The claim that Parler represents some unique risk to public safety is a lie driven by politics
Democrats and their tech oligopoly friends are drunk with internet power. Whether Parler survives or not, politicized internet repression by tech oligopolies is making the national atmosphere more toxic.
The takedown of Parler, currently in progress, is one of most chilling and ominous signs that this country is heading to a very bad place, a lot worse than we have seen.
Parler is the main alternative to Twitter for Trump supporters and conservatives, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by force of being shut down by Twitter. Famous conservative media personalities have flocked there, and Parler apps were near or at the top of both the Google and Apple App Store downloads. That trend accelerated after Twitter permanently banned Trump.
Legal Insurrection’s Parler account has 10 times the number of followers as our Twitter account, even though we’ve only been at Parler since last summer.
Yet Google and Apple now have removed the Parler App from their stores, and in the coup de grace, Amazon Web Services, the largest corporate hosting service, gave Parler 24-hours notice that it was terminating hosting services, effectively removing Parler from the internet. That clock runs out at midnight Pacific time tonight.
But it’s worse than that. Parler’s other vendors are afraid to help the company, including Parler’s law firm. This is part of a tactic we have seen develop for years where lawyers and law firms are pressured not to represent controversial conservative causes and people — but representing al-Qaeda members at Gitmo is just fine. It’s a perversion of the legal system, and it’s happening to Parler as well, as CEO John Matze explained:
The pretext for singling out Parler is that some people have posted threats there, which is a violation of Parler policy. There is no claim that the riot at the Capitol on January 6 was coordinated through Parler — not even Apple, in its letter terminating services, made that claim. USA Today, citing other sources, gave examples of calls for violence prior to the Capitol Hill riot — on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and a single video on Parler:
Violent rhetoric including threats against elected officials and police officers flooded all social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube, not just online forums popular with extremists…..
On Facebook, pages and private and public groups urged civil war if Democrats were not arrested for election interference, alleged police officers were assisting “Antifa” and claimed “Antifa” members were impersonating “patriots” at the Capitol. A video encouraged protesters to bring pepper spray, tear gas, batons, tasers and knives.
A Facebook page called Red-State Secession shared addresses of “enemies” including members of Congress. One post urged people to prepare “to use force to defend civilization.” Facebook removed the page Wednesday.
Even the president of anti-conservative Media Matters points to Facebook as the main organizing site:
Facebook had much bigger role in creating conditions that led to as well as organizing for January 6 event. We tracked people using FB to organize attendees to bring guns to the Jan 6 event. FB did nothing.
So why aren’t Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit being deplatformed? Why are they picking on Parler?
That some people post threats in violation of policy is not at all unique to Parler. Twitter has had a longstanding and pervasive problem with threatening conduct and threats, so much so that Amnesty International calls it Toxic Twitter, and wrote reports on violent language directed at women on Twitter, and Twitter’s failure to remove death threats. Not that long ago Twitter hosted accounts for the military wing of Hamas, and related entities (I know, I used to check the accounts when something was happening in Gaza).
If you have spent any time on Twitter, and I’ve spent a lot, it is a cesspool of hate and conspiracy theories, particularly related to so-called Russia Collusion. The notion that Parler is worse is a fabrication.
Facebook has deep problems with terrorist groups organizing on its platform, so much so that it deletes millions of pieces of terrorist information a year but cannot keep up:
Facebook removed nearly 40% more content that it categorized as terrorism in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year [2020], the company said.
Facebook removed about 8.7 million pieces of such content—which includes, according to the company’s definition, nonstate actors that engage in or advocate for violence to achieve political, religious or ideological aims—in the second quarter of this year, up from 6.3 million in the first quarter.
For “organized hate” groups, a separate category, the company said it took down four million pieces of content, down from 4.7 million in the first quarter….
Instagram removed about 388,800 pieces of terrorist content, down from 440,600 in the first quarter, but it removed more organized hate content in the second quarter—266,000 pieces versus 175,100 in the previous quarter….
