Parler Taken Down. Your Thoughts?

[MJ DeMarco]

What are your thoughts on this

I don't know -- I have to wait for Fuhrer Zuckerberg and Comrade Dorsey to tell me what to think.

Once they tell me the official thoughts I should have, Ill let ya know.

 

[MA81]

 

[The-J]

Without stating my political opinion, I will say this:

No business is immune to the political landscape. If what you're doing is politically unpopular, that's part of the inherent risk of the business.

Also: FOSS (free/open source software) is the way to freedom. Build your communities outside of the eye of governments. Use end-to-end encrypted messaging software NOT backed by major corporations (which have the ability to silence people just like governments can). Use software without government backdoors. I haven't gone "full Stallman" yet (nor do I think it's reasonable in all cases) but I do my best to use as much FOSS as possible.

Even though I do not support what these people say, nor do I support the actions of the rioters, I support their right to say it because I want the right to say what might be politically unpopular. Freedom of speech is a 2 way street: just because I might be on one "side of the fence" doesn't mean that I'm safe!

"Then they came after me."

 

[Fox]

I’d like to think it’s a large step too far and there will be a backlash - maybe not stateside but elsewhere. Or at least I hope.

Clearly in the USA they can do whatever they want right now but globally I think that quite a few governments are going to be rethinking things.

I already see Merkel and a few other European heads of state thinking WTF. Uganda shut them down when they tried to do the same there this week.

A few problems are apples control over what apps exist on their devices and the lack of viable competitors. But I think if they keep pulling this stuff it won’t be long till someone else figures out a way.

I am hopeful for Signal. The founder is the guy who created WhatsApp before it was sold to FB and after Zuckerberg bought it he parted ways over FBs privacy/ad policies. Hopefully if something can take down WhatsApp it will encourage others into the space.

One way I see this playing out is the solution coming from outside the US. If other countries start limiting/banning fb/Twitter and co it will allow a real competitor to emerge. I think the solution coming from within the states is very slim - they got everything under control and will squeeze anyone new out.

* if you haven’t heard what Uganda did about Twitter blocking some government accounts recently it’s a funny story. They basically decided to then turn off fb and Twitter for the whole election.

 

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[EVMaso]

The Western Politics/Tech/Media complex is now officially a thing. I mean, it was a thing before, but it has now unashamedly revealed just what it can do - take down a sitting president. No one thing should have that much power.

For the record I'm from Canada and I don't care for Trump or US politics that much, but I support anything that takes power and control away from this complex.

 

[lowtek]

Not surprised.

Decentralization just speed up 5 years.

you follow the wall street playboys?

My $0.02

There are a number of decentralized options out there that are worth looking at. I'm going to do some basic research and start a thread on this.

I agree with @Timmy C in that the future is decentralized. The cat is out of the bag with cryptocurrency entering the mainstream consciousness. It's only a matter of time before the politically disaffected withdraw their consent from the system and start using self hosted / decentralized options to deal with the current slide into fascism.

 

[Kak]

They shouldn't have had a politically opposite vendor as a single point of failure, not only a single point of failure, but the biggest failure. Though they are having trouble domestically finding a host company, there are plenty of foreign data centers that would happily take their money... And they are a big customer to have as well. I would imagine a Mexican or Russian data center not giving a shit, nor should they.

Personally, while I don't think Donald Trump and big government was worth this fight, I liked parler for the lack of rules. That was the point of parler. That 100% should be allowed. People should be allowed to say whatever the hell they want. Policing thought is ridiculous.

I anticipate they find some other host and they are back online. It shouldn't be that difficult.

There is also the option of hosting something physically yourself... While economies of scale are needed to make that an efficient use of money, it is something a sage free speech platform might consider at some point.

 

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[socaldude]

Implied in our constitution(which was sold out) is that citizens need the truth to make independent decisions to make democracy work. So while these big tech companies claim to be protecting “democracy” they are by their acts of censorship and manipulation “anti-democracy” plain and simple.

It just exposes just how “sold out” our country and our constitution is to these monopolistic media companies as well to other entities.

Its even scarier how people find this funny and don’t even care. As long as it’s consistent with their socialization.

Welcome to the dark ages reminiscent of the USSR. No rights, no privacy and oh yeah lots of hyper-stagflation.

Don’t be fooled by what we were taught in school. This country has been sold out to international bankers and globalist shill politicians. Scary how people think this is “American.”

I for one am not gonna just stand here and watch these deep state idiots steal what the founding fathers set up for future generations.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Could they not have done that instead of being subject to the terms of AWS?

Yea, what a dumb move from the Parler people.

