skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you deserve it far far far far far far far far far far far far more than most but also oh shit
Agreed — I'm not trying to say I know the answers. However, I do believe there's a role that social media companies have played in this polarization that needs to be addressed. Tristan Harris (of The Social Dilemma fame) makes very good points in this regard. Many of the political problems we have are thanks to to a distorted landscape of information distribution centered around advertising and platform addictiveness.

Maybe we need a "C-SPAN/NPR of social media".
> that's every social media site of non-trivial size.

Facebook missed the fact their platform was being used to coordinate a genocide in Myanmar.
It's a fair distinction. Applications that have private messaging systems that have exchanged all sorts of bad / illegal content to parties haven't been cancelled by their hosts or held up to such high moderation standards.
> chemistry follows from physics, which is made of math

Is that a reference to XKCD #435 ? ;)
Just a nit-pick, but the suppression of speech by a private institution is still censorship, it's just not government censorship. I think maybe you were conflating it with the First Amendment, which applies only to the government and it's agents and not private companies.

In agreement with everything after your first sentence though.
insurrectionists? more like a unorganized group of baffoons. To whoever flagged me: truth hurts.
I was wondering if you were online to see it and thinking about that comment. I was really surprised to read that, AWS is another level beyond social media de-platforming. Wouldn't there be other harmful things hosted on AWS? Who governs this?
I think the recent NYT article on DLive laid out a theory that I find particularly convincing.

> In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.”

> The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0]

Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users.

It seems to have worked out for Reddit.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...
They will never draw the line. Even at an extreme, after the bodies of their enemies are in mass graves, they will still need to control the historians for hundreds or thousands of years. Crazy? Ask an average person how many people died in the Holocaust and they will get the number about 6 million too low.
This is a good example too. A baker cannot be forced to do unusual or creative work he doesn't like, but refusing to sell pre-made cake, or refusing to do routine customizations (like selecting colour or text if these are always done for other customers), is wrong. So as far as i can tell from wikipedia article the decision of US court was wrong, and the situation republicans find themselves in, is in a way deserved.

I am not from US, and I think it's really sad that most people think, that by opinion on one issue it is possible to infer opinions on all the other issues. Social media makes it too easy to create echo chambers, and see only strawman versions of other sides arguments, freedom of speech and tolerance is the only way to heal the society.
Screenshot examples aren't hard to come by. 30 seconds of searching Twitter:

https://twitter.com/StanCollymore/status/1347969923289657344

https://twitter.com/Olivia_Beavers/status/134795743412035174...

https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1347050705110986753

The @parlertakes account is a gold mine for it, if you're genuinely interested.
Why would Stanford ever say that they're definitely going to have classes return?

What if there was a new strain that was 1,000x worse in the last week?

Colleges should be the last thing to open back up. At least with local elementary and high schools, illness is more traceable and more confined to the community.

With colleges, you're telling students "okay, go around the world and come back. And then, go back around the world once we're done with you."

I can't think of another institutional structure as populated as colleges (maybe airports?) that guarantees international transmittion
There's a legitimate debate to be had on these issues but the speech we're seeing from the Far Right is well over the line of protected speech. It's now advocating civil war. The consequences of allowing it to continue should be obvious to any reasonable person after the assault on the US Capitol on Jan 6. That was just the beginning.
But this isn't the same as ISIS recruiting off of Twitter where the FBI/CIA/NSA monitors that discourse and contacts the respective platforms. This is a company deciding what should and shouldn't be censored.

There's a difference between protected speech and yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater. But with the way things are moving, more and more speech is being classified as "hate speech." The line between offensive speech and violent words is getting more murky. I think there needs to be clear standards and clear enforcement.
There seems to be a common misconception around free speech: that it is limitless. It isn't.

"As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building)."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible...
Thank you. It does seem like Amazon requires professional moderation when someone's service is used to incite violence.

I wonder if this is in part due to concerns about revising section 230.
Research has been happening for years. Little new has been discovered, not even leads.
The Proud Boys might be an interesting case study. Creator Gavin McInnes along with the group was de-platformed a couple years ago. I remember them at the time seeming like a dangerous group of hipsters, nerds and meatheads.

Today they appear to be a bunch of navy seal white power dudes with guns. Scary. That culture kept growing outside of the spotlight in a creepy dark corner.
A signal conversation is not a public platform. It's the difference between sending a letter and sending a newsletter.
The reference image on the sight was 18kb AVIF vs 79kb JPEG at (as far as I could tell on my phone) identical perceptual quality.
Freedom of speech basically always has two sides to it. If you would prevent Twitter from suspending Trump's account, then you're forcing Twitter to be a platform for the president; you're literally requiring it to broadcast the government's message.