White supremacist groups have been a focus for the social-media giant. Since October of last year, the company said it completed 14 network takedowns to remove 23 organizations in violation of Facebook’s policies. The majority of those takedowns, nine of the 14, targeted “hate and/or white supremacist groups,” including the KKK, the Proud Boys, Blood & Honour and Atomwaffen, the company said.
Facebook, not Parler, is the central hub for terrorists, organized hate groups, and White Supremacist groups.
So the claim that Parler represents some unique risk to safety is a lie. It’s a lie driven by politics, exploiting the justifiable national outrage at the Capitol Hill riot to purge political rivals through unprecedended collusion among the internet oligopolies, furthered by isolation tactics to cut Parler off from legal and other services.
All of this was predicable, and has been coming steadily down the road. Collapses, it’s said, happen slowly, then very suddenly. And so it has happened with the collapse of internet freedom through the domination of a handful of companies that control the flow of information and whose platforms are indispensible for political discourse.
The defense that the internet giants are not subject to the First Amendment because they are not governments is no defense — the accumulation of power in the hands of a few non-governmental entities mostly freed from the restraints of the First Amendment is in some ways more dangerous.
In 2017, on the occasion of Legal Insurrection’s 9th Anniversary, I wrote, Legal Insurrection is 9 years old, and filled with dread:
… [I’m] waking up to implications of the concentration of power in a small number of social media and internet companies who have been weaponized to shut down speech and expression. Google, Facebook, Twitter and two handfuls of other companies now completely control our ability to communicate with each other, while internet backbone companies are poised to block internet access altogether.
Imagine living in a repressive country in which the government blocked access to and suppressed internet content. You don’t need to move. It’s coming here but from private industry. This is, in many ways, more dangerous than government suppression of free speech because at least in the U.S. the government is subject to the First Amendment, and can be voted out of office.
On December 14, 2020, I further cautioned about the merging of the internet oligopolies and Democratic Party, and the need to shift the focus to organizing rather than continuing to contest the election:
The merging of the Democratic Party and the high tech oligarchs who control the flow of information is one of the most serious threats non-liberals have faced politically. They will hit the ground running. Will we?
They just hit the ground running, using the Capitol Hill riot as the pretext. And it is a pretext as demonstrated by singling out Parler, seeking to deplatform it from the internet and destroy it, even though liberal darlings like Facebook and Twitter are far more toxic.
Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” frequently used by liberals as a “prediction” of Trump. In fact, it’s more of a prediction of the loss of freedom that is happening now by tech oligologies choking speech in collusion with a political party.
Free speech and the ability to express political ideas is a societal pressure-relief valve. That relief valve is being slammed shut, and the consequences are entirely predictable, particularly combined with organized efforts to get Trump supporters fired and made unemployable.
Democrats and their tech oligopoly friends are drunk with internet power, and feel all-powerful. If history shows us anything, it is that those who seek to repress free expression inevitably increase the repression, and the people repressed find a way to push back. In China, The Communist Party has increased repression through internet control and deplatforming dissenting voices through extensive social media monitoring. It can happen here, and it is. Tech oligopolies have learned well from the Chinese Communist Party.
Parler is the canary in the coal mine. Whether it surives or not, internet repression by tech oligopolies is making the national atmosphere more toxic by the day.
[The title was changed after publication.]
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Comments
So…any idea if Gab is safe from what they are doing to Parler?
As the previous poster wrote, Gab’s been through this. Gab built its own servers, so amazon, et al., can’t stop it. It’s DNR registry also cut them down, now another company hosts their url. Epik.
There is also a new offering, http://www.Tv.Gab.com.
Has great features. slow right now, so much new traffic. They’re installing new servers this week.
Gab needs bandwidth AND new servers. I made an account. This speed makes me remember dial-up. This is NOT a fond memory.
I’ll donate and try to help them out. Once the page loads…
please save your money for Parler when they come back. they need it more.
Gab is doing far more than Parler.