You know you're a target, but you set up shop in your enemy's backyard?

If you want to voice grievances or fight against the big-tech monoliths, you'd think you'd be smart enough to not use their assets.

 

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[WestCoast]

The last thing I want is other people having power over what I say and do.
While I respect the rights of companies to do what they want..... now it seems corporations can just control what people say.


So, what is everyone doing about it?

Me?

- I refuse to shop at Amazon. Haven't for 10 years. Screw them.

- I stopped using Google last month (DuckDuckGo works fine)

- I am in the process of dumping Gmail (switched to ProtonMail)

- I am moving from WhatsApp (to Signal and Telegram).

- I have never used social media, but, if I did, I would be bailing on Facebook/Twitter as fast as possible.

I am looking deeply into if there is a better company than Apple to keep giving my tech dollars to.
This will be the hardest one for me, but, I'm not impressed by them here.
How are they any better than the others now?



So, my question is, aside from all of us complaining online. What are we, as individuals and business owners, doing to take our money elsewhere?

 

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[Timmy C]

This was funny.

 

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[WJK]

What are your thoughts on this, TFLF members?

It is scary... but, I think that Big Tech is completely overplaying its hand through doing this. They are shooting themselves in the foot. And it wasn't just Twitter. It was the whole industry marching in tin-soldier-tandem -- canceling them, one after another.

I have a different take on this process though. Parler could have never paid for this type of global notoriety. Big Tech started with Trump and then went on to the people and businesses around him. It was a classic mean girl's move to bully the new kid on the block, along with his family. I think that the ones who are running these tech companies just don't understand human nature. People are turning on them in droves. Their move against Trump and Parler may spawn their greatest competition... and it may even create their downfall.

 

[csalvato]

So, they need to tell them somehow. But how? They are banned from advertising.

They are banned from advertising?

They just got a shitload of free advertising by being banned by everything! They were on the front page of every news paper and mentioned in every single publication I've read in the past 10 days.

They just need to put instructions on how to use their app on their home page, like every other off-the-app-store app that exists.

I mean...

It's pretty clear we don't have a free market anymore, right?

Even in this crony capitalistic, pseudo-free market, I believe that this will play out pretty fairly and too many people are excessively wound up about this.

All they need to do is get hosting on another provider (there are actually several), and even fragment it across providers (e.g. web servers on digital ocean, database on Azure or Cloudant, etc.).

A service like Parler should really have their own data center, like @MJ DeMarco said above. This was a fatal strategic flaw.

If the president of the United States doesn't have free speech, nobody has free speech.

If the president of the United States doesn't get a free trial, what chance do regular people have?

In the current version of the war of ideas, Group A is willing to tolerate and accept that Group B has different ideas. But Group B is not willing to tolerate group A having different ideas.

Group B's ideas aren't persuasive enough to win Group A's allegiance.

So Group B has resorted to violence. That's the only way they can get anyone to "voluntarily" go along with their plan.

The president does have free speech.

This isn't what a lack of free speech looks like.

A lack of free speech would mean you say something against the regime and you are beaten and incarcerated/killed. Think Thomas More in the cells of the Tower of London.

This is the spirit behind the letter of the 1st amendment.

Being removed from Social Media is not a violation of that letter nor that spirit.

If we time travel back to when the 1st amendment was penned, this would be equivalent to all the major newspapers deciding to not print any news or statements involving the president's quotes, which isn't protected by the amendment.

We aren't even doing that now. The president still has a press room.

And, the president is getting a fair trial. An unfair trial would be if they stormed into his office, and incarcerated or executed him right then and there.

He was impeached, and now the trial will take 6+ months to get to go through a full trial and come to a decision.

IMO both sides are having hyperbolic reactions, and just dividing people further. It's like a fast-escalating fist fight at an alcohol fueled frat party. Ridiculous, but there's no stopping it, and it will likely be very violent.

Gear up. Being an entrepreneur is about to become a whole lot more difficult than it used to be.

At least we can agree on this point

 

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[ragnarcallan]

This is too far from AWS. Parler didn't do anything illegal. They merely created another platform for people to join and communicate on. It is clear that the big tech monopoly feel under threat and have seen an opportunity to try and destroy some of the competition. All this does is sends out a message to the rest of the world: Don't do anything we disagree with or challenge us

I'm sure AWS have tons of very, very bad stuff on their servers that they haven't bothered removing...

 

[Kak]

A monopoly is a temporary condition unless it is a political monopoly.

This big picture problem of "mega tech companies controlling us" will get sorted out by entrepreneurs. They have exposed themselves to disruption and basically half of a population embracing something new is a powerful market force.

