I ran a crawler to collect posts and comments on Parler

https://anonymousdata.medium.com/violent-hashtag-frequencies-in-parler-eddab2871b66

by formalsystems • 6 years ago

81 92 6 years ago

anonymousdata.medium.com

tsjq• 6 years ago

could've + should've + would've = didn't

it is a shame , with so much of surveillance and the tax money gone into it, and yet this wasn't prevented.

diragon• 6 years ago

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.

zepto• 6 years ago

Perhaps the administration had good reasons for not making this a priority.

yeuxardents7• 6 years ago

I fully believe the flip side of this is.

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...

trianglem2• 6 years ago

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.

yeuxardents7• 6 years ago

And yet that did not occur. You have all the crazies on 4chan too, did that enable law enforcement to stop the New Zealand Mosque shooter, who was a regular?

inglor_cz• 6 years ago

People self segregate based on other characteristics, too, say nationality and language. Hence all the China Towns. There are even remnants of Czech communities in places like Texas that still dance polka and bake kolaches. And Czechs abroad generally assimilate fast.

Yet racial diversity at universities and in corporations is highly sought after and supported by all kinds of measures.

Perhaps political diversity should be added into the mix. It would be consistent.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

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."

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.

loraa• 6 years ago

Very similar to the antifa rhetoric that we have seen over the past few years. I am not sure how alt-left is good and alt-right is bad when it seems that rioters are all assholes.

ed25519FUUU2• 6 years ago

Anyone watching the protests of 2020 can predict a protest in 2021.

roenxi3• 6 years ago

Although a short phrase, "armed Trumpist militias" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Even with hindsight, he is still technically wrong. An armed militia is a very different beast from a unarmed but violent right-wing protestor.

roel_v• 6 years ago

People have been saying that sort of stuff daily for as long as I've been online, 25-ish years. Of course someone will say 'but this time it's different', but I chalk this up to a broken clock being right twice a day.

ariehkovler• 6 years ago

Hey that's me!

me_again• 6 years ago

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.

ballenf• 6 years ago

You see it here on HN all the time. An inflammatory post gets scolded/graciously questioned and the person retracts/apologizes/softens. Not every time, but a lot.

But HN might be unique in that regard? Or maybe there's just a scale beyond which it doesn't work?

yeuxardents7• 6 years ago

I do feel so, yes. The internet is not real life. Comments of people you know may lead to real life conversations, and yes, myself and others have come to common ground after being on extreme sides based on internet comments.

kingludite• 6 years ago

I did some cursory examination of the traffic other us presidential electables enjoy and was kind of blown away by how all except the top 2 basically have no traffic at all. The facebook likes and youtube clicks are so low it doesn't account for direct friends and relatives. This means not even the journalists around the world bothered to look at any of them. They had on average 1/3 article written about their electibility usually with the author explaining he didnt know anything about their program. Those who didnt disclaimer it all equally failed to say anything about the program.

There are to many of them for a [private] person to really look at all the programs but that out of many many hundreds of millions (in and outside the us) no one bothered to look at any of them rules out objectivity by the full 100%

It means people get all of their information from other people who also know nothing. Information limited to the top 2 groups. If team blue gets all of its information about team red from other team blue members you will have a similar total exclusion of reality.

End of the day you have to get off the ledge yourself either way based on the information you've gathered.

If we want you to know what anarchy, communism or Christianity are we should have you talk wiht the anarchist, the communist or the christian.

numlock862• 6 years ago

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.

yeuxardents7• 6 years ago

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.

What kept 'regular people' from hopping onto a widely derided and supposedly extremist platform, where threats of exposure of ones personal life simply for being there stopped them from noticing extremism?

Are you sure that is a good argument?

Firstly, almost no average FB or TW user knows of those forums, let alone the ones that do being willing to also 'go there' given all the stigma.

My point still is, if you force these people into places like that, where their plans are easily observable, and 99% of people wont go there then it will fester in silence.

Whereas the other potential is..sunlight. Let them say their statements in the sunlight, rather than ban them.