A youtube substitute, http://www.TV.Gab.Com
AND a CeLLPHONE, so the app store issue will go away.
Give the company your money who is DOING MORE, not who “needs” it more.
This isn’t about charity, it’s about establishing a free speech outlet for Americans. Get real.
Read the current wiki pedia article on Gab. They are being maligned as well.
The Democrats ginned up the current atmosphere of Pitchforks and Torches against Free Speech Platforms. Look for Dems to do this for 2nd Amendment groups next.
The NRA better have a plan for when AWS kicks them off too.
For the most part Gab ia because they’ve been down the deplatforming road already and built up a infrastructure of their own at high costs.
That’s something I hope Trump considers post Whitehouse, funding computer infrastructure ventures that can support Gab and Parler. He’s going to marginalized in his traditional businesses so I hope he invests in competition to Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft. Funding a Parler isn’t enough, but funding some modern communications infrastructure would be. The market will take care of the rest.
Great idea, who will the Trump Data Center be buying their trunk links from? You think AT&T and Comcast won’t refuse to do business with him?
The way it was reported – Amazon Web Services De-hosted Parler because the Employees demanded it. If that is the precedent, then any website, company or Industry can expect to be de-hosted at the Whim of the AWS employees.
Gun manufacturers and Sellers, or Coal Using utilities better have a plan for when the wrath is turned upon them.
That said – GAB owns it’s own servers and is ordering more. They cannot be de-hosted.
No, Gab isn’t safe. Whoever runs the root DNS servers can eliminate your domain, that’s why ICANN wants to give up control, so national governments can take out dissidents by controlling the root DNS servers in their country/region. ICANN itself is lefty, and so far stayed out of politics in the US, but there is nothing to restrain them if they choose to merge with the Democrat Party as the rest of Big Tech has. The other problem is the backbone providers. If Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Level 3 all block your traffic crossing their backbone you will be out of business.
http://www.gab.com NOBODY, near as I can tell – and I’ve looked – owns this guy and his site. Real-world evidence as to his indpendence? He’s been banned from the app sores; from credit card companies, yada yada. check him out.
Here’s a better link: https://gab.com/home
Regarding Parler “Why are they picking on Parler?”
A case can be made that Parler was taking their business, anti-trust. They saw their customers deserting them and attacked Parler to try and stem their losses.
Also, Gab is struggling and needs donations, it seems wise to help them. There needs to be backup of our communication channels, that should be outside the US, making it damn near impossible to take down. And their needs to be redundancy, servers in at least two locations out the country.
Outside of the US may not be any better than inside. Increasingly other developed nations are siding with Chinese axis as I like to call the leftists these days. Any other nation doesn’t have even the constitutional protections that the US has. Anything that the government doesn’t like can be easily just taken down under some governmental pretext and done without warning. The fight is here, even if the battlefield isn’t a level playing ground. That’s OK, in 1775, there wasn’t a level playing ground either and 8 years later we won. We’ll do it again.
“Free speech and the ability to express political ideas is a societal pressure-relief valve. That relief valve is being slammed shut, and the consequences are entirely predictable, particularly combined with organized efforts to get Trump supporters fired and made unemployable.”
Agreed it’s not good, a sensible discussion needs to be had around free speech, conversely their needs to be a discussion around the echo chamber effect. To many tribes looking inwards.
You can blame your comrades at Google for that. Watch the social dilemma on netflix (a documentary by leftists) about how algorithms drive users to like-minded individuals insulating them from diversity of thoughts, opinions, and even obfuscating facts.
Umm I thought that was Facebook? Anyways the point remains echo chambers are bad.
This forced segregation of ideas will not help that in the least. Nor will the outright attempt to suppress various groups to communicate and share ideas, no matter how much of an echo chamber it is. The creates more aggrievement and a sense of prosecution that only inflames and sows greater distrust.
“I wasn’t paranoid until they started to plot against me.”
Agreed
This was all predictable, if one studies history. Progressivism is one of the four horsemen of Collectivism (the others being Communism, Socialism and Fascism).