You're not protecting freedom of speech in itself when you damage one party's to protect another's.
I belive you mean Bostock v Clayton Co, which was decided this summer and extended Title VII protections to LBGT individuals. Obergefell extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.
I'm not sure about that, but the maintainers are very active and receptive so maybe make an issue? Better yet a PR.
I think your point is legit. I don't have an account because I didn't want to find a burner phone.

One of the things I do is pay a lot of attention to the rhetoric of people on the US right... I've been trying to understand what all is being said and why, and my general understanding is that there are a lot of folks with legit grievances filtering them through highly, uh, metaphorical understandings of reality.

A lot of what I see in other media taken from Parler is out-and-out falsehoods about the world. And I have seen quite a lot of content in the various right-wing FB groups I have been in... enough that I don't feel like I have no gauge for what the discourse there looks like.

You're correct that they aren't directly "planning political violence".

However, it is a system where there are unchallenged and wholly fictitious views of the world being spread as if they were the patent truth. That's legal, but it's the epistemic equivalent of smoking meth and if I were a tech company interested in the continued function of the US I'd do everything in my power to stop that process.
Rhethoric in Germany is already pointing at various WhatsApp and Telegram groups filled with people discussing unsavory topics. Protocols have been published and the groups are not really that private anymore as soon as you no longer know and trust everyone in them. So as soon as the first Signal groups with Nazi policemen shows up, there will be pressure to somehow get rid of those groups...
6 million? No way the number is that high.
No, it objectively is not free speech! Threats and incitement aren't protected speech (Brandenburg et al.) and Parler's refusing to do anything about it; AWS cited 98 instances that they themselves provided Parler that weren't attended to.

Got anything else?
Ah yes, Voldemort.. What an interesting time to be alive =P
I think the problem is scaling moderation. Even Facebook and Twitter haven’t solved that problem.
Pretty much anyone with any intelligence can determine this, in particular, is harmful to society. This situation isn't just "someone bad saying nice things" and to suggest that is completely disingenuous.
Any chance you can share more (post, github, etc)?
> Nazis and fascists do not want a free and fair society

The same can be said for the radical left.
Agreed. Though I'd point out this it's an incredibly long time to leave the infrastructure in place when there is active planning of further violence taking place on the platform.
The only people who care deeply about suppressing TPB is a small cadre of copyright lobbyists who need to arse judges throughout the world to do their bidding every once in a while to show that they're tough on copyright crime. As far as enforcement priorities go it's a minor annoyance at best for both the justice system as well as the telcos and ISPs who get forced to block them.
Yawn.. robots are boring.

Edit: Look. Robots are not boring. Ok.

But the fact of the matter, is that they just don’t excite us the same way as sending a human to explore it ourselves.
> Every place has the right to self determination, but secessionists tend to be treated as criminals.

The HK democracy activists are protesting in support of self determination. Those arrested are not "secessionists", and as far as I know, Hong Kong has not left the PRC, so your comparison doesn't really make any sense.
I owe you an apology. I was sure I had posted the article referencing his conclusions video, but I did not, and I ended up wasting your time and compounding my error with an unfounded accusation. That was pretty egregious and rude, and I'm sorry about that.

If you're still inclined, here's his conclusion video. The summary includes links to various sections within the admittedly lengthy video, if it helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA
There’s nothing wrong with enabling a platform which is overtly political. If I want to start a libertarian-only dating site...why not?

There is everything wrong with enabling a platform which actively supports violence.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

Among others, DevinNunesCow was banned. Lots of liberals and leftists joined. Lots of them got banned without any reason. Hell, a number of journalists were also banned for...unclear reasons.

That's a bad look for an app that claims to support free speech and claims that the solution to speech one doesn't like is simply to counter it. I have no problems with a platform moderating content. But I do find the hypocrisy amusing.

> Have you even used Parler?

Why would this be relevant to my ability to know who or what the platforms moderation policies were?
> For those who support Trump, "deplatforming" is a major concern, as Trump has now lost access to essentially all of his base via social media.

There are also a lot of people who are concerned about the dangerous precedent being set, regardless of whether they support this individual or not.
Yes, they get to be, that’s what terms of service are.
Yes, and I think that's one of the first complaints that many think of here, e.g. how many users on Twitter are there that post worse things than Trump, how many thousands of websites does AWS host that are worse than Parler?, and so on.

