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Talk about hyperbole. In no way did even 1% of the population on Parler want mass executions for people like you.

muspimerol 1986 days ago

There's no hyperbole in the comment. It can still be a safe haven for extremists even if most of the users are not.

simonh 1986 days ago

An even if they didn't agree with the sentiment, many or even most of those on the platform were perfectly happy to fraternise with those that did.

Should we still have due process in the external world? After all, the United States is a "safe haven" for people who talk about killing pretty much every minority group under the sun.

> the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs."

The line doesn't have to do with the infringement of privacy, it's about whether that infringement is being done by publicly sanctioned power, or the whim of the arbitrary, domineering power of private (tech) actors. Elizabeth Anderson has written quite well on this topic in "Private Government."

That applies equally to the rest of the internet.

estomagordo 1986 days ago

So let's start by looking at Hacker News. Where on HN can we see people plotting mass executions like that?

dx87 1986 days ago

In the initial post about the Capitol being shut down,t here were people saying that everyone who broke into the capitol building needed to be tried for treason and executed, or saying that the police should have opened fire and killed anyone who broke in. The mods removed the comments, but HN isn't some paragon of virtue that isn't susceptible to the same calls for violence as any other site.

wetmore 1986 days ago

Mods removing those comments sort of proves that HN isn't a safe haven for the calls for violence.

muspimerol 1986 days ago

No, not really. It comes down to how you define "safe haven" - if violent groups are actively moderated and banned, then I don't think it can be called a safe haven. How does the rest of the internet equate to Parler in this respect?

nkrisc 1986 days ago

I don't know what people think, we can't read their minds. All I know is if you wanted to find people who want mass executions in the US, Parler would be a safe place to find them, based on what we do know about them.

cbozeman 1986 days ago

What are "people like you"?

Facebook and Twitter have millions of people who want mass executions for all kinds of groups, a quick trip into Muslim areas of both services and you'll find moderate and right-wing versions that want execution for LGBTQ+ people. You can find the same desire for marginalization and extermination of other groups. Not every language and dialect has a huge team of moderators that review content and take the appropriate punitive action against malicious users.

I have a Parler account. I have a GAB account. I make accounts on all new social media platforms and communications services. Everyone should. Because you have no idea what platform might be the next Facebook, or which one is going to be the next MySpace.

mike00632 1985 days ago

Parler will not be the next Twitter.

nfRfqX5n 1986 days ago

here's nearly 1% of (4mm estimated active) upvoting something similar though: /r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is_the_type_of_free_speech_parler_accepts/

That statement—while absolutely and undeniably abhorrent—is not even remotely calling for mass executions, or even mass violence, against anybody.

pavel_lishin 1986 days ago

But for the people that did, it was absolutely a haven.

makeworld 1986 days ago

How do you know?

adrr 1986 days ago

We have the data. That would be easy to prove what percentage of active users called for violence both in public and private messages.

tw04 1986 days ago

I hear this a lot, but it makes no logical sense to me. I see a site that is (in)famous for being full of self-proclaimed right-wing "patriots" who are calling for violence against people due to political beliefs.

Someone then decide to associate with these people by joining the site. They may not personally post messages calling for violence, but are now associated with them. And the response is: well sure I'm in the group but I don't actually agree with any of this.

Then my question is: why did you join in the first place? If you don't agree with the most vocal 1% (I SERIOUSLY doubt that number after spending time perusing the site), and you don't denounce what they're saying, what do you expect others to think? We're supposed to read your mind that you're part of a "silent dissent" and just joined the site because...?

People were banned from facebook and twitter for calling for violence, if you switched sites specifically to follow that person I have a REAL tough time believing you don't support them.

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

tw04 1986 days ago

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

brandmeyer 1986 days ago

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

Parler is banning those posts as well: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/parler-lin-wood-... The point is that there are bad actors and bad voices across these platforms, including those that are "okay" like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.

tw04 1986 days ago

But they aren't. You can go there right now and find posts calling for violence. They have no automated system and have no plans to implement one which is why they were kicked off AWS. From the AWS letter they were kind enough to post:

>Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.” This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.

themaninthedark 1986 days ago

I am not going to go through and find some examples but there have been calls for violence there. I remember the entire Sandman period of time with many people saying he "what a punchable face"....

Edit to add: Also what happens behind doors on invite only subreddits?

Edit to add further: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/bmtdqb/ch...

CHapoTrapHouse got banned but....CTH is invite only.

evgen 1986 days ago

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

According to Wikipedia, there are 4,000,000 active Parler users.