Today the public face of the Democrat Party is the “Democratic Socialists.” They are the useful idiots for the real power brokers behind the Party — the corporate and central banking and corporate tech oligarchs, and the CCP. The “Democratic Socialist” and “Black Lives Matter” shticks are useful to attract the street agitprop folks. But the real agenda is …
The World Economic Forum and its “Great Reset.” It’ll come in on a pretext of “sustainability” and such, but is really intended to install a global regime subordinating nation states. Some call this the “New World Order” — I prefer to call it “Corporatist Fascism” as that is what it really is. As Mussolini said, “the merger of state and corporate power.”
Unlike Mussolini’s time, the intent now is global rather than one country, and multinational corporations and central banks and some NGO’s running the show (I suspect with more than a little CCP “influence” over the whole thing).
Seig Sustainability!
The Left has instituted the ministry of truth.
“We can’t imagine this happening here.”
It’s happening.
We need to announce our move and start making it: let’s take what’s ours and get the hell out of here.
If Wechat continues to allow unmoderated internal US political posting, then Wechat is better than big tech. If big tech succeeds in destroying Parler, Wechat could be our only choice. The American communists will have already banned us, but maybe the Chinese communists will seek profit from letting us speak to other Americans.
http://www.Gab.com.
WeChat is controlled by CCP, this is a really dumb suggestion.
Ignore the spammer. He’s been trying to push the China crap here for a few days, nobody is interested.
“Pure blundering on the right” How about?
-DNC email sever
-Clinton homebrew email server
-Pakistani spies running IT for congressional Democrats
-Obama are websites
Etc.
A pro po plundering.
They have hacked the Parler data, all of it, and are leaking it. https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348484125825658887
the woman who owns this Twitter is the lead on this. See her website….
Here you go. China cuts people using Wechat in America a lot of slack.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/01/10/report-chinese-government-censors-wechat-users-living-in-america/
Exactly! I read the same things about Wechat when reading about of the Trump ban.
I eagerly await the local sage to tell us that Parler should have been ready to start its own law firm.
“but representing al-Qaeda members at Gitmo is just fine”
“William Kunslter, call your office”
“Tom Hayden, a Chicago Seven defendant and now a state senator in California [and a long-time lefty radical], recalled, ‘Bill would always argue the test of a good lawyer is whether he’s willing to defend the most unpopular people in America, because if no one does then sooner or later you’ll be on the list yourself and have no legal defense.’″
https://apnews.com/article/b9d4f6e5b533bb23c6639cac29f2b27d
ROBERT MONROE, September 5, 1995
If you tried to march down Tom Hayden’s road against the left, you would not survive the experience. Mercy is not their thing.
Without doubt, John Roberts and his cohort of harlots is standing by in ready covenance should anyone challenge the last days of the coup.
It appears that there is not so much as even one patriot in federal office, with access, who will not take a knee to the debauchery at hand.
Milo was the canary. Alex Jones. Gab. The canary died a few years ago.
Ironically, immorally, we now have Americans being blacklisted by the TSA for “terrorism.” The capitol wasn’t damaged as badly as friends’ of mine’s businesses. Not even close. Minor stuff, evidenced by them resuming in the same chambers that evening.
By the way, calling Proud Boys extremist is just more faux crap. Proud Boys simply won’t accept being beaten up by the lefties.
When will we take our own side in a fight.
I’m OK with calling the Proud Boys extreme. But they’re being called all kinds of ridiculous things. As far as I can tell they don’t hate anyone except thugs and commies.
Is it really so bad????
Facebook and Twitter just gave half of their revenue to Parler.
I’m considering shorting the living shit out of both of them with puts.
And now Parler can argue that they attacked them over loss of business.
and is we had a non-corrupt judicial system, Parler would have a good case.
Twitter is down over 6% today on over 3x average volume.
More importantly IV has jumped over 40% since Friday’s close!!