I am, however, afraid that the Parler CEO might be too much of a "victim" to grind it out and save his gold mine.

All of that said... Censorship is crap and even though they have the right to make shitty business decisions and alienate half of their market, I don't have to like it. I believe the problem is even deeper though. They are more afraid of the lynch mob left than they are of conservatives.

Here's to an emboldened new class of tech entrepreneur that just found some real relevance.

 

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[SEBASTlAN]

AWS screwed up.

On the bright side, it may have sparked a new category of hosting.

 

[James Klymus]

My thoughts are that censorship doesn't work. Trying to tear down you enemies only makes them dig their heels in deeper and eventually come back stronger.

The people being censored, and the people like me who are nobodies watching all of this take place, we don't all just say "Welp, guess we lost". It makes people more and more mad when this happens, as well as more and more innovative about how their ideas can be heard.

So these people being censored have to go somewhere. When you censor something, you create a vacuum, and something needs to fill it. You already see this with alt tech platforms.

I would predict that all the big tech names (FB Google YT Insta) will all lose marketshare.

I try not to be black pilled, but this is some dangerous and scary stuff. Nothing we haven't seen through out human history, but still scary to see its new incarnation.

 

[MattR82]

The last thing I want is other people having power over what I say and do.
While I respect the rights of companies to do what they want..... now it seems corporations can just control what people say.


So, what is everyone doing about it?

Me?

- I refuse to shop at Amazon. Haven't for 10 years. Screw them.

- I stopped using Google last month (DuckDuckGo works fine)

- I am in the process of dumping Gmail (switched to ProtonMail)

- I am moving from WhatsApp (to Signal and Telegram).

- I have never used social media, but, if I did, I would be bailing on Facebook/Twitter as fast as possible.

I am looking deeply into if there is a better company than Apple to keep giving my tech dollars to.
This will be the hardest one for me, but, I'm not impressed by them here.
How are they any better than the others now?



So, my question is, aside from all of us complaining online. What are we, as individuals and business owners, doing to take our money elsewhere?

No Amazon for me.
Been using duck duck go alongside google for some time now, but now it's time to only use DDG
Moved to Signal
Deleted FB and IG, and messenger (deleted not deactivated, FB has reactivated before without my knowledge, you HAVE to delete). Never had Twitter.
I've actually bought a dumb phone for work to try and remove my reliance on my Samsung so much.
I'm not extremely tech savvy but want to look into the Linux thread next.
Hadn't thought of gmail yet actually.

edit: just set up protonmail and emailed my gmail account, which was kind enough to give me a strong phishing warning lol.

 

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[CareCPA]

Serious question: if you're a tech company, is it that hard to spin up your own hosting for your website? Could they not have done that instead of being subject to the terms of AWS?

 

[Fox]

Serious question: if you're a tech company, is it that hard to spin up your own hosting for your website? Could they not have done that instead of being subject to the terms of AWS?

I believe less than 24 hours notice and also they wiped the severs/emails to really do as much damage as possible.

Maybe with a few weeks months or months notice but they blindsided them massively.

What’s crazy is the pretext for this was “it was used for the capital hill riots”. The thing is though that FB/Twitter was actually the main platforms used my the protestors. Not debating the protest itself but that Parlor was the one app at fault is highly misleading.

 

[GoodluckChuck]

I think they (the corporations that want to be part of the new world order once the central banks own everything) are trying to invite violent retaliation from the disaffected preferably with guns so that it's easier to justify the incoming onslaught against the 2nd amendment. 1st amendment, check. On to the next one.

P.s. ignore flyers you receive asking you to March on your capital on the 20th, armed. It stinks of entrapment.

 

[GoodluckChuck]

If the 1st and 2nd amendment get drastically changed wouldn't that just be the end of America? What's stopping them from altering the other 8?

I'm not sure anything is stopping the guv once the citizens don't have guns. That's the whole point of the 2nd amendment.

With the way people of the world are becoming debt slaves to banks I would say it's possible america as we knew it is already over. Soon most ppl will be suckling from the guvs teat. They are making sure it happens quickly before people realize what's going on.

That's what it looks like from my screen anyway...

 

[RealDreams]

I think that the ones who are running these tech companies just don't understand human nature.

If Zuckerberg created a virtual platform where 3 billion people reside, I wouldn't be so confident in saying he doesn't understand human nature. He mindfucked half the population and "thanks" to him and other people society's structure is completely F*cked.

 

[Guest-5ty5s4]

This was funny.

