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The Internet Social Networks

Parler CEO Brings Back Website, Promises Service Will Follow 'Soon' (arstechnica.com) 148

Posted by BeauHD from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
Right-wing social media platform Parler, which has been offline since Amazon Web Services dropped it like a hot potato last week, has reappeared on the Web with a promise to return as a fully functional service "soon." Ars Technica reports: Although the platform's Android and iOS apps are still defunct, this weekend its URL once again began to resolve to an actual website, instead of an error notice. The site at the moment consists solely of the homepage, which has a message from company CEO John Matze. "Now seems like the right time to remind you all -- both lovers and haters -- why we started this platform," the message reads. "We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. Our aim has always been to provide a nonpartisan public square where individuals can enjoy and exercise their rights to both. We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome all of you back soon. We will not let civil discourse perish!"

Parler, however, was deplatformed in the first place explicitly because the content it allowed to flourish was anything but "civil," and as multiple reports have made clear, the service backend was designed with basically no thought given to privacy. Meanwhile, the path Parler appears to be taking to rejoin the Internet is a shady one paved for it by other explicitly extremist, white nationalist platforms that lost access to more mainstream services after being tied to terrorism. [...] Parler has apparently secured hosting from Epik to bring itself back online. Epik is best known for helping far-right extremist platform Gab to come back online a short time after a Gab user committed a mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; it has also provided services to other white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi platforms including 8chan (now known as 8kun) and The Daily Stormer. Multiple security researchers have also pointed out that Parler appears to have secured the services of DDos-Guard, a cloud services company based in Russia. UPDATE: According to Krebs On Security, "DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients -- including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler."
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Parler CEO Brings Back Website, Promises Service Will Follow 'Soon' More

Parler CEO Brings Back Website, Promises Service Will Follow 'Soon'

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  • We value privacy (Score:5, Funny)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @06:45PM (#60961808) Homepage Journal

    Which is why we allowed all your data to be scraped and didn't bother stripping metadata from photos and videos you posted. Good luck at your trial though, don't forget to post on Parler about it.

  • Gab has already eaten deep into much of Parler's user base. It's also a way more professional operation that has open sourced much of its code so it can be shared and scrutinized by the users.

    • Parler was important as a middle ground. [youtube.com] The trouble with Gab is the same trouble the chans have. If a normie stumbles into there they're liable to make a hard swing left as they freak out over the types of people they'd be associating with.

      • Parler was very fast growing so it was sure to attract a broad user base.
        I know indeed about cases of people who aren't particularly right wing , often more left wing, and who made a Gab account and found what they saw there pretty troublesome. So the accounts are dormant until the pressure on Twitter becomes too high.

        Most domestic censorship on social media is still of the type where visibility is reduced but if you know exactly what you are looking for it still exists. So you get caps on the amount of fol

    • Gab seems more robust and better (technically, not evaluating the userbase.) But they've been around for years longer than Parler and failed to get any foothold. Parler got the Trumpist endorsement it seems. Gab tried to duplicate it by recreating Trump's twitter feed, but I don't think it worked.

    • I disagree. This whole mess about Parler was a great commercial. Parler has a real chance to bit deeply into the Twitter's users base. Gab is more like Facebook, less like Twitter. I wish Parler all the best.
  • I wonder how much stories like this help find and expand the user base of Parler and friends ?
  • I looked up the word "nonpartisan" which states > not biased or partisan, especially towards any particular political group And "partisan": "a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person." But for the life of me I can't work out what a "nonpartisan social media" even means?

  • Epik rules? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Likely platformed at Epik, or one of its various "bulletproof hosting" subsidiaries. Rob Monster (Epik CEO) is well known for support and hosting such platforms, including, allegedly, gab.com on one of the subsidiaries.

  • Does "Material Support for Terrorism" come in? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @06:54PM (#60961860) Homepage

    You'd think that anything involving just the transfer of information was all First-Amendment protected, but I've been reading today about the various cases around "Material Support for Terrorism".