I just sold a few Twitter out-of-the money-puts for some juicy premium and sold short shares equal to about 75% of delta. A portion of any profit on this trade will go to LI.
Remember the Apple ‘1984’ commercial that introduced the Macintosh? Up until recently I never would have believed that Apple would be the man on the screen and not the woman with the hammer.
That commercial is easy enough to find on Youtube (yech) and DuckDuckGo turned up a script for it pretty fast too.
I used to turn Apple 2+ computers into industrial computers. When they announced the Lisa, I dumped them and designed my own master-slave multiprocessor.
Not log after that I was hired by a Fortune 100, ran their R&D and wore several other hats, one of which was to write corporate computer and software specs for 15 divisions.
The first thing I did was blackball Apple.
Over the years I tried a few of their products, 3 times, they were inferior by design, a design meant to lock people in and continue overcharging.
Mac’s hardware was superior to Intel, their implementations made it inferior.
macOS: Linux with AppleSauce all over it.
I think Apple started with a superior operating system and general user interface. But other OS have always been more flexible but more difficult to use by the masses. Apple is now so constraining as to be not be very attractive for large scale operations. I even think their OS and GUI have gone downhill. They have been riding a outdated reputation for a while. They are now a cellphone company. Notice Apple desk tops and laptops do not now hold the cache they once had. I have not seen a business install an Apple based local network in a long time, nor do I know any business that provides Apple computers to their employees, though Apple phones are common.
Seems to me that the first thing Parler needs, after a new hosting solution, is a new set of lawyers to sue the first set as well as Amazon and the other vendors. Even if each individual vendor had the right to drop this client, they conspired to do it all at once, and that’s surely against some law. And its former lawyers seem to have been part of the conspiracy, which is a breach of their duty to their client. I would hope Parler had a contract with Amazon, which Amazon has broken. Of all of this, it’s the lawyers ditching them, just when they need them most, that seems the worst.
Datacenters are total a commodity in 2021. Somewhere a sales person is pissing their pants over the commission they just landed and future revenue.
Not necessarily, depending on your software architecture. In any event, moving a large scale application from one web services platform to another is non trivial.
I don’t code so I don’t how dependent AWS makes you to deploying on their platform- however from what Parler has said is that they are not 100% on AWS as they smelled a rat.
I know DCs. Shipping Container, Trunk, Electricity. Repeat. Been there and have the tshirt.
FB is literally offering half of their customers to Parler. They will move heaven and earth to make this happen. Entire tribes are pissed and they are moving. Once a “tribe” moves- Most will not come back.
Twatter won’t suffer as big because only 2 groups of people still use it 1) those who live in the CHAZ and 2) conservative commentators who troll the first group.
Twitters relevance was about to go into the toilet with Trump leaving office- so all they have done was set their MySpace offices on fire.
“Datacenters are total a commodity in 2021. Somewhere a sales person is pissing their pants over the commission they just landed and future revenue.”
They all did it at once because they either all agreed or were all extorted at once. Who else will take up the business that can’t be bullied by Big Tech? Who has contracts or promises of future business that can’t be threatened?
We already know that the courts won’t protect them.
The datacenter itself is practically irrelevant. It’s your trunk line that’s your weakness. I am assuming that the electric company where you have your servers won’t refuse to do business with you if you build out your own data center, or threaten to cut off any data center that colocates your servers.
that’s surely against some law.
But which one? As I’ve been saying, s.230 is a red herring, it’s coordinated deplatforming that’s the real danger. But how do you deal with that legally without violating the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, and the association clause of the First? Tortious interference?
I would hope Parler had a contract with Amazon, which Amazon has broken.
They almost certainly had the bog-standard AWS account with the associated Terms of Service and AUP, which basically says “if we don’t like your content we can terminate your service”.
Datacenters are total a commodity in 2021.
Doesn’t matter. Business continuity is important, and being down for 3-5 days will put most small businesses out of business. We also don’t know how locked-in to AWS his architecture is – if Parler makes heavy use of AWS-specific services migrating to another host could require significant rewriting of the code.