View attachment 36394

this pretty much sums it up.

lots of people I know IRL who previously were “anti-capitalist” are suddenly of the position that “it’s a business man, they can delete whatever speech they want to”

“Make your own”
*makes new app*
*banned from app store*

*makes new social media site*
*banned from hosting*

True colors on full display.

Lots of tyrants. The cat is out of the bag.

 

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[Bekit]

It feels like we are overreacting to something that the free market will sort out (assuming we let it operate as a somewhat quasi-free market....but who the hell knows on that point anymore)

I mean...

It's pretty clear we don't have a free market anymore, right?

If the president of the United States doesn't have free speech, nobody has free speech.

If the president of the United States doesn't get a free trial, what chance do regular people have?

In the current version of the war of ideas, Group A is willing to tolerate and accept that Group B has different ideas. But Group B is not willing to tolerate group A having different ideas.

Group B's ideas aren't persuasive enough to win Group A's allegiance.

So Group B has resorted to violence. That's the only way they can get anyone to "voluntarily" go along with their plan.

Gear up. Being an entrepreneur is about to become a whole lot more difficult than it used to be.

 

[Bekit]

I know exactly how the President feels...

I've been demanding that CNN and Fox News give me airtime to talk about how horrible each of their networks is, but they refuse to allow me on their networks to insult them! Won't even let me on the nighttime non-news shows!

WTF? Why are they censoring me?!?!? Haven't they read the Constitution?

f*cking Orwellian shit not letting me on Hannity or Tapper...

You are of course free to look at it that way.

The point I'm trying to make, though, is that we're at a stage where we're seeing these social media giants flex on (what we used to call) the most powerful man in the world. And if they're getting away with that, just wait for when it's your turn.

Tech companies are at the point where, "I'm big enough to do what I want, and if the government doesn't like it, I'll just laugh in their face. Just try to make me obey the law."

We're increasingly seeing that the way a tech company governs my life is more relevant than the way the US Gov governs my life.

When that happens, we no longer have elected officials reigning over us. We have CEO's.

And I'm not talking about "the boss at my company, where I'm free to quit and work for someone else if I don't like it."

I'm talking about CEO's of a company where I DON'T work dictating what I'm allowed to talk to my sister about, what details I'm allowed to uncover when I'm doing research, and even whether or not I am allowed to earn money or not.

Case in point 1: I don't use Twitter, but the actions of a CEO at Twitter affect me when regular people are not even allowed to learn of the existence of a breaking story because Twitter has forbidden it to be shared.

Case in point 2:

On January 4, my new year's gift from Paypal was a disabled account.


No warning. No explanation. Out of the blue.

What in the world? The only thing this account was ever used for was copywriting income. The account was connected to a business checking account based in the US, which was set up and registered properly as an LLC. There was nothing remotely shady or illicit going on with this account. (Good thing I didn't have any money in there, because they're freezing it for 180 days. That's the kind of thing that could bankrupt your business.)

But what do you know - tens of thousands of conservatives also had their Paypal accounts shut down recently for no reason.

Being pegged by Silicon Valley as a conservative is the ONLY explanation that I can think of for why this would have happened to me.

Watch your back, fellow conservatives on FLF, if you also use paypal. Or any platform at this point.

Are we going to start making fun of conservatives and saying, "Well, you should have hidden your money in caves in Somalia?"

Back to the main point, though, that if we have CEO's instead of elected officials reigning over us, the implications of that are tremendous.

In a world like that, what's "legal" and "illegal" is no longer the laws on the books. It's whatever that CEO likes and dislikes at that point.

As soon as we move away from democracy, voting, and choosing our rulers, we're suddenly in a system where if you're in a minority or a group that has fallen out of favor, there is no representation for you.

If you read the Federalist Papers, you'll see how much thought went into creating a system where minority views still get a hearing.

Not anymore.

We thought we were too civilized for witch hunts and book burnings... only to see it happening right in front of our eyes.

 

[Charnell]

Unphased by it being taken down. Maybe they should have had a bit more control in their process.

From what I understand about Parler, it was a platform that allowed conversations & posts free from moderation. Primarily catering to conservatives, it also housed a more alt-right group that turned it into a breeding ground/echo chamber. Cool, no problem there at all. Let them talk.

But if I'm AWS, Apple, Google, payment processor X, or whoever and don't agree with that sort of content being created, I'm getting rid of them. In the same way you can't host porn sites on AWS or use any mainstream payment processors, Parler was too high risk for them. They should have done their research.

