Why?
What you're talking about isn't freedom of speech. It's some newfangled "right to social media" bit of nonsense. You don't even try and justify it, you just try and pretend that it's somehow related to freedom of speech.
And it's not.
The right to free speech means the government can't censor you.
It does not and has never meant that other private citizens can't tell you to fuck off.
The first amendment only restricts government actions. Expanding the first amendment would require a constitutional amendment which needs two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures, which isn't going to happen.
The best you could hope for is a law that does something, which you can't really define. What would this law even look like? Would there be a government penalty if Twitter bans someone?
Look, the GOP want to remove Section 230 so that publishers are held accountable for the content that users post, but they also want users to be able to post whatever they want through these publishers.
If it hasn't already been discussed...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7...s-embarrassing
Very delightful read of the founder of Pirate Bay dunking on Parler and the lot supporting it for being a bunch of dishonest, inept clowns.Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler’s Inability to Stay Online Is ‘Embarrassing’
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi calls Parler’s face plant in the wake of its deplatforming 'embarrassing,' driven by 'egotism.'
As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully.
Kolmisoppi took to Twitter this week to share some thoughts on Parler’s recent deplatforming for failing to seriously police death threats and illegal content before and after the fatal Capitol riots.
“The Pirate Bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost two decades,” Kolmisoppi said. “Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing.”
Parler, part of a growing echosphere for rightwing conspiracy theories, is primarily financed by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. But the company’s deep pockets haven’t been able to assuage the concerns of companies unwilling to do business with a toxic enabler of hate speech in the wake of last week’s violent riot.
While Parler has found a new provider in the far-right enablers over at Epik, the service isn’t expected to get back online anytime soon, in large part because, according to CEO John Matze, companies with enough firepower to host the platform don’t want to be associated with bigotry.
Platforming white supremacy and hate speech is a tougher proposition than serving users pirated copies of the Prince discography. But Kolmisoppi was quick to laugh at the fact that despite being backed by billionaires and parts of the US government, Parler didn’t seem remotely prepared for the justified firestorm it found itself at the center of.
“The most ironic thing is that The Pirate Bay’s enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one,” he said. “Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too.”
Over the years, Kolmisoppi and The Pirate Bay crew explored no limit of strategies to keep its servers operational and out of the reach of law enforcement and the entertainment industry, even when that meant hiding them in caves and submarines, or even using low-orbit drones to redirect users to hidden regional servers hosting torrent indexes and trackers.
The organizations shift to magnet links in 2012 helped make it more difficult to take offline. And despite numerous trials, fines, multi-country IP address blockades, police raids, and even a stretch in prison, the website he originally co-founded on a shoestring budget remains more or less operational.
In contrast, Parler lost its primary cloud service provider and simply disappeared, seemingly incapable of any adaptation. Meanwhile, thanks to sloppy coding and substandard security standards, researchers are hard at work scraping publicly-available Parler data to help identify platform users who thought it might be fun to flirt with violent sedition on live television.
“In all honesty, the reason we did The Pirate Bay was to bring freedom and take back control from a centralised system,” Kolmisoppi said. “The reason that Gab et al will fail is because they're just whining bitches that have only one ideology: egotism. Sharing is caring y'all.”
In more recent years, Kolmoisoppi has moved on to fund Njalla, a privacy-centric domain name registration service. One he says was already asked to host Parler, and refused.
“Of course we wouldn't,” Kolmisoppi said. “We're pro human rights, which includes the right to not be killed by extreme right wing terrorists.”
And he makes some good points. This isn't some "Free speech" nonsense. Parler is first and foremost a business. They care about money above all. Not "Freeze Peach".
HAs anyone really wondered why Trump is pushing the 230 repeal so hard? He's too dumb to understand what it does at all. He's too dumb to understand the fallout from the repeal.
Who benefits from such a huge market disruption? Who would be ready to have alternative sites and infrastructure to fill the void?
Government Affiliated Snark
It should be embarrassing for anyone making these arguments... children can do this... I am not kidding... children... but, parlor can’t? Idiots... or better yet... they know they can get more support from Trump supporters by lying, than actually doing their jobs.
You can be the most inapt idiot on the planet, but if you get on the conservative MAGA phone... your inaptitude is just you fighting for freedom... wtf? Why do any work, when you can just go on Fox, BrietBart, Newsmax, OANN, NY Post or what ever other conservative media exists, and just get rich by bitching about the left, keeping your hard work down. Easiest tact in the world... play golf all day and just have your minions fight for you and send you money... talk about me making the wrong career choice... I should have studied to be a conservative victim for a career...
Last edited by Felya; 2021-01-14 at 05:30 PM.
Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
Every damn thing you do in this life, you pay for. - Edith Piaf
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - Orwell
No amount of belief makes something a fact. - James Randi
Parler problems extend well beyond Amazon, Apple and Google. Scylla, whose database is used by most major companies, refused to work with Parler. Stripe and Amex refused to provide access to their payment platform. Slack and Twillio also refused to provide access.
IMO this is exactly like the saber rattling the GOP does about abortion (note to mods I'm not going to discuss it as a topic!) -- It's used to fire up the base who don't really understand the consequences of change or what the actual stance is...
I can almost promise you 99.999999999999999% of the "repeal 230" crowd has never read it, doesn't know what it is, and couldn't tell you the difference between a platform and a publisher.
The GOP has zero interest in actually taking action because they all know that doing this would result in their deplatforming WAY faster than what actually happened. It's just a dogwhistle talking point to rile up their base.
Yeah that seems to happen when you create a toxic brand. No company wants to risk their business by being associated. This stuff has been happening for years though. White nationalists, terrorists and crime syndicates get dropped and locked out. It's even worse for nations under embargos and sanctions. Citizens of those countries are blocked from participating in the world economy through no fault of their own.
In this case though, it's Parler's CEO to blame for not following the policies they agreed to.
He is correct. Pirate Bay is not a money making venture and it is only used by a very specific group of people. The people that uploaded stuffs to Pirate Bay definitely are not making any money. There are advertisements on Pirate Bay. Mostly from companies that you have never heard of. Last data I have seen indicate that at its peak Pirate Bay revenue was barely over 1 million dollars per year. Probably not even enough to cover their cost of running the enterprise.
Despite all the lofty talk about freedom of speech, Parler is trying to be Twitter lite for the alt-right movement. Twitter is a company with advertising revenue of around 1 billion dollars per quarter.
Yeah, and they're finding out pretty fast that catering to violent white supremacists doesn't really drive much in the way of ad revenue. Because they're not looking for some "freeze peach" mecca like they so often claim, it's still all about the money. There is no loftier or more noble goal for them than greed.
It's why nobody outside of the violent white supremacists cares that much, it's just another in a long list of low-effort grifts for the extreme right.
It is good that they got Pirate Bay founder to speak out against this nonsense. If anyone has been shut down more times then a roach filled restaurant, it is them and yet they keep coming back. Comical part is, they had far more adversarial issues then Parler or Gab has had.
Seriously. Not just a company, but multiple governments and entire industries.
Parler are just a bunch of fuckin snowflakes.
My favorite part was when he said Parler approached him for web hosting and his company told them to fuck off. Freedom of association is a wonderful thing.
Just a comment. Pirate Bay can survive because they are not trying to be profitable. In fact it is a money losing enterprise. The people that run Pirate Bay actually believe that their cause is just.
As Edge said, Parler only pretends to care about free speech. The true motivation behind Parler is "GREED."
Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
Every damn thing you do in this life, you pay for. - Edith Piaf
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - Orwell
No amount of belief makes something a fact. - James Randi