One might object "Sure, enforcement is not perfect and some bad actors will get by. But at least we are removing some things instead of nothing!", and while they are right about this as a first-order effect, they are missing what happens afterwards: people will, rightfully so, identity that policies are not evenly enforced, and this can have many further effects down the line.
There’s no truer fallacy than slippery slope cause however far you slide, there’s always further if you don’t look up.
Yes they are (arbiter of what action they can take) if you use their platform to call for murdering and lynching people. Did you read the article and see the screenshots AWS sent to Parler?
If you have friends whom you intend sharing this with, be sure to do so before they're exposed to Polanski's 'Death and the Maiden', which may indelibly alter their interpretation. Thankfully he didn't use andantino.
8 million and half are active. Thats what I'm getting on a search anyway.
Did they name people, places, or times? A key factor in free speech legal cases is how credibly threatening something is — someone telling a friend “I’m going to strangle you!” after they get rickrolled is clearly not but someone saying “On <date>, we’re going to <place> to kill <politician>” is enough that the Secret Service might want to talk with you.

Another factor is the climate: nobody is using guillotines anywhere now but mass shootings are sadly common.
Parler just needs to enforce their own policies and this wouldn't be an issue. They wouldn't need to bend their will to anyone's political agenda, just enforce the policies they themselves espouse.
kathy griffen posted a photo of herself with a severed donald trump head. i mean cnn did ask her not to attend a new years Eve party but shouldn't she be deplatformed?

the deplatforming policy is impossible to define and will be enforced arbitrarily. it's going to satisfy no one.
I've just kept going to the gym. If your local gyms are closed, obviously that isn't an option though.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-...

tl;dr a bunch of liberal and leftist people joined Parler back in June when it got popular. They did so intentionally to test how "free-speech" supporting it was and if it would allow people to post left-wing content. They got banned.
I believe in property rights. The service is the property of the shareholders. They should be able to do what they want with their property so long as it isn’t breaking a law.

This is why I can’t understand some conservatives having an issue with this. It is principled to anyone who believes in the private ownership of property that they can ban whoever they want.

I also believe internet companies shouldn’t have special privileges. They should be responsible for anything illegal on their property they could reasonably be believed to know about. Especially so if the content is user generated and made public. Crowdsourcing should be a liability.
Some people may follow through with that, or they may not.

The media tells stories, social media tells stories, our friends and family tell stories, and our own mind tells stories. But they are just stories. Some of them will surely come true, some of them will not.

It feels like you know, just as it feels to the people at this riot like they know - it is the very same underlying phenomenon: human consciousness, with its ability to see into the future, to read the minds of millions of people, to know the fine details of what happened at an event even though no one who was actually there may have witnessed it with clarity. It is the most powerful device on the planet, but if it isn't kept under control: watch out (as we saw at the Capitol).
Do you really expect "credible moderation" given that giving the RWNJ's a home is their stated business plan?

(And no - it isn't free speech, they're quite happy to ban non-conservatives)
>that undermines the fabric of democratic society

This has become our new blasphemy. It's hip to be a Puritan again. It's cool to collectively hate and punish anything which is deemed to "undermine the fabric of society"

Right now it means exactly what you all want it to mean. Wait till all sorts of things you liked to do and think are considered to "undermined the fabric of society", then it'll be too late. Good chance for people to sell some books about the delicacy of societal fabric and which outline all the baddies and ghouls that destroy the fabric of society with their various unorthodox moral / political positions.

EDIT: People will point out that this specific group / incident / thing was objectively bad. Sure, I agree with that. But the precedent being laid down here will go farther than all of you intended. "undermine the fabric of democratic society" is what I highlighted. Lots of reasonable things undermine the fabric of society (especially corrupt / unjust societies) but should still be allowed. Perhaps this was a poor choice of words, but when talking about what should be censored and what shouldn't be, words matter.
When you make it harder, or at least less convenient, for that someone, somewhere, to plot something, you're taking concrete steps to improve public safety and deter crime.

Just because plots will occur is not a reason to avoid making it harder for them to succeed.
That can be very convenient if you want to silence opposition. Just use an “incitement” clause indiscriminately for the entire conservative platform.

There’s lots of incitement of violence on Twitter but no one cancels/de-platforms Twitter.
Yes, thank you. I edited my post.
I'm not saying that there isn't violent content there. I'm sure there is, but there is also violent content on reddit, tik tok, twitter, facebook, and every other social media site that has ever existed.