1. Family or friends will banter them down

2. Friends of friends will bring them to center rather than extreme (on EITHER side)

3. its one place rather than 35 distinct forums for LEO to follow.

watwut• 6 years ago

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".

KozmoNau74• 6 years ago

Sunlight really isn't the best disinfectant.

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.

MrMan• 6 years ago

This is empirically the correct approach

x86_64Ubuntu2• 6 years ago

You said it better than me. All of the Parler-Ban-Survivors-Club posts intentionally neglect that it was their content, rhetoric and real world actions that lead to it being shown the door. And Parler was created because the people that populated it as you mentioned, were impervious to facts but would engage in endless bad faith arguments over and over again.

formalsystems7• 6 years ago

This is valuable insight which anecdotally I agree with completely. Plenty of people got onto Parler from time-to-time and tried to throw in some reason and facts. They were silenced/ignored as quickly as those trying to throw lies/misinformation into Twitter discourse.

I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.

tpoacher• 6 years ago

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.

x86_64Ubuntu2• 6 years ago

No one is going to buy the argument of "bad apples" on Parler. It was designed because the bad apples were getting regulated on your standard platform.

Viliam12342• 6 years ago

Create a new account, post some shit, immediately screenshot it, and share the picture on your real Twitter account. Takes 1 minute of time, and has a chance to be shared by media.

ashneo76• 6 years ago

You're gaslighting. Storming the capitol and threatening the lives of senators isn't the same as protesting to be heard.

BLM protestors didn't show up with a guillotine

yesTheyDid• 6 years ago

They most certainly did though.

This was setup in front of the mayor's house in Portland OR:

https://twitter.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1297421944799686658

—

I am starting to question if people do not realize this activity has been going on for many months in cities across the country.

Why the media kept this relatively quiet (now and previously) is beyond comprehension for most people aware at this point.

The media is divided and therefore, our people are also divided.

If two people can’t agree what/when/if past events occurred, how can anyone discuss, much less agree on the current events?

In other words, perhaps people should consider that any opinions formed re: politics were likely formed from/by the media they consumed.

If we know the media has lately been “one-sided” (yet coming from all sides), perhaps we should be a bit more vigilant to not make assumptions about “another side” if we are unwilling to look at that side - outside the lens of the “great filter”.

IIRC, the great filter is what Elon Musk calls it, at least that’s my understanding of the meaning.

The instant outrage of today - solely based on what the media is presenting - is at the very least - a possible attack vector for outside or even internal forces.

It is my opinion that folks need to better understand this before becoming immediately outraged.

It’s up to a person to determine what side they want to present to others politically, but having an understanding that most people won’t review “all sides” before discussion can help keep “toxicity” in-check upon the inevitable disagreement that will come after posting any political statement.

This is why it’s an attack vector, and why the attack works. It works based on the likelihood that most won’t even look, yet will make assertions as if they did.

formalsystems7• 6 years ago

Thank you for your insight on this.

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.

exporectomy• 6 years ago

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.

dang• 6 years ago

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.

mikewarot2• 6 years ago

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.

We need to take back the web.

ed25519FUUU2• 6 years ago

Take anonymity away from people to give the power back to... people? I don’t see this benefiting anyone other than web trackers.

mikewarot2• 6 years ago

Anonymity is an illusion, and it encourages bad behavior, much like road rage. Arbitrary censorship is the larger issue.

If I do something illegal, it shouldn't take down everyone I ever happened to chat with, or who read or liked something I wrote once... even the Godwin's law protagonist had a few good ideas mixed in with his assured evil.

Free exchange of legal speech shouldn't arbitrarily be squelched because some corporation decides their advertisers wouldn't like it.

For example, a few years ago there was a great machining set of videos in which an M-16 lower receiver was machined out of a billet of Aluminum. Youtube decided that anything like that had to go, not for legal reasons, just because of... you know... whim.

There was nothing wrong with the video series, it didn't promote violence, it was just a well done documentation of all the tips and setups required to do a tricky bit of work.

