Dropbox just announced that it’s laying off 11% of its workforce (315 people). Sad news for those affected.

I still don’t understand why the smallest amount of storage they offer is 2 TBs of space at $119.88 per year.

…I don’t know about this.

I mean, considering we’ll be wearing masks for a while still (right??? please wear your masks), I definitely appreciate any attempts at making them better. I like the idea of having your mouth be visible but illuminated tho? Also, I thought there was kind of an unspoken agreement that relying on people to replace filters on masks like these is not a good idea.

It sounds like it’s still very early in the concept phase, so I guess they have time to figure things out but… I’m not really expecting this to go anywhere.

I want to write about Parler.

Background

Parler¹: was that micro-blogging social network and app that marketed itself as an alternative to Twitter. Parler emphasized “free speech”, and presented itself as a place to avoid Twitter and Facebook’s unfair moderation policies.

The creators/owners² of the service believe that Twitter and Facebook (and the entire media really) are controlled by people who are particularly unconcerned with “free speech”, and are quick to silence or ban anyone on the other side from their services. I’ve seen a few influential³ people on Twitter equating this to a (US Constitution) 1st Amendment issue, of which it obviously is not.

So Parler implied that they care about “free speech” and are therefore a good alternative to these services that are trying to silence them. Predictably, the service attracted lots of people who regularly get banned from other web services and communities. This includes lots of conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump supporters, “conservatives”, right-wing extremists, white supremacists, and people who would decide it’s a good idea to storm the US Capitol building (there is obviously a lot of overlap between the these groups).

Of course, it turns out that services that market themselves as free speech alternatives usually end up heavily moderating and banning users who have the opposite political beliefs as them. Parler was no exception, so… 🤷🏾‍♂️

The Fall of Parler

After the insurrection at the US Capitol, and it first started to become obvious that people from Parler were involved, Apple threatened to remove the iOS app from the App Store unless they improved their moderation practices. Then eventually Google removed the Android app from the Google Play store. Then Apple actually removed them too. Then Amazon stopped hosting the service itself.

In the meantime, other institutions (financial and otherwise) have completely backed away from Parler, Trump, and many of Trump’s supporters⁴.

At this point, the service is down, the apps are banned, and the company has no real way to survive. Trump supporters and free speech activists are upset about how this turned out. It’s unfair that all these people were silenced for their opinions right?

Nope.

The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution

First of all, the 1st Amendment prevents the Government from being able to abridge freedom of speech. This has nothing to do with individual companies (private or “public”) like Twitter or Facebook. This may be a general “free speech” issue, but there are no violations of the Constitution happening when a company decides what’s allowed or not allowed to be published on their platform.

Now if you’re talking about the US Government pushing for or creating a law that says a company (like Twitter) must publish the current Administrations views, that would definitely be a 1st Amendment violation.

Refresher:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Free Speech

So this isn’t a 1st Amendment issue, but there is a general “free speech” discussion here right? Especially in the context of online communities, politics, and social networks. Clearly a bunch of institutions all deciding to leave a company pathetically twisting in the wind like this over “politics” must be… bad?

Not really no.

Contrary to what I keep seeing elsewhere on the internet, I do not think that an organization (including social networking or micro-blogging service companies) should have any expectation to use the platform they built to host any content anyone wants them to in the name of free speech. Nor do I think their moderation policies are even required to be fair. We choose to use social networking services, and sign agreements (lol) that state how we’re supposed to use them. There is no expectation of “free speech” in that, and there shouldn’t be⁵.

I think people getting upset with Twitter’s policies and then leaving it to start their own service is fine. That’s a good thing. I actually think that people being able to use technology to form smaller, more community based services is much better than everyone trying to sloppily integrate into a giant platform that’s powered by pure capitalism and advertising revenue.

But you can’t then promise “free speech” on your new service and be surprised when you get fucked over after your users attempt to murder people and overthrow a government and nobody wants to do business with you anymore.

The Tech Monopoly

I’ve heard a few people say that it’s scary that it was a “monopoly” that was able to crush Parler into nothing but a pile of useless code and fresh evidence for the FBI. But it wasn’t a monopoly that did it. It’s not like executives from Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook sat in a room and made the decision that because of their combined market position, making a coordinated move like this would be profitable for them all⁶. A bunch of organizations just decided that associating with Parler is bad (morally, politically, financially, legally, etc) and made the business decisions that made sense in this situation.

Which is to not associate with the platform that inspired people to murder a US Capitol police officer.

Aftermath

As it turns out, not thinking through the implications of aiding insurrectionists wasn’t the only mistake Parler made. I’m looking for more of the technical details, but someone going by @donk_enby on Twitter was able to scrape 57 TB worth of data (images and video with EXIF data, private DMs, deleted posts that were never actually deleted⁷, etc). It sounds like it just happened to be very easy to guess object IDs in their database and start pulling data once their two-factor authentication system went down.

Now with the massive amount of evidence that’s floating around on the internet (including the insurrectionists own recorded and uploaded footage), now these people are being picked up by the Feds left and right. Well… you know. I guess that’s what happens.

From Emmanuel Felton of Buzzfeed News:

“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” said the officer, who has been with the department for more than a decade. “They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs … They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military,” the veteran said, referring to two suspected pipe bombs that were found outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.

Twitter has banned Donald Trump’s account. It sounds like he joined Parler¹ earlier today.

Both Apple and Google are both either considering or have already removed Parler from their stores.

Edit: It will be interesting to see what happens with all the older articles that have linked directly to his tweets. From The Verge: Trump’s ban from Twitter creates the ultimate case of link rot in posts across the internet