You would expect a forum for pedophiles to discuss what they would do to children to get taken down, a social site that allowed terrorists to talk openly about their plans is not something to be associated with. Even if they're the micro-minority of users, if it's unmoderated then it's the whole site that's the problem. "A few bad apples" as they say.

As far as freedom of speech goes, if that was the case, this forum would be nothing but advertisements. When MJ bans a user for a landfill, drive-by, spam advert, is that infringing on their rights? Or is it because MJ does not want this forum to turn into a cesspool and it's MJ's business?

 

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[BizyDad]

Serious question: if you're a tech company, is it that hard to spin up your own hosting for your website? Could they not have done that instead of being subject to the terms of AWS?

First off, I wonder how much of this is the CEO playing politics with the situation.

A small business with little traffic? Sure. I could host my site on a raspberry pi (and have as a fun test). But when your site (app) requires many concurrent requests, for example if influencers push a signups and thousands of people sign up within a few minutes, you need a scalable solution that can handle spikes in traffic such as this over a distributed network of servers. AWS is generally thought of as the best place for this.

Otherwise you have to buy more server capacity than you need, and the cost balloons. Or, you can skimp, and in busy times, the user experience at best lags, at worst crashes.

Still, you have a point and I shared Pirate Bay's founder's reaction to this in the rant thread. Here it is:

View attachment 36365

Think about that for a second, because to me it embodies the can do spirit of the entrepreneur, combined with a healthy dose of "who says I can't"?

The article is a quick read. Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler’s Inability to Stay Online Is ‘Embarrassing’ - VICE

Here's the highlight: "Over the years, Kolmisoppi and The Pirate Bay crew explored no limit of strategies to keep its servers operational and out of the reach of law enforcement and the entertainment industry, even when that meant hiding them in caves and submarines, or even using low-orbit drones to redirect users to hidden regional servers hosting torrent indexes and trackers."

Talk about creative problem solving...

I believe less than 24 hours notice and also they wiped the severs/emails to really do as much damage as possible.

I don't believe this is accurate.

Hacktivists preserved 99% of the public content using the Parler API, most of this was accomplished after the site was taken down. Side note, this included supposedly deleted posts.

Initially, Parler said they'd be back up in a week, which suggests they have access to their data.

 

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[AFMKelvin]

Apparently Parler was running both on wordpress and AWS. That's how they were able to "hack" them through a basic wordpress login. It seems idiots were running that company or someone who did it as a hobby project and didn't really care about it.

All throughout the 2010's free speech has been under attack. I'm glad these companies showed their hands and both sides of the political spectrum now see what Sillicon Valley thinks about free speech. Whoever makes an open source, decentralized, blockchain social media will slowly kill the ones currently dominating the landscape.

 

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[j0elsuf]

Nothing we haven't seen through out human history, but still scary to see its new incarnation.

Once you see that this is part of a cycle, you get a little more comfortable.

I for one am against all censorship. My social/political beliefs are even more pronounced than Anarcho Capitalists such as Adam Kokesh or Doug Casey in that no kind of governing or law enforcing body should exist and the only real law that should exist are laws that prevent murder. All other laws should be negotiable.

For example, it shouldn't be against the law for me to grope a chick in public, but it shouldn't be against the law for said chick to stab me through the neck as a response either.

Most everything should be legal and if it were, we wouldn't so much heinous stuff going on.

Speech should be the exact same way: Anyone should be able to say whatever they want to whoever they want without any restrictions. However, this is not only a two way street, it's a multi-way street.

So yeah, the Proud Boy white supremacist stormfronter a**hole should be able to say literally whatever they want. The BLM SJDub AntiFA Bernie bro/babe should be able to say whatever they want without any fear of their message being removed or regulated in any way.

However, anyone who disagrees should be able to go after them any way they choose, even if that includes violence/doxxing/hacking/whatever.

However, this would make most people uncomfortable and understandably so.

Most of us prefer security over free reign every single time. It's human nature. We're just seeing it being more and more explicit now. But it's been there before.

Combine that with our natural tendency to be tribal, you get a population who wants law and order for their kind and no one else.

This is nothing new and there is going to be a time where things come to a head.

I mean, is this a cause for a bloody revolution?

I'm not the one to ask, since an absolute anarchist like myself thinks that just the existence of any kind of government or authority is cause for a bloody revolution.

So to me this is all business as usual: Our elder statesmen's never-ending quest to take away our freedom for the illusion of security. This is nothing I haven't been talking about since I was in high school over 20 years ago.

I for one don't have it in me to start a bloody revolution over this since I have a better idea of what it would entail than most. The sacrifices that you'll need to make are sacrifices that very, very few are willing to accept.

That's what I think about all this.

 

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