    2009 : Javed Iqbal, Staten Island cable-package salesman, is sent up for six years, of a possible 15 year sentence, because he'd never committed a crime before. He set up several people with cable packages that included some channel owned by Hezbollah. So of their $5/month, maybe $1/month went back to Hezbollah in profits. Jailed. OK, that one handed them actual money.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2009/0... [nytimes.com]

    2010: Holder vs Humanitarian Law, the SCOTUS upholds conviction of people running training courses for Tamil Tigers, on how to have more-peaceful resolutions. But it's a training course, an in-kind contribution of expertise and advice, so it's "material support for terrorism".

    Social media sites provide a clear value, for free, that you'd otherwise have to pay for. And certainly Mr. Iqbal's experience shows that the amount of money is not relevant.

    Also, any software performs "services" for people, is embedded, codified expertise and help.

    I'm not suggesting such legal charges; what I am noting is that there's a "Breakfast with Hezbollah" Twitter account, that seems to be able to promote them with impunity. What's the deal, here, did all Social Media just get a pass on Material Support for Terrorism chilling-effect way back when they started?

  • Does this mean (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @06:54PM (#60961862)

    Parler will stop banning people [newsweek.com] who troll the white supremacists? Will they change their TOS to not ban people even if they follow the rules [dailydot.com]? Will they leave up all the death threats [go.com] against elected officials [thehill.com]?

    • No Joke, their CEO got death threats (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @07:32PM (#60961974)
      apparently from angry users who were mad the app stopped working. Being a "True Patriot" he went on Fox News to decry the left for it, neglecting to mention that given that the threats came from his own users it's very likely it was from somebody on the right wing.

      • No Joke, their CEO got death threats apparently from angry users who were mad the app stopped working. Being a "True Patriot" he went on Fox News to decry the left for it, neglecting to mention that given that the threats came from his own users it's very likely it was from somebody on the right wing.

        If Democrats had all the desires and powers the idiot right wing ascribes to them, the entire galaxy would be a peaceful, prosperous, perfectly fair communist utopia full of rainbows and bunnies and rainbow-colored bunnies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      "It was their platform and they can do whatever they like"

      Isn't that the rationale that supported Apple and Google kicking Parler off their app store, and Amazon kicking them out of AWS? Wasn't Parler told to "roll their own" platform?

      Now that Parler rolled their own, why is it a problem if Parler did the same thing as Apple, Google and Amazon did and kick whoever out?

      Could people at least be *consistent* with their complains?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mvdwege ( 243851 )

        We are completely consistent. Parler didn't build their own platform. They glued together third-party platforms. Badly. And violated their TOS.

    • So you never saw a death threat (veiled or blatant) made against Trump or some other Republican official or voter? I know I have yet no one de-platformed Democratic Underground or Raw Story.
  • Take your time, don't hurry on account of us. Take as many years as you need.

  • Stop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Forty Two Tenfold ( 1134125 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @07:18PM (#60961934)
    Stop making stupid people famous.

  • I am all for people with different political views having their own platform to say what they like. If it crosses a line then it can be dealt with on a case by case basis like we do with all legal matters. Otherwise let people babble away about whatever nonsense they like. Just don't expect services companies to be supportive when things get messy. No one owes these chumps anything outside of what the contract says.

  • Didnâ(TM)t Richard Stallman famously say âoeFree speech isnâ(TM)t freeâ :-)

  • ... Parler, which has been offline since Amazon Web Services dropped it like a hot potato last week, ...

    Shouldn't that be, "patate chaude" ?

  • Seeing as how most of the organizing for the capital riots were done on FB and Twitter, how come they haven't adhered to their own standards and taken themselves offline as well?

  • So once Parler is back up the NSA can, legally, monitor everything that goes on there and share it with other interested parties. Nice.

  • Unreasonable framing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sentiblue ( 3535839 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @09:06AM (#60963660)

    short time after a Gab user committed a mass murder

    This is an extremely prejudice statement by whoever that wrote it. The mass murderer should no doubt be handed the most severe sentence for his crime. I pray he fries in jail. But putting Gab together with his crime is straight up unbiased. Yeah he used Gab all right, but he also used email, phone, car, etc... why did other providers not listed in conjunction with his name? Why only Gab? Because Gab is seen as an enemy? This is pathetic journalism!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DeVilla ( 4563 )
      I took it to mean that Gab got de-platformed elsewhere on the basis of the act of a user. My question is how many of the other social networks have had a user that killed someone? Perhaps we just need to apply that rule fairly and shut down more social networks?

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