Yay! Trump Banned From Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[danielravennest]

They keep calling it a "freedom of speech" issue, but its not. The First Amendment protects people from *government* censorship. This is a business matter. Private businesses like Amazon are free stop doing business with customers they don't like, so long as their reason isn't discrimination based on protected classes under the Civil Rights Act. Certainly a social network whose members are fomenting violence, and the operator is doing little to nothing to stop it is worthy of getting the boot. That's especially true when you violate the "Acceptable Use Policy" you agreed to (activities harmful to others).

[Raises a glass of MAGA tears]

 

[danielravennest]

Gab is the only social media I have ever deleted an account on. I signed up super early on because at the time, I did a lot of that just to get in with a good username at the start. Then I forgot about it. When it became the hell hole it is, I made a point of logging in solely to delete my account.

The only social networks I use are Reddit and NextDoor. On Reddit I limit myself to three subreddits (space, science, and technology) that I'm interested in and have reasonable people making comments. NextDoor is people who live within ~5 miles of me i.e. neighbors. Useful for keeping up with local activities and events.

 

[danielravennest]

Schwarzenegger rebukes Trump and compares Capitol riot to Kristallnacht

Ex-Republican governor of California compares US democracy to sword wielded by Conan the Barbarian in video address

www.theguardian.com

God help the White House (and Mar a Largo) domestic staff, though.

Do NOT piss off the White House kitchen staff. They have knives and might put something in your KFC.

 

[Casey Pelous]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

(You have to click to see the whole image to get what the tweeter is alluding to)

 

[bubblesort]

Oh yeah, you were obviously prepared for something like this, which is why you.... *rereads* ....are "rebuilding from scratch".

This is fascinating to watch. Parler is losing all kinds of infrastructure it relies on. Github, Jira, Twilio, Outlook... Twilio cutting ties basically means their authentication will accept arbitrary characters to log in, which is a big deal on a social network that requires a photo of your drivers license to sign up.

Check out this thread, where they seem to be following the steady breakdown of services that parler relies on.


If we can kind of try to forget that this is about violent terrorists for a moment, just as a thought experiment... and think about how the internet was supposed to be built on resiliency... things aren't that resilient when you use so many outside frameworks and services like this. This is how most web sites are made today, though. Almost nobody writes out all their own hypertext and CSS and back end logic any more. Even bloggers use WordPress, which can use all kinds of dependencies and services. Maybe we should start making our web sites more independent?

Think about it from the perspective of a political dissident in, say, Tibet, or Palestine. If you are singled out to be shut down by the oligarchs, they can not only render your phone as useless as Trump's phone overnight, they can break any web site you build, unless you are careful to build it in isolation, which is very time consuming to do, even if you have the skill to do that. Is this a good thing? Is there another way?

I am not saying I sympathize with terrorists at all! Fuck em. I'd ban parler and all their members from the internet permanently if I could.

I am saying that this is a kind of power we haven't seen exercised like this before, and maybe we should think about what that means more deeply.

 

[bubblesort]

It takes a lot more than a few servers in a room to protect against ddos attacks which is one reason people use outfits like Cloudflare and AWS.

You're right, but it's a day later and they haven't had a serious outage yet. The site has loaded slow, but they haven't gone down, and nothing has broken, even though they are taking on parler refugees, and probably dealing with a lot of DDoS attacks.

I'm not saying they are definitely as robust as AWS and cloudflare. Their blog post about their hardware might be hyperbolic. At the same time, they are robust enough to survive so far, so they have something bigger than the average hobbyist server closet.

 

[Essence Lumin]

You're right, but it's a day later and they haven't had a serious outage yet. The site has loaded slow, but they haven't gone down, and nothing has broken, even though they are taking on parler refugees, and probably dealing with a lot of DDoS attacks.

I'm not saying they are definitely as robust as AWS and cloudflare. Their blog post about their hardware might be hyperbolic. At the same time, they are robust enough to survive so far, so they have something bigger than the average hobbyist server closet.

Time will tell. Certainly if Trump joins them, they and any isps providing them connectivity will be in the spotlight.

 

[Cristiano]

Parler CEO Says Service Dropped By “Every Vendor” And Could End His Business

Parler CEO John Matze said today that his social media company has been dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements with the social medi…

deadline.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

We need a tiny violin Smilie as part of our 2021 preppers package.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

 

[bubblesort]

Parler has finally stopped loading in my browser!

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, has something important the world to tell:

We need more than deplatforming

There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6.

Since then there has been significant focus on the deplatforming of President Donald Trump. By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one, among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that decision-making power theirs alone?

But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.

Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms.

Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken:

• Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
• Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
• Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
• Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.

These are actions the platforms can and should commit to today. The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that.

 

[Chalice Yao]

 

[Isabeau]

Personally, I don’t think private companies should be the ones doing the regulating. Yes it’s ridiculous that the ones who push for letting the market take care of what is acceptable/available are now the ones who angry about it but it should be the government’s job to set laws and regulations, no? Apple and Amazon aren’t small bakeries, yet they have had to make decisions (at the very last second) only because of how extreme the situation became.

 

[Free]

Yes it’s ridiculous that the ones who push for letting the market take care of what is acceptable/available are now the ones who angry about it but it should be the government’s job to set laws and regulations, no?

Yes and no. The problem is we get efforts like Trump's to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would have open up providers to liability over any content published on their services by their users. Many services would probably just shut down rather than involve themselves with the Herculean task of policing, which could possibly even require previewing before allowing the public release of, every single user's postings.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Ka-booooooom holy carp

 

[Casey Pelous]

The magical appearance of no-fly lists the morning after the riot had me scratching my head. How in the world did they do that?

Thanks, Parler! You sure showed those dirty dataminers at Twitter and the other one.

It is almost like the whole thing was a giant honeytrap.