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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

#921

Post by smileybarry »

grawprog wrote: post #837
ibrault wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not seen any indication that private messages are included in this. As the person indicates, phone numbers are only included if they were posted on Parler by the users themselves, but yes from what I can tell the IDs are the most "private" part of the leak. Although one could argue that they are still "public" given that Parler publicly exposed the information.

I have to point out. Messages being leaked is actually in the title of the article. >70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

The article itself never defines "messages" and, from context, it seems like they referred to users' [public] posts as "users' messages" -- not DMs/PMs.

EDIT: A clarification on Twitter from ~9h ago:

"since a lot of people seem confused about this detail and there is a bullshit reddit post going around:

only things that were available publicly via the web were archived. i don't have you e-mail address, phone or credit card number. unless you posted it yourself on parler."

https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

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

#922

Post by runarberg »

refurb wrote: post #910
burntsushi wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. /r/conservative censoring views or users is just fine. They can define the norms of their own community and enforce them. Just don't hypocritically declare that other people can't also do the same. That's the point here. The hypocrisy.

This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform. That's what the OP was referring to. If everyone is going to call out Parler for being a propaganda channel, then apply the same standards to Democratic Underground, r/politics, r/antifa, etc.

How cute, you think antifa are democrats.

But sure call it propaganda if you wish. Perhaps it is. Many anarchists such as my self are well aware of the propaganda we proactively distribute on a daily basis.

What the ancestor is complaining about is that when the right wing does propaganda, it is not called propaganda, it is called free speech.

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

#923

Post by joshuamorton »

brigandish wrote: post #909
joshuamorton wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler was an echo chamber. > which was unchallengable due to blasphemy laws There's basically no support for this claim in any literature I can find. Care to cite a historian?

Parler was not an echo chamber by design . > There's basically no support for this claim in any literature I can find. Care to cite a historian? Tell me the literature you looked in first, because I want to know which books can miss such basic facts, and hence what I should avoid. The history of Europe is soaked in blood provoked by differences over what can be said by religious people, to religious people, and of th…

You appear to no longer be claiming that blasphemy laws were a direct contributor to the holocaust.

Yes, widespread antisemitism was a contributor to the holocaust, but that wasn't primarily or even really particularly due to blasphemy laws. Taking anti-Semitism in pre WWII Europe and blaming it, in any significant part, on a lack of free speech, is not something that has any mainstream historic support. It's weird historical revisionism that's honestly a bit uncomfortable. (for example, Germany blasphemy laws pre-WWII, as written, actually protected Judaism)

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

#924

Post by runarberg »

xupybd wrote: post #858
chrisco255 wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been to /r/politics? It's a groupthink circle jerk. The difference, of course, is that /r/conservative is explicitly defined as a conservative community while /r/politics implies they are some sort of neutral community which they most certainly are not. At any rate, finding a diverse community of ideological people coming together to discuss politics with intellectual fervor is rather difficult these da…

I think HN does better than most because they remain non political and heavily moderate on the basis of relevance. Also because Dang is so active and impartial.

HN is really well moderated IMO and I think you are right in giving credit for its success to this superb moderation.

However I think you are wrong in assuming HN has remained non-political. There is a lot of politics going on in most threads. While blatant partisan shoutouts are usually not voted to the top and remain at low impact. Participants regularly engage in heavy political discourse. This includes responsibility to security breaches, workers rights (especially those of tech workers; e.g. should remote working be encourage; is flexible vacation policy good actually), taxation policy (especially those around start-ups), housing policy, transportation policy, justification of international sanctions and their effects, etc.

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

#925

Post by webmaven »

brigandish wrote: post #914
webmaven wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step. Free speech is a good thing. And if algorithmic ranking weren't involved, I would probably still hold to the notion that the appropriate cure for bad speech is usually more speech. But I've…

Speech is not gasoline, and ignoring the fact that "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" is not the correct quote (it's falsely shouting it, and I only know one case of it happening[1]), you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself. Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU

> Speech is not gasoline

It's a metaphor. Let me extend it a bit: Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent.