You think you can assert with confidence that there are not 40,000 people with Parler accounts who want mass executions?

I'd like to think you're right, but I'm not as confident as you are.

Not after watching someone beat a Capitol Police officer to death with a flag pole flying the American Flag. People think they are defending their country against evil. Like me, apparently.

How many QAnon followers are there? How many believe the most outrageous claims? I would not be surprised if 40,000 do. Would you?

Anon1096 1986 days ago

FWIW Wikipedia lists that number of users as of November 2020. It had a huge influx of users in December and obviously January, to the point that it was number 1 in the App Store before it got pulled. So the 4MM user number is probably very off.

The data is public now—if you're so certain, go find me a single post on Parler calling for mass executions.

https://imgur.com/gallery/nHb2lO8

> The data is public now—if you're so certain, go find me a single post on Parler calling for mass executions.

Easily done:

Some of these are Verified users - Parler has their Drivers License and Social Security number, and yet they still felt secure in brazenly violating the law like this.

wool_gather 1986 days ago

Hey, spoiler alert for people regarding that link -- there's some very strong, graphically violent language. Don't click if you're not in a good head space at the moment.

MrMan 1986 days ago

i think its good to see it so people understand that there are literally millions of other americans that actively want them dead

Sorry, I should have clarified: find me a post that wasn't moderated away. Lin Wood's post was: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/parler-lin-wood-...

Unfortunately the service is down, but I would imagine that other post was removed as well.

No, I do not accept that you are "clarifying." You are intentionally moving the goal-posts.

The question we were discussing was whether or not many of the USERS are calling for mass executions.

I provided ample evidence, despite your "find me a single post" challenge.

Now we might want to engage in a different discussion, about whether Parler was correctly moderating that content. But that is not a "clarification," that's a new topic.

I do not have access to information about how long content was allowed to remain before it was removed. Do you?

mittermayr 1986 days ago

Since a "single post" has been provided by someone now, it would be nice to see you give them the decency and acknowledge it. There are so many comments here, and they all read in the same way, "well, what about..." and "show me proof" — only for someone to actually go and spend the time to respond, and then be ignored quietly. Discussions here (political ones) feel so childish, I wish we'd be better as a community on those.

Personally, when I discuss politics online I don't expect the other person to acknowledge anything. My audience is all the people on the fence lurking and reading and forming opinions on the topic.

Agreed.

I will admit that it's draining, talking to one user who keeps moving the goal-posts.

And I will then say that I think it's their intention to drain people like me.

So I try to shrug it off and keep refuting arguments with the evidence they pretend they will be convinced by.

wool_gather 1986 days ago

Yes. In many cases, the only "winning" move is to say what you have to say and then step back.

You can't usually "win" the argument, just your own time.

I have. I don't typically sit on HN and refresh my own comments to see people responding in real time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/arkansas-police-resign...

hartator 1986 days ago

These are not credible death threats.

The following was requested and provided, please stop changing the goal post when you're called out.

> single post

> on Parler

> calling for mass executions

ipsocannibal 1986 days ago

Data, evidence? The threat is in giving the fascist terrorist 1% a microphone not that the other 99% happen to be listening. Parler was lax in policing that 1%.

And thus the private messages/videos of all should be leaked by vigilantes?

I am equally concerned about what happened about the Capitol, but the actions taken by tech in response are unacceptable to me.

ipsocannibal 1985 days ago

You just jumped to a conclusion. In another comment in this article I specifically said only messages that are related to the commission of a crime should be released and everything else should be deleted.

brigandish 1986 days ago

> The threat is in giving the fascist terrorist 1% a microphone

The problem with fascist terrorists is not their rhetoric, it's their violence. Allow them to speak their mind and you lower their need for violent action and everyone else gets to show that their ideas are horribly flawed.

It's amusing to think that people seriously believe there are huge swathes of people just ripe to become neo-nazis because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote some tweets - how do you manage not to succumb to these rhetorical titans?

>It's amusing to think that people seriously believe there are huge swathes of people just ripe to become neo-nazis because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote some tweets - how do you manage not to succumb to these rhetorical titans?

Given that exactly this happened 90 years ago and caused the deaths of tens of millions, people are needless to say cautious.

cbozeman 1986 days ago

You can't have Hitler without the Treaty of Versailles. He was just a catalyst to an incredibly punitive and emasculating treaty that scarred the psychology of the German people.