The replacement that seems to be safe (for now) is to machine model steam engines and lathes from casting kits. Cool, but far less useful in learning the real thing.

[update] The idea of learning by watching is a lot less powerful when whole areas of study are excluded randomly, for "reasons" that are never fully explained.

If someone decided that hashtables and binary trees should be hidden from view, could you really teach computer science without them?

It's a filter bubble of the worst sort. It keeps you from even learning what you don't know, because it can't be safely mentioned.

roenxi3• 6 years ago

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".

[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.

99_002• 6 years ago

Exactly. It's nothing. Just as this is nothing:

‘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.

zaq12• 6 years ago

Tabloids are not credible.

3pt141598• 6 years ago

It's a disgusting practice. I don't care how time-honoured it is. Real people are involved here. Real violence. Real death.

Showing someone a guillotine or a gallows or making threats to use deadly violence as part of a political protest is just plain wrong.

the8472• 6 years ago

I don't disagree that it's a threat. But that threat is always there anyway. We prefer the democratic process because it's less destructive than regular, bloody power transitions. A guillotine can be seen as a reminder for why we have democracy. So in a way it's a pro-democratic symbol as the threat is there to enforce democratic norms.

The threat only becomes misguided if you're wrongly under the impression that democratic norms have been violated and thus you're threatening legitimately elected officials.

Think of it as a prisoner's dilemma. Perfectly rational or virtuous prisoners might cooperate out of their own volition. But even very selfish prisoners might be convinced to cooperate if they repeatedly get reminded of the grisly outcomes that happen to defectors. We might prefer the former (virtuous actors) but if we can't rely on everyone being like that then encouraging good behavior through threats is the next best option which is still far more preferable than the worst possible equilibrium.

rvn10452• 6 years ago

Back in the summer protestors stood outside Jeff Bezos's house with a guillotine: https://twitter.com/dcexaminer/status/1299022885231538176

austhrow743• 6 years ago

Threat of deadly violence is the weight that the political system throws around. To consider using them same to keep it in check to be disgusting is to ask to be used as a doormat.

saargrin3• 6 years ago

im super annoyed by people who are outraged about this then turn around and repost memes about eating the rich or guillotining/GULaging Jeff Bezos

formalsystems7• 6 years ago

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.

roenxi3• 6 years ago

The Turner Diaries were openly discussed and gave rise to various gallow-related hashtags which proliferated on it.

This looks to me like a classic correlation-causation mistake.

* Discussion a book with mass hangings can lead people to talk about gallows.

* Going to a political protest can traditionally involve bringing a gallows.

They are not linked, even though both things involve a gallows. Political protest commonly involves nooses (here is a really good one [0]). That is totally normal symbolism after a US president is voted in.

[0] https://www.cbs17.com/news/kentucky-man-hangs-effigy-of-dona...

_delibash_• 6 years ago

[1] Absolutely. The insinuation is the "wrong people" are not supposed to use it.

throwawaysea4• 6 years ago

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.

throwawaysea4• 6 years ago

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.

KozmoNau74• 6 years ago

The dump only contains information that people posted publicly on Parler, as per this:

"only things that were available publicly via the web were archived. i don't have you e-mail address, phone or credit card number. unless you posted it yourself on parler." - https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348666166978424832

If anything, the people on Parler doxxed themselves by posting all of it in public, it was all directly visible by everyone who used the site/app.

EDIT: Posts that people tried to delete are also in the dump, because of Parler's choice to only mark them as "deleted" and not actually delete them, hence they were still visible to admins. They were publicly visible in the past and could just as easily have been archived then.

Parler does have those people's e-mails and so on, but that is not in this dump. It will have to subpoenaed.

formalsystems7• 6 years ago

I appreciate what you are saying here. What started as concern for my personal safety morphed into a realization that an Internet mob is looking to lynch any Parler user who said anything even remotely questionable. I also believe these people need compassion and dialog from the other side, as they will retreat even further if the people they consider elitists start publishing names.

formalsystems7• 6 years ago

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.

I ran a crawler to collect posts and comments on Parler

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