Speech gathers the tinder of a crowd committed to "stop the steal".

Speech is the accelerant convincing those so predisposed that violence or the threat of violence is acceptable and even to be admired.

And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation).

> you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself.

To be clear, I find algorithmic ranking to largely be the cause of mostly the 'widespread discontent based on repeated lies' part, although there are clearly also various 'automated radicalization' effects happening as well.

> Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things.

I don't think we get to unring that particular bell (especially since such ranking efforts predate both Twitter and Facebook). Applying ranking techniques to the prioritization and selection of a subset of items from a variety of sources is one of those ideas that was inevitable because it was obvious to a sufficiently large number of people, whether the result is a live feed, an automatically arranged 'front page', a playlist, or some other format. It doesn't even matter which specific techniques happened to be used, they were all going to be tried by a lot of folks until somebody got the results they wanted (more engagement / time on screen). Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are going to continue to try to mitigate the toxic side effects on public discourse, but I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely). For that matter, I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked based on engagement+recency with editorial decisions being made to nuke certain types of posts/topics for being attractive nuisances.

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

#926

Post by geitir »

chrisco255 wrote: post #744
joshstrange wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the irony of /r/conservative complaining about censorship or their rights to free speech being restricted while making submitting posts and commenting "flaired users only" (AKA only the users who agree with us and think the same way) is completely lost on them...

Have you ever been to /r/politics? It's a groupthink circle jerk. The difference, of course, is that /r/conservative is explicitly defined as a conservative community while /r/politics implies they are some sort of neutral community which they most certainly are not. At any rate, finding a diverse community of ideological people coming together to discuss politics with intellectual fervor is rather difficult these da…

Reddit in its entirety is communities of circle-jerk. Before reddit you had hobbiest forums that were close to the same thing

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

#927

Post by coldtea »

FireBeyond wrote: post #792
coldtea wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hyperbolically bad thing You mean like that these group was "violently and undemocratically install an authoritarian government"? Did you feel much scared of the possibility of some dictatorship (as opposed to an act of protest in the congress)? Second, even if they did seriously try to do that, heck, even if they succeeded in establishing an "authoritarian government", that wouldn't be enough to qualify them as "l…

> that wouldn't be enough to qualify them as "literally nazis" How about SS tattoos? "6MWE" - "6 Million Wasn't Enough" "1488" "Camp Auschwitz" All things seen in the group. But I get it, still not nazis, neonazi, or other. I guess unless they were card-carrying, dues-paying members of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei?

>All things seen in the group.

Yeah, so? If a group of "neo-nazi" tags along, that makes everybody a neo-nazi (much less so, a nazi danger, as neonazi is more like a kind of "edgelord" archetype for far-right leaning people).

If a group had the hammer and sickle or Mao or whatever on their t-shirts on a democratic side protest would it make the people there "communists"?

Or would mean anything about some "danger" to the US of communism becoming installed?

US was, is, and will remain corporatist and capitalist. Democrats, Republicans, and Liberalists all agree on that, and even if they didn't, tough luck, it's not them that have the power, the corporatist elites do.

There is as much "danger" of a fascist coup as there is of a communist overtaking, or as there was of Obama being a radical pro-Black president or Trump "draining the swamp": zero.

The rest are talking points for masses with nothing better to do (and pundits that make money of it) to hit each other with.

My european 2 cents.

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

#928

Post by dwd »

There's been a bit of talk that Parler was only ever a way for alt-right Republican operatives such as the Mercers to have their own social media and data gathering platform after the Cambridge Analytica fallout.

This is the data they wanted...

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

#929

Post by julianmarq »

confidantlake wrote: post #917
julianmarq wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why is it ironic? Hacker news censors content more heavily than somewhere like twitter or facebook. If you call someone stupid you will likely get warned and eventually banned.

I replied this to someone else, but I think it works here too: The irony, for me, is that if I were in favor of censorship, I would be the first person I censor, instead of using an online forum to speak in favor of censorship. I feel that there's irony in using a widely accessed medium just to talk about how censorship is the way to go.
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