[downandout]

What’s interesting about this to me is that Facebook, where most of the planning took place, is still online, while Parler has been, for all intents and purposes, killed. I wonder why AANG isn’t colluding to kill F like they did with Parler - by tomorrow morning - now that this has come to light. It seems only fair given that we now have an established standard of user behavior that dictates whether or not companies can continue to exist.

[dragonwriter]

> Parler has been, for all intents and purposes, killed.

Parler wasn't “killed” because planning took place there, but because they were openly at least unable if not actually unwilling to take action against a huge backlog of specific problem identified to them; the problem was current and forward, not retrospective.

[rj_kidwin]

Amazon has stated that it warned Parler for months without redress, but to offer another perspective, the CEO of Parler stated in an interview that they were notified the day before they got the plug pulled, sought to work with AWS on solving the issue, then were "deplatformed" the following day.

He said she said, but obviously both sides are incentivized to make themselves look clean

[boomboomsubban]

Though I doubt that Parler has many employees, it seems unlikely the emails from your hosting company would be read by the CEO. It's entirely possible both people are telling the truth.

[three_seagrass]

Your CTO of your social media startup would definitely surface threats of deplatforming from your cloud provider to the CEO.

[boomboomsubban]

In a well run organization with great employees that is what you would expect to happen.

[AzzieElbab]

How did you come up with that conclusion? Honestly, just asking

[nl]

Not the OP, but it's the reason AWS gave:

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

[AzzieElbab]

Even that does not say any planning was done on parler.

[downandout]

This does [1]. According to the description, Parler was the "preferred" platform for planning of right-wing election-related violence. According to the video, now that Parler is gone, Telegram, a tool that over 500 million people use everyday for entirely legitimate purposes, is now nothing more than an outlet for Qanon. If this isn't a prima facie example of the completely balanced, factual, and accurate reporting by our friends at MSNBC, I don't know what is.

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/far-right-extremists-...

[AzzieElbab]

I read Aws letter not buzzfeed take on it. I advise you do the same

[nl]

The parent post was pointing out that Parler was banned because of an ineffective to moderate content going forward (not if things were historically planned there or not).

[ttt0]

If anything, the same is true for other platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well.

[berryjerry]

Parler was killed for one reason. They said they wouldn't ban Trump. It's probably tamer than Facebook, Twitter or even Reddit where one search and you can find threats and calls for violence.

[notacoward]

There are two really simple reasons. One is that any such collusion would itself be a breach of anti-trust. The other is that they can't. Facebook has its own servers in its own data centers, its own fiber lines, etc. They could remove the apps from the iOS and Android app stores, but that wouldn't affect the billions who already have the app or get it preinstalled by carriers. And that's all beside the question of whether Facebook deserves such special treatment, either compared to the others or at all.

[alsetmusic]

This reminds me of a discussion with a parent who was distressed about Parler being deplatformed. She was never on it, but her choices of news media told her this was “bad”.

I argued that threats of violence were viable on the platform. She didn’t seem to believe me. I later sent screenshots of violent rhetoric that I found with a quick web search. No response.

There are people who refuse the validity of reality right up until they can’t anymore. Then silence.

[downandout]

If you’re referring to me being silent, the discussion seems to have made my point for me. I didn’t see the need to further interject. But here’s my take...

If you listen to mainstream media, you’ll see them telling their audience that Parler was “deplatformed” because the planning for the Capital attack occurred there - in fact you would get the impression that the planning only occurred there. Yet it turns out that Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter users also engaged in this behavior, and most of it occurred on Facebook.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that these “news” sources are knowingly lying to their audience about the reason big tech colluded to kill Parler. The second is that they believe what they are saying, which means that there is a new standard by which we decide whether or not social networks are allowed to operate - if attacks are planned on a given platform, big tech colludes to instantly shut it down.

We know that as of this morning, Facebook is still fully operational. So we either have “news” sources openly lying to their almost exclusively Democratic audience, or there is extreme hypocrisy in the way that big tech applies the new “Parler Standard”. It is one or the other, and neither of these say good things about our society.

[dragonwriter]

> If you listen to mainstream media, you’ll see them telling their audience that Parler was “deplatformed” because the planning for the Capital attack occurred there

I do listen to, and read, mainstream media (and others), and I haven't seen that explanation. I've seen lots of people on the right attributing it vaguely to the MSM to lead into arguments against it, but that's the only place I've seen that explanation of the deplatforming, rather than the failure to moderate when unacceptable content was identified.

> in fact you would get the impression that the planning only occurred there.

Again, no, I've seen plenty of references to planning elsewhere, social media and otherwise, in the MSM. Again, this is a frequent thing I've seen people with a right-wing media preference attribute without detail to the MSM, but not actually seen in the MSM.

[downandout]

Read this video description [1]. "NBC’s Anna Schecter reports that extremists are recalibrating and planning for January 20th even though their preferred app to plan, Parler, was shut down". Does that not directly say that Parler was the "preferred" app for the planning of right-wing election violence? I won't spend all morning detailing the rest of them (there are too many), but arguing that mainstream media is not saying that planning occurred on Parler is about as ridiculous as Kamala Harris' argument that the US Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over California jails - an argument she made when she was trying to keep nonviolent prisoners in custody in direct violation of a Supreme Court order [2].

The larger point, though, is the hypocrisy surrounding the continued operation of Facebook while Parler was shutdown. The first paragraph of this [3] pretty much says it all:

"Parler all but vanished from the internet this week. Major tech platforms, including Apple and Amazon, booted the social network popular with the far-right for what the companies said was a failure to moderate incitement and violent rhetoric on its service that contributed to last week's deadly Capitol riots."

Does the report we are discussing in this thread not clearly underscore the fact that Facebook also failed to "to moderate incitement and violent rhetoric on its service that contributed to last week's deadly Capitol riots"? If that is the standard by which all social networks are judged, then should Facebook not meet the same fate? It's hypocritical that they are still online today.

Are you arguing that Facebook is not guilty of the exact same crime for which Parler was executed?

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/far-right-extremists-...

[2] https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-kee...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/tech/parler-online-violence/i...

[dragonwriter]

None of your reports communicates either of the two claims you attributed as consistent messages of the mainstream media uphtread:

(1) that Parler was deplatformed because planning for the Capitol attack took place on the platform, (taking your best swing, you've managed to find an article presenting the incitement—not planning—cause for deplatforming as being specifically about incitement for the Capitol attack.)

(2) Planning for the Capitol attack took place exclusively on Parler, (the closest you got to this was the claim that Parler was a “preferred” app for planning for extremist groups, not that it was the exclusive venue for planning the attack)

[downandout]

That’s not my “best swing”. It was an example that I found in 30 seconds of Googling. There are countless others.

Again, I don’t really understand your argument here. This is something that you often see on HN. People going deep into the woods, disputing minutiae while avoiding the entire point of the thread because there is no argument to be had. Combined with the upvote/downvote system, it’s an effective tactic. It silences opinions you disagree with by pushing them deep into threads where few will read them. But it is destructive to our community and makes debate on here absolutely pointless.

There is hypocrisy in the Parler situation, and it is disingenuous to say otherwise. Planning of attacks and general violence advocacy, from both the left and the right, occur daily on Facebook, just as it may have in the darker corners of Parler. The only difference is that Facebook is still operating, and Parler is not.