As an aside, I strongly hope that this is Parler pulling a woe-is-us crowdfunding stunt because any conservative-oriented site choosing to host on an enemy platform is just stupidly suicidal. I’m a cloud engineer and designing your architecture for “what happens if your region/data center/entire cloud provider goes belly-up” is a basic element.
Could a court remove 230 protections and the theory that by deplatforming tech has caused harm by editing content?
No, a court cannot remove Section 230 protections. But those protections are completely irrelevant to this story. These companies have conspired to do direct harm to Parler, and for that they must be liable.
It certainly seems like there is some sort of competition / fair trade law violations to be found.
However, lawyers abandoning their clients at such an inopportune moment is absolutely disgraceful. Lawyers that do this should be disbarred unless they can show a good faith basis for their actions.
But not only should Parler have a civil action, antitrust enforcement by the DOJ – and probably by state Attorney Generals as the Biden administration will most likely protect their masters by dropping any action, however obviously justified – is needed and should immediately be taken.
Spot on.
BTW: I wish the downvote button was a bit farther away from the Reply button ?
” I would hope Parler had a contract with Amazon, which Amazon has broken.”
Seems to be the case, but I have see that contract. The devil is, as always, in the details, and what drugs the Judge is on any given day.
By the way, (Q) what do you call a an attorney with an IQ below 70? (A) His Honor.
Old joke, but it never gets old.
….And now, we have the Antifa armed march in DC on the 17th.
https://media.thedonald.win/post/klI5a8aY.png
Ticker tape parade, no doubt.
….And The Donald.win has been attacked, too. Two of their hosting companies were terminated today, but they had backup plans and are functional.
Those unmitigated bastards really don’t want us to get out the word that the election fraud is real.
Just “clicked” on a “Blogger” web site and a Google message pops up wanting my e-mail address, telephone number for access. With that kind of intimidation, that site will quickly die.
What site was it?
Second City Cop…very critical of Chicago mayor and exposes ongoing incompetence and corruption in city gov’t and PD, etc.
Google has taken the Second City Cop blog down. https://twitter.com/SecondCityCop/status/1348701609577033728?s=20
total control of the media.
Well, Blogger is Google.
This just happened when I tried to access ‘Second City Cop’ today. Never had to do that before.
Second City Cop is very critical of Mayor Groot and The Machine.
“Access to long-running Chicago police blog is suddenly restricted and a lot of people are asking “why?”
https://cwbchicago.com/2021/01/access-to-long-running-chicago-police-blog-is-suddenly-restricted-and-a-lot-of-people-are-asking-why.html
Yeah, CWBChicago is also one of my regular reads.
I wonder if it’s a security measure implemented by the blog owner rather than Google. This is what I get:
This blog is open to invited readers only
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/
It doesn’t look like you have been invited to read this blog. If you think this is a mistake, you might want to contact the blog author and request an invitation.
You’re signed in as [redated]@gmail.com – Sign in with a different account
The Capitol Hill riot is proving to be as useful as the Reichstag fire.
If you saw Lindsey on YouTube in a panic about almost getting killed on Wednesday, it at least has some entertainment value
Hey, Mark, you got a link on that?! I’d love to see Miss Lindsey in such a state!
never let a good crisis go to waste.
The thought to me they have isshutting down all opposition after their successful coup d’etat, next will do everything they can to Californization the voting.
In the modern age, the internet is the primary means of communication information just like books used to be in the previous generation.
What we’re witnessing is a combination of the Night of Long Knives and book burnings.
We’re witnessing the beginning of fascism in this country. And if various red states don’t band together quickly to push back against it, things are going to get much, much worse.
As Mussolini said, Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. The “Democratic Socialists” have been useful pawns to help with the street-level operations of this “color revolution” / coup-by-election-fraud. If not, the business community (especially the multinationals) would have been opposing them, not funding them (e.g., Black Lives Matter).
Global-scale Corporatist Fascism (via “The Great Reset”) has always been the goal — and the United States as founded always the major obstacle. Now, absent a miracle, the United States as founded has been taken out.
