Had social networks not, over the last 10 years, been consistently banning anyone and everyone they could for everything ranging from simply slightly disagreeable speech all the way to flat out illegal speech, you would not have needed a massive analysis of data from one-off sites. The crowd sourcing and eyes on the information of regular people could have predicted it.
By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
By isolating people who moderates consider extreme, on either side, creates divided communities of extremism. This should seem like an obvious outcome.
the crowd sourcing and eyes of regular people could have predicted it anyhow, and many people did in fact do just that simply by reading Parler or 4chan and taking threats seriously. See for example Arieh Kovler, 21 December 2020:
"On January 6, armed Trumpist militias will be rallying in DC, at Trump's orders. It's highly likely that they'll try to storm the Capitol after it certifies Joe Biden's win. I don't think this has sunk in yet.[...]
To be clear here, I don't think the 3%ers, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers or boogaloo types are going to seize the Capitol. But some of them are going try. And people will die."
Don't spin this into some borderline gas-lightning argument about letting more of these people run rampart on platforms, this is a result of not taking far-right extremism seriously. If these people faced the full force of the law and state like ISIS-propagandists do you would not see them try to storm (and succeed) to occupy a federal building.
By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.
You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.
It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.
The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.
The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.
I'm curious: anyone feel they have ever successfully "talked someone down from a ledge" in an online forum in this way? Presumably it must happen but it seems vanishingly rare.
The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.
Worse still. You want to cause trouble? All you need to do is open an account in your enemy's platform and start being a publicly visible asshole under its badge.
I'm not claiming a "bad apples are always planted" conspiracy theory, but it does worry me how easy it is to do so and create a destructive narrative if you really wanted to.
Whereas if you're just trolling in a general platform, most likely outcome is that you'll get called out for it from both sides and that's about it.
> been consistently banning anyone and everyone they could for everything ranging from simply slightly disagreeable speech all the way to flat out illegal speech
This is lie. Social networks were not banning for "simply slightly disagreeable speech".
What twisted rationalization. People will self segregate based on ideologies if given the option unless they are forced together. If anything having all the crazies segregated into one platform makes it easier to spot trouble.
> The crowd sourcing and eyes on the information of regular people could have predicted it.
> By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
What kept 'regular people' from hopping on 8ch and stopping Christchurch by talking him down? Fun fact: The whole thing was well known in advance and even observed online by law enforcement.
Point is, the argument doesn't hold up. Bubble or not, things like these are accessible in every way for almost everyone. The problem is that it's not taken seriously. This has nothing to do with isolation. Simply no one cares, that's what it is. There is just too much of this on the internet at any time. Are you supposed to go after every hate comment? How would that work? It doesn't. It's just too much, even with regularly banning people.
Gallows are a time-honoured protest prop (eg, [0]), one being present isn't really the manifestation of gross negligence that this post wants to make it out to be [1].
This is not a very interesting post. Yeah you could predict that there was going to be a protest from Parler. There would have been people saying "hey, there is a rally on the 6th, lets go there and show our support".
[1] Refering to "Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians ... through gross negligence or willing ignorance. This idea manifested itself in the gallows erected outside the US Capitol on January 6th.
I personally spent many hours on Parler reading the discourse. The Turner Diaries were openly discussed and gave rise to various gallow-related hashtags which proliferated on it.
I don't presume to predict anything as was correctly pointed out. I could not and did not imagine the events that transpired.
No, you don't get to retrospectively pretend you could have predicted something after it happened. No amount of graphs can make up for the fact that he's cherry picked an event that actually happened then went on a fishing expedition.
This comment was about the submitted title, "We could have predicted the events of January 6th from Parler's data". The submitter changed it to "Violent hashtag frequencies in Parler", which is now also the title of the article. I've since changed it to the first sentence, which feels (to me at least) more neutral, and have turned off the flags on the post.