If it hadn't been Hitler, it would have eventually been someone else.

macintux 1986 days ago

War, maybe. Genocide of the Jews? Seems less likely as an inevitability.

brigandish 1986 days ago

I'm going to side with the interpretations of history that are a tad more complex than "he gave a rousing speech, hence, genocide", and there are plenty of them.

l9k 1986 days ago

Yet you seem to side with the less complex interpretation of current event being "he gave a rousing speech"

amanaplanacanal 1986 days ago

> Allow them to speak their mind and you lower their need for violent action

That may be true, or that may not be true. Has there been any research on this?

loveistheanswer 1986 days ago

History is replete with examples

mrzimmerman 1986 days ago

You're purposefully being reductionist about this. People having their brains hit with racist or violent rhetoric over a long period of time will be changed by that. They human brain adapts to it's environment, expecting certain inputs and if it's receiving /pol light on Twitter then it starts to expect it.

On top of that, it's only a matter of time before they're linked to one of the many .win site that sprang up after Twitter purged the_donald and the Qanon people.

And again, people have been moved to violence and facism in human history, that's not difficult to find.

brigandish 1986 days ago

> You're purposefully being reductionist about this.

I'm really not, and I'd prefer if you started off responding to me by not (mis)characterising my intentions. I'm 100% sincere in my support of free speech and stand 100% behind my comment.

> People having their brains hit with racist or violent rhetoric over a long period of time will be changed by that

Yes, they will, which is why it's good to allow every voice and every kind of viewpoint a chance to be expressed and hence challenged. Unless you think that echo chambers are a good thing?

> people have been moved to violence and facism in human history, that's not difficult to find

Did they occur in places with high amounts of censorship or free speech? The Holocaust wasn't caused simply by one of Hitler's speeches, for example, it was also (among other things) primed by the rampant anti-semitic prejudice that came from the pulpit every Sunday for hundreds of years - which was unchallengable due to blasphemy laws.

Another "win" for the repression of speech someone in power doesn't like, eh?

joshuamorton 1986 days ago

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?

cbozeman 1986 days ago

There's a huge degree of just outright horseshit here.

I've been browsing /pol/ for years, hell almost decades. Its a great place to go to get an idea of just how fringe certain elements of society are becoming. I was actually actively browsing when QAnon was making his posts there.

I thought they were just as ridiculous and far-fetched then as I do now. People become radicalized largely because some condition in their life is lacking. For every single successful mechanical engineer that joins ISIS, there's 99 out-of-work coal miners and factory workers who storm the American capital.

Most people who have everything in their life going great don't end up extremists.

amanaplanacanal 1986 days ago

I doubt most of the people who stormed the Capitol were out of work coal miners and factory workers. Which is not to say they didn’t have things going badly in their lives, that describes a lot of people.

heavyset_go 1985 days ago

To quote a violent rioter screaming at the police on January 6th, "We're the business owners of America, and we don't have your back anymore!"

I watched lawyers, doctors and owners of IT companies attack the Capitol.

There are very few struggling coal miners who can afford to fly into DC during the week along with hundreds of dollars in riot gear in order to spend a few days rioting.

ipsocannibal 1985 days ago

I think this is relevent a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

brigandish 1985 days ago

This is often brought up, mistakenly, as support for restricting speech based on speech alone when it says no such thing.

Popper draws a clear distinction between those who will have intolerant views but do not engage in violence, and those who do engage in violence. It is only the latter, in Popper's view, that must be restricted.

I'm not the one making the positive claim: if people are so certain there were calls for mass executions on Parler, they should demonstrate it.

sn 1986 days ago

I also fall in the category of parler "was a haven for people who want mass executions for people like me."

I still think it's wrong to leak the data.

Many of these people use twitter and gmail too - does that justify a leak from those services? If not, why not?

There were and are legal means for law enforcement to access that data if they need to.

nkrisc 1986 days ago

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

LunaSea 1986 days ago

I would set the line at "following due process".

gooseus 1986 days ago

My impressions is that everyone whinging about privacy with regards to giving seditionists and terrorists a space to coordinate and share misinformation after the biggest attack on the US since 9/11 are just being contrarian or are absolutist to a fault in their libertarian ideals (which I mostly share).

People minimizing this attack and not treating it like a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis for the US are not considering the propaganda win this is for extremist groups domestically and autocratic regimes internationally. Could this be a slippery slope? Sure, but it's not as slippery as the other side of the slope which goes right off a cliff.

