better understanding why people believe in the conspiracy theories and fixing the social ills that radicalize portions of the population will be critical factors during my entire adult lifetime. For the US, and for the world at large. We need to learn how to prevent terrorists from being created and in so doing advance…

Well the first order of business in protecting democracy is to crush the terrorists head on. Doesn’t really matter what their back story is. You must confront the terrorist first, and win. You’re not going to win the long game by losing the short one.

I was going to say the exact opposite. Well, almost. You do need some action against the most radicalised, violent elements.

Goal #1 of a radical organisation: create a division. Your narrative is that you represent a downtrodden demographic - "us" - whose misfortune is caused by those in power - "them".

Goal #2: invite hatred and repression The worst thing that can happen for you is for your division to dissolve. You have to work to make membership in your "us" group a stain on its perceived members.

Example: Islamic terrorism. Only a small group of radicals is actually involved in operations, but because they are so deliberately monstrous, and constantly claim to represent all Muslims (factionalism notwithstanding), the stain of their deeds gets spread on all Muslims. This drives a wedge between "Muslims" and "non-Muslims", eventually making that the #1 defining identity for any given Muslim.

The worse the atrocities e.g. ISIS commits in, say, the EU, the louder the voices that demand society be protected against islamic radicalism get. People start to demand that Muslims take responsibility for stopping violence committed by "their" brethren. Muslims start to lose standing in society. This breeds resentment, and reinforces the ISIS message that Muslims are a repressed group who need to fight back. This increases radicalisation, which increases violence, which increases repression, which increases resentment.

By deliberately being monstrous, a radical group can leverage a society's self-defense mechanisms as a recruitment aid. So I'm sceptical of hard-line solutions to these kinds of problems. They seem more likely to make things worse than better.

What should be done, then? I sure don't know, but some things I think should be considered:

1: Do not acknowledge the division. Certainly do not reinforce it. It is an illusion that serves the radicals.

2:Fix the root causes. The radicals' goals are irrelevant. There's no Muslim majority fervently longing for a Caliphate. There's no widespread desire for a whites-only USA among the white conservative-leaning population. What people care about is food on the table, opportunities to progress in life and better their lot, and not being singled out for ridicule and punishment day in, day out. It's the economy. When the economic prospects for large demographics tank, bad things start to happen.

3. Hope for the best. It may take a generation to see meaningful improvement in quality of life for the disaffected population under risk of radicalisation. In the mean time, the political apparatus needs to stay afloat long enough to see those results.

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#78

Post by alphabettsy »

dc2k08 wrote: post #71
threeseed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere with a strong, independent legal system e.g. EU, Canada, Australia, Japan etc would never tolerate an app like Parler being used to incite an insurrection. Any countries without one e.g. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia would also not tolerate it as it could equally be used to incite an insurrection. So very curious where you think this "safe" place is in the world.

Twitter and facebook tolerate the use of their apps to set up autonomous zones within american cities and incite users to riot, loot, commit arson and murder cops so why doesn't parler just use a similar hosting infrastructure to whatever they use?

I’ll pretend this is an argument in good faith and point out the explicit intent in the messages to commit crimes is the point.

Organization of a protest that draws 100,000 where a small number commit crimes is much different than rallying 100,000 with the stated purpose of committing crimes.

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#79

Post by vkou »

dc2k08 wrote: post #76
vkou wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Twitter and YouTube are both full of conservative content. 2. The difference between Parler, Twitter, and Youtube is that the latter two moderate their content. 3. Parler was banned because it wouldn't moderate violent content. Your interpretation of events is incorrect. Even Parler, in their legal filings, are not claiming that they were silenced because they were a platform for conservative speech.

Twitter and facebook both enabled the spreading of a fake news conspiracy in 2020 that the death of drug-addled criminal during the course of a difficult arrest in which a multiethnic police crew applied the protocol that had been signed off on by a black police chief was the result of anti-black racism. Consequently sections of cities were burned, stores were looted, people were attacked and killed. These riots, we…

There have been thousands of BLM protests, with millions of people participating them across the entire year. The overwhelming majority of them have been peaceful. The overwhelming majority of the violence inflicted during them has been done by... Police forces. Most of it was done against people legally protesting, not against looters, trespassers or vandals.

Meanwhile, one 'stop the steal' capitol insurrection resulted in five deaths, the evacuation of congress, and the interruption of the peaceful transfer of power.

If every BLM protest killed five people, you might be able to draw some equivalence between the two. As is, the only equivalences you can draw are false ones.

And besides - this is an irrelevant tangent. The parler messages mentioned in the Amazon lawsuit were not something that would have been tolerated on Twitter, or YouTube, regardless of whether they had been posted by BLM protestors, or anyone else. People get banned from Twitter for posting things like that. People do not get banned from Parler for posting things like that. That's why Parler got booted off.

Re: Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

#80

Post by rebuilder »

strangattractor wrote: post #27
asdf333 wrote: post #12

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327257161739677697 looks like there are some legit questions on Parler and its origins.

What will happen if anti-Putin posts show up on Parler? Will the Parler CEO get poisoned or the site simply goes offline. Any bets?

Nothing will happen as long as Parler isn't widely used in Russia. (I'm going on the assumption they're even actually hosted there.)

The Russian M.O. seems to be to maximize chaos. I don't think they care about the details very much, and I doubt Putin cares one bit what random net-dwellers outside Russia say about him. He cares about:

-Control in Russia

-Making life difficult for opposing states.

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