State, corporate, and labor power. The three intertwined cords of fascism are big government, big unions, and big business. They support each other, and destroy anyone not in their system, i.e. small businesses and independent workers.
That’s very well stated and concise. Well done, Milhouse.
Now take a look at what is happening now and tell me… what is happening now?
2600’s Hacker Quarterly Facebook page claims Parler has been hacked. Very briefly, critical details of its security and account verification tools were leaked in an email, and were used to establish “millions” of faux-admin accounts. Those accounts exploited the fact that posts to Parler are never deleted, just MARKED as deleted. (That old wheeze? Again? Did we learn nothing from DOS?) Deleted posts and their contents, even those created as private, were then revealed.
[Bold mine.]
To me, this looks like Parler was a honeypot. Worth noting, though, that they were hosted by Amazon, and if that were the case, the hack would scarcely have been necessary. But incompetent IT security, and pure blundering on the right generally, are par for the course.
“Pure blundering on the right” ?
How about:
-DNC email server hack
-Clinton homebrew email server hack
-Pakistani spies running IT for congressional Democrats
-Obamacare website fiasco
Oh, no question the left has blundered more, and worse. Problem is, the left is out for blood. They believe the rules do not apply to them, because they are fighting The Nazi Evil for the oppressed peoples! For their own good!
The right has not vigorously pursued the malefactors. It colors inside the lines, says please and thank you, and treats its barbarian enemies with respect and courtesy. It harshly criticizes its own supporters for any breach of etiquette that offends those trying to kill it. And it makes stupid mistakes.
One or more skilled rogue AWS software engineers with the required access could have easily ‘hacked’ Parler. And Amazon would not be able to determine who exactly did it. If they cared.
Never place put real information about yourself on the web – NEVER.
I once new a guy who used his dog’s name when registering for things on the internet. Eventually, his dog started getting credit card offers.
The attack has been enabled in no small part by people like the National Register crowd and other NeverTrumpers, one especially despicable example is the Goldberg-French hive of hypocrisy, who just were immediately jumping on the Reichstagsbrand opportunity.
Of course, they will very soon regret their folly, as their voices will be canceled by those they enabled.
Richard Epstein has a solution, albeit offered as what the civil rights law ought to have been so as not to take away freedom of association.
Namely discrimination is illegal in monopoly markets, whether state-enforced or convention-enforced. “Nice store you have here, it would be a shame if you served blacks.”
In such a monopoly market, you don’t have freedom of association, but like a sanctioned monopoly, e.g. water company, railroad, etc., you must serve all customers at a fair price.
If you want your private freedom of association back, get out of the local monopoly.
A replacement civil rights law.
Of course it is a lie. All they do is lie. All they have ever done is lie. They lie to you so much that they begin to lie to themselves.
They know they lie. They know they don’t believe what they say they believe. They know they don’t have real standards. Anybody that isn’t in a coma knows it, too.
The real question is when we are going to stop treating these people as though they acting in good faith. They aren’t.
To the Left, 2 + 2 = shut up proles, and think what you’re told.
Or as Theodore Dalrymple put it, somewhat more elegantly:
“The purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
The people who DESTROYED a bakery for refusing, for religious reasons, to serve an LGBTQ couple, destroys PARLER by refusing to serve people with opinions they oppose.
Not even ironic.
There should be two lawsuits filed here. The first, Parler should have an anti-trust claim that it is being denied access to services used by its competitors and therefore being locked out of a market by Amazon, Apple, and Google. The second should be a class action by Parler subscribers that they are being denied a public accommodation in the same way as if a drive through window at the only restaurant in town refused to serve anyone driving a GM electric car while serving all other cars without regard to manufacturer or engineering. It took less than this to break up AT&T.
I agree. It all looks like fairly easy from the legal point of view. Maybe this is a watershed moment when these questions will be answered. We needed this to happen. In a way I am glad. It changes the dynamic and makes us think more clearly.