There is still plenty of time/space to have debates about how to move forward from here with moderation and privacy on social networks, but for now we are in the middle of an insurrection that needs to be put down.

Also, should another attack take place couldn't platforms knowingly providing services to the capitol attackers find themselves liable for providing material support for terrorists? If I were managing risk at AWS that definitely be a major concern.

My POV, if we wouldn't have a problem doing it to ISIS after an attack on our Capitol, then we shouldn't have problem doing the same to QAnon and these "patriots".

throwaway0a5e 1986 days ago

>People minimizing this attack and not treating it like a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis

We're still getting groped by the TSA and wrapping up a war from the last time we had a 9/11 scale crisis. We were tricked into spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives invading a nation that had nothing to do with it and we gave some of the less savory government agencies a lot of power which they still have not returned.

I think the public is right to be hesitant to play the knee-jerk reaction game this time around considering how well it turned out last time.

gooseus 1986 days ago

I think there is a big difference between invading two countries and passing the PATRIOT act and the reaction we're seeing here.

All this "hold on and let's make sure we're not being too unfair to far-right extremists" while they actively recruit and plan more attacks sounds like an under-reaction from a fear of over-reacting.

> All this "hold on and let's make sure we're not being too unfair to far-right extremists" while they actively recruit and plan more attacks sounds like an under-reaction from a fear of over-reacting.

I think it is right to be worried about the ascendant tech industry being able to quash certain ideas before they have a chance to influence voters at the ballot box.

Just this past 3 months, we've seen true stories about Joe Biden's son banned from posting on social media, anti-Biden news outlets banned from posting, and now the president banned.

I vote straight democrat pretty much every time, so that is where my leanings lie, but I'm not going to shut my eyes as wealth inequality goes over the moon in the past 20 years and consolidated platforms owned by the hyper-wealthy increasingly control what news people even see.

To me, it is entirely inappropriate to be blasé about this point.

chmod600 1986 days ago

Where you are going wrong is that none of what you say demands a hack or a data dump.

Get warrants, subpoenas, etc., and go after those inciting riots/sedition.

jaywalk 1986 days ago

> the biggest attack on the US since 9/11

This is an absolutely disgusting and disgraceful thing to say.

gooseus 1986 days ago

So you can name a bigger attack on the US that has happened in the last 20 years?

Far fewer lives were lost, but the impact and implications of this are on par.

They're just not even remotely the same thing.

Nothing like 9/11 or the OKC bombing has happened in the last 19 years; full stop.

I have lived in DC my whole life, I hate to see this happening in my city, but we can be honest with ourselves.

macintux 1986 days ago

This could have led to the public execution of the Vice President and speaker of the house. This came close to being a dramatically worse event.

> This could have led to the public execution of the Vice President and speaker of the house. This came close to being a dramatically worse event.

I remain unconvinced about how close that actually was, nor have I seen a compelling case that it was that close actually made.

Further, before it becomes close to "executing the Vice President", you can bet shots are going to actually be fired. Crowds of rioters behave very differently when gunshots start ringing out.

seppin 1986 days ago

And until such a thing occurs, most Trump adjacent HN members with continue to play "no true scotsman" with the extremists amongst them.

jacquesm 1986 days ago

No, it is factually correct. They said 'since', not larger than. In the meantime, since 9/11 there have as far as I know it not been any larger attacks within the US on the United States itself. If you know of any then please correct me.

> on the United States itself.

What does "on the United States itself" mean and why does 9/11 meet that standard but not, say, the Pulse nightclub shooting?

jacquesm 1986 days ago

The Pulse nightclub is not typically associated with being a seat of government, though I don't doubt that people in government have been seated there.

On 9/11 there was a plan set in motion to crash a plane in to the Capitol, which only failed because of the bravery of the passengers in that plane. Incidentally, the very same Capitol self described 'patriots' broke into and vandalized last week.

> a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis

So what made 9/11 have large scale was the (thwarted) plot to crash into the Capitol and the successful attack on the Pentagon? Not the 2600 killed in the WTC?

This seems like a very twisted reading to compare two not-actually-that-similar events.

daveevad 1985 days ago

Perhaps the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting where 24 members were attacked and one nearly died?

jacquesm 1985 days ago

Yes, that was definitely bad.

TomSwirly 1986 days ago

If the statement is false, it should be easy to come up with a counter-example...?

tedjdziuba 1986 days ago

Twitter is a haven for the "kill all white people" and "Republicans all deserve to die" supporters.