It's unclear exactly what these graphs are showing. The axes are not labeled well - why does "relative" frequency matter? From my reading of this post, all the author is saying is that the rate of those posts went up over time, relative to themselves. But if they're still an exceedingly rare occurrence, that tells a different story. How frequently were they appearing overall? What percentage of all Parler users posted messages calling for violence explicitly? What percentage of all Parler posts did the same? These are the questions that matter more in my opinion.
Until then, this claim seems like a leap:
> It is clear that Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians to spread virally on the platform, either through gross negligence or willing ignorance.
The recent NYT article that appeared on HN (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-p...) mentions examples of posts being moderated and removed. So there is a non-zero amount of moderation happening, apparently? Let's also keep in mind, Parler is a 30-person company. How can they keep up with the deluge of traffic they received? If the answer to censored speech is "go make your own social network" but then people turn around to deplatform a small social network that does not have the funding, monetization, or staffing of a megacorp like Twitter or Facebook, then there is no viable competition for the big players. They not only have the competitive moat of network effects, they also are able to collude with each other to kill any new competition.
And if these companies like Facebook and Twitter face no realistic competition, we should recognize that they are simply public utilities operating the digital public town square on the public's behalf. As such, they must be held to a higher standard and required to carry all speech that isn't illegal.
Thank you for this valuable feedback. I have added a disclaimer as I believe I have not answered the questions you listed well enough, and I need to ensure whatever statements I make can be reproduced by others.
The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language.
Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way.
Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.
Also, kudos to this author for not logging personal information:
> there is panic among the ex-Parler community that all their data, even private/deleted posts, have been scraped and archived — it has, just not by me. Furthermore, Parler did not follow industry standards in obfuscating EXIF metadata from uploaded images, so millions of users had their exact location logged.
However, I am stunned that Twitter still has not taken down the tweets from @donk_enby, the person whom this post mentions with the location logging (example: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128). This account has been sharing datasets with the private information of all those Parley users widely and archiving it all over the place. Isn't this textbook irresponsible disclosure of personal information? Doesn't this violate all the rules of Twitter for doxxing? I've submitted several reports at https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information but it seems no one at Twitter cares about preventing privacy leaks and doxxing when it concerns their political enemies.
Many people are reconsidering the way we socially network. I propose making each person directly responsible for what the post, and their hosting.... but layered on top of that is a creative commons license so other people can repost, review, comment, markup, etc.
That probably means that either they're focusing on the wrong thing (muslims and lefties? I don't know) or that they actually did predict the events and did nothing for whatever reason.
[+] [-] yeuxardents|5 years ago|reply
Had social networks not, over the last 10 years, been consistently banning anyone and everyone they could for everything ranging from simply slightly disagreeable speech all the way to flat out illegal speech, you would not have needed a massive analysis of data from one-off sites. The crowd sourcing and eyes on the information of regular people could have predicted it.
By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
By isolating people who moderates consider extreme, on either side, creates divided communities of extremism. This should seem like an obvious outcome.
https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
"On January 6, armed Trumpist militias will be rallying in DC, at Trump's orders. It's highly likely that they'll try to storm the Capitol after it certifies Joe Biden's win. I don't think this has sunk in yet.[...] To be clear here, I don't think the 3%ers, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers or boogaloo types are going to seize the Capitol. But some of them are going try. And people will die."
https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1341016471795843080?s...
Don't spin this into some borderline gas-lightning argument about letting more of these people run rampart on platforms, this is a result of not taking far-right extremism seriously. If these people faced the full force of the law and state like ISIS-propagandists do you would not see them try to storm (and succeed) to occupy a federal building.
[+] [-] KozmoNau7|5 years ago|reply
By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.
You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.
It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.
The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.
The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.
[+] [-] me_again|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formalsystems|5 years ago|reply
The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.
[+] [-] tpoacher|5 years ago|reply
I'm not claiming a "bad apples are always planted" conspiracy theory, but it does worry me how easy it is to do so and create a destructive narrative if you really wanted to.