“It all looks like fairly easy from the legal point of view.”
Nothing is ever easy from a “legal point of view,” but people shooting each other is much harder still. Never doubt that.
I never thought Twitter should be a business in the first place, it should be a protocol, like email or SMS. One tweet contains less data than a single IPV6 packet. A distributed public message store that anyone could read/sort/filter would be far superior to a commercial platform like Twitter and not subject to repression.
Yes, it would still be completely toxic.
The Federal Bureau of Incompetency will prove its leftist agenda beyond a shadow of a doubt if it does not immediately start a RICO investigation of the big tech attack on Parler.
In Orwell’s 1984 there was Big Brother.
In 2021 we have Big Brothers — plural. A Mount Rushmore version of Big Brother. Containing the faces of Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, and Cook.
Collectively our — Tech Big Brothers.
And, obviously, Trump is Emmanuel Goldstein.
It’s now 1984 in America. It just looks a little different than Orwell envisioned. But give it time. The American version of 1984 and Orwell’s are rapidly merging.
Virtual states – global tech oligarchies.
Buy buy buy buy
Sell sell sell
How well you learn
To not discern
Who’s foe and who is friend
We’ll own them all in the end
Germany is super excited about Biden. They can continue to ignore their NATO obligations and get America on-board with the Great Reset. The one-worlders have been playing the long-game.
I’d be fine without any social media at all…
me too. But the genie is out of the bottle.
and this is only the very beginning of what is coming down the pike vis a vis SM. The Russians understand ( mass ) psychology much better than we in the West.
Just listen to Yuri Bezmenov and you get an inkling what is in store for us. As the jobs migrate out of Western nations to Asia and Africa things will get very nasty in the USA and the EU.
Why is it the job of Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and other left-wing Big Tech gurus to decide what we see or don’t see — and here’s the critical part: As long as it’s legal?
Social media’s censorship crusade against President Donald Trump and his campaign pressed the above point.
Why have Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Navigator, and others, been ordained Guardians of the Universe — particularly given their predisposed political bias? That is where the battle is joined.
From the White House to Congress to social media and everywhere in between, that’s the debate. Who died and left Big Tech in charge of deciding which legal material Americans can access and which, they cannot.
Every American citizen has the right to voice his opinion in the public square and these platforms are the modern public square. These are rights that all Americans have and they should be enshrined in a new Technology Bill of Rights. Any company that wishes to operate in the U.S. must not deny access or apply any conditions or restrictions on the basis of political or religious views. This includes efforts to make forums or channels more difficult to find or demonetizing channels on the basis of the political views that they espouse.
Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech. But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters per FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. It’s about time. Facebook, Twitter, and others, have been publishers for far too long, hiding behind section 230 of the Communications Act. Enough is enough.”
Facebook, et al has certainly succeeded in mutating the cerebral genome structure of many people who were ignorant to begin with, but their downward spiral has left them with no redeeming hope whatsoever. Social media is a cesspool where political correctness and righteous indignation thrives.
Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem. Though sometimes necessary, as witness a professional and technical secret that may have a bearing upon the welfare and very safety of this country, we should be very careful in the way we apply it, because in censorship always lurks the very great danger of working to the disadvantage of the American nation.
“Why is it the job of Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and other left-wing Big Tech gurus to decide what we see or don’t see”
Because you clicked that “I consent” button at the bottom of their terms of service.
Even if you aren’t a member of the Bar Association can’t they threaten your law license? I’d bet the lawyers who dropped Parler were informed action would be taken against their license if they didn’t drop Parler. That’s the big danger the push to license as many professions as possible creates: activist bureaucrats now control your livelihood.
You do not want a lawyer you have to force into representing you. However, make a complaint to the BAR, absolutely. But in this corrupted, cowed land we now live in, nothing will happen.
It was presumptive of us to think that we could create a place where we could express our views without the approval of our Digital Overlords. Big Brother is indeed watching us, and He is a billionaire who runs a social media monopoly.