My point is just: it seems like people are claiming that parler exists only for this content, or that they're somehow encouraging it or something. But I'm just curious how people came to this conclusion if none of us even have accounts there. I have seen some interviews with staff members there and they just seem like normal business-type people.
I've done calisthenics for a lot of my life, I'm lean and strong (6'1" 160lbs). 50lbs is a lot and would be a serious gain even with weights unless you're really thin. I would focus more on ability, can you do 10 pull ups? Can you do 10 sets of 10 pull ups in a day? Can you do 50 body weight squats? Can you do 20 sets of 50 body weight squats in a day? Get those numbers up rather than having a weight goal.
'The line between offensive speech and violent words is getting more murky.'

So do you think Amazon is falling on the wrong side of it here? Because even if it's more murky, if they're waiting until it's -very clearly violent-, egregiously so, with real physical criminal acts occurring because of it, I'm pretty sure no matter how murky the line is, they're well on the side of "violent words", not "offensive speech".

Your concern only applies if they're trying to draw the line in an area that is murky. I'd contend this is not.
Sure that's possible, but what if their domain registrar disables their domain name? What if Verizon limits web traffic to and from the website? The idea that that could happen used to be far fetched, but now I wouldn't be surprised.
Or they simply fizzle out as their obscurity undermines recruitment. We’ll see.
What a time for news. It was only two hours ago when I wrote: "I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?)" when Apple removed the app, following Google Play from yesterday.

It would seem this cycle is certainly not done perpetuating itself as of yet. I think we are going to have some rough times ahead of us unfortunately. I have no interest in this app or those on it, but they are probably going to get much more upset and feel much more persecuted.
AWS has the right to decide with whom they would like to do business. Parler is free to migrate to a competitor.
Do you have a response to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA
Lets consider this possibility: if there was systemic voter fraud [1] then this is again another action done to supress the information and prevent from more people learning about the possible voter fraud. Not only are social media platforms supressing voices, there is also the media which has the option to decide what to cover and what not to. These are the primary ways people stay informed.

Note: not an American.

[1]: https://hereistheevidence.com/
If you’re going to be a hardcore free speech site you should be on a hardcore free speech hosting service like prq.se. Anything else is just asking for hassle with Hosters refusing to host the crap.
> It will be far easier to get laws changed than to develop a whole new phone.

Disagree, as substitutes presently exist in the form of Android models, which can be sideloaded.
I've looked at Parler - while I don't find the content at all compelling, it doesn't seem any more dangerous than Twitter. Have we forgotten the truly odious content that was freely available on Twitter during last summer's riots?
I thin that this misses the point. The fringes and conspiracy theorists grow by catching new people from the mainstream. If you segregate the extremists from the center, you can starve the extremists.
Even old operating systems like Windows NT4 could easily memory map a window into a file as large as 256 MB at a time, and could map multiple segments concurrently. It could do this even if there was much less physical memory available, because this is a virtual memory mapping only.

Well-written code would start with a sliding window of some reasonable size such as 64 MB, and if that failed would try halving it repeatedly down to some lower threshold.

Unfortunately, the 64-bit era has lead to a "pit of failure" where many programmers incorrectly assume that this means that 2⁶⁴ bytes can be mapped reliably in a single call. This is never true, because of all sorts of operating system and hardware limitations.

I've seen "modern" code written with this assumption, such as a Rust library and a couple of C# libraries. They fail on older Xeons, some hypervisors, and 32-bit platforms.

Even in 2021 server applications run as 32-bit surprisingly often. For example, Azure's App Service defaults to 32-bit on the low-end tiers to save memory.
Time to split up AWS into multiple competing providers.
If you have family members who use the site, you have family members who are fascists. I'd recommend cutting ties before that catches up with you.
How does one decide what is imminent violence?

Who decides it?
The thing is, a whole lot of people who stood behind the Nazi party and enabled the evil were decent folks. Do you think Germany was just full of evildoers in the 30's?

That's one of the scary things about fascism and authoritarianism. It can coopt decent people into enabling the suppression of their fellow man.
It’s the neoliberal center that controls the big tech companies, not the left. The left is scrappy neighborhood groups of activists that run soup kitchens and lie down in front of oil pipelines and collect signatures for ballot referendums. They gather in coffee shop bookstores to have book clubs on malatesta. They’re flat broke and half of them are homeless and based on what I’m hearing they’re pretty much convinced that they’re next on the censorship list. I mean you can’t really look at those kids and Jeff Bezos and say, hmm, looks the same to me.