Whereas if you're just trolling in a general platform, most likely outcome is that you'll get called out for it from both sides and that's about it.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ashneo76|5 years ago|reply
BLM protestors didn't show up with a guillotine
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
This is lie. Social networks were not banning for "simply slightly disagreeable speech".
[+] [-] trianglem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numlock86|5 years ago|reply
> By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
What kept 'regular people' from hopping on 8ch and stopping Christchurch by talking him down? Fun fact: The whole thing was well known in advance and even observed online by law enforcement.
Point is, the argument doesn't hold up. Bubble or not, things like these are accessible in every way for almost everyone. The problem is that it's not taken seriously. This has nothing to do with isolation. Simply no one cares, that's what it is. There is just too much of this on the internet at any time. Are you supposed to go after every hate comment? How would that work? It doesn't. It's just too much, even with regularly banning people.
[+] [-] roenxi|5 years ago|reply
This is not a very interesting post. Yeah you could predict that there was going to be a protest from Parler. There would have been people saying "hey, there is a rally on the 6th, lets go there and show our support".
[0] https://www.victoriabuzz.com/2019/11/climate-activists-plan-...
[1] Refering to "Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians ... through gross negligence or willing ignorance. This idea manifested itself in the gallows erected outside the US Capitol on January 6th.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|5 years ago|reply
Showing someone a guillotine or a gallows or making threats to use deadly violence as part of a political protest is just plain wrong.
[+] [-] formalsystems|5 years ago|reply
I don't presume to predict anything as was correctly pointed out. I could not and did not imagine the events that transpired.
[+] [-] _delibash_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|5 years ago|reply
‘OFF WITH HIS HEAD’ Black Lives Matter protesters put Trump effigy in a GUILLOTINE outside White House
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1384275/protesters-trump-effigy...
Both sides do it. Both sides fein outrage and disgust at the other side doing it.
[+] [-] exporectomy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
Until then, this claim seems like a leap:
> It is clear that Parler allowed the idea of attacking and hanging politicians to spread virally on the platform, either through gross negligence or willing ignorance.
The recent NYT article that appeared on HN (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-p...) mentions examples of posts being moderated and removed. So there is a non-zero amount of moderation happening, apparently? Let's also keep in mind, Parler is a 30-person company. How can they keep up with the deluge of traffic they received? If the answer to censored speech is "go make your own social network" but then people turn around to deplatform a small social network that does not have the funding, monetization, or staffing of a megacorp like Twitter or Facebook, then there is no viable competition for the big players. They not only have the competitive moat of network effects, they also are able to collude with each other to kill any new competition.
And if these companies like Facebook and Twitter face no realistic competition, we should recognize that they are simply public utilities operating the digital public town square on the public's behalf. As such, they must be held to a higher standard and required to carry all speech that isn't illegal.
[+] [-] formalsystems|5 years ago|reply
The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language.
Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way.
Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
> there is panic among the ex-Parler community that all their data, even private/deleted posts, have been scraped and archived — it has, just not by me. Furthermore, Parler did not follow industry standards in obfuscating EXIF metadata from uploaded images, so millions of users had their exact location logged.
However, I am stunned that Twitter still has not taken down the tweets from @donk_enby, the person whom this post mentions with the location logging (example: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348294151712944128). This account has been sharing datasets with the private information of all those Parley users widely and archiving it all over the place. Isn't this textbook irresponsible disclosure of personal information? Doesn't this violate all the rules of Twitter for doxxing? I've submitted several reports at https://help.twitter.com/forms/private_information but it seems no one at Twitter cares about preventing privacy leaks and doxxing when it concerns their political enemies.
[+] [-] mikewarot|5 years ago|reply
We need to take back the web.
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AntiImperialist|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] monoclechris|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _hudj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tsjq|5 years ago|reply
it is a shame , with so much of surveillance and the tax money gone into it, and yet this wasn't prevented.
[+] [-] diragon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortilla|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]