Pro-Trump social media app hacked on launch day as half million sign up
reuters.com
reuters.com
They think they want a safe space where they can say whatever they want, but what they really want is to say abrasive things in a place where people are obliged to listen. If you and your friends have been ejected from a bar for causing conflict, it's no fun standing out in the parking lot yelling slurs at the sky. People who love conflict need someone to argue with.
Google is even blocking emails from gettr.
How big is that corner? That would be the upper limit to the size of the new platform which would service that specific audience.
There were a lot of knee-jerk calls for some sort of government regulation or similar on the right when the censorship started to kick up a gear. Hopefully they'll learn that the first reaction is a mistake and that the market eventually corrects for that sort of power abuse.
These new platforms have generally all been a fantastic example of that, as have the older reddit forks/splinters (voat?)
There is little doubt that we'll see a lot of unimpressive attempts at a right wing social network. But since Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics, people will keep trying until a competitor hits the right notes. They don't have much to lose and a lot to gain by trying.
This is really quite a big claim, I'm not sure it's that cut and dried, personally.
But then I don't tweet or care to read other people's tweets anyway. I think the whole thing is overblown and representative only of a few noisy minorities in the first place.
The opposite happens to Democrat politicians, "thoughtful and sane" echoing replies are boosted to the top. Twitter gaslights conservatives and anti-gaslights the left.
I saw this happen for the first time in real time when Trump first expressed his outrage when Twitter first amended his tweet that set off the whole S230 discussion. The first 5 minutes were nothing and I mean nothing but supportive tweets. After about 5 minutes, almost all the replies that were visible at the top were vitriolic and expressing anti-Trump views. Since then, I've been spotting this pattern everywhere, just not in real time. I think what probably happened is that the censors at twitter were scared of applying their gaslighting in light of Trump's threats, but that's just a guess. It's extremely obvious to me though that Twitter is purposely gaslighting conservatives by editorializing which anti-Republican replies get the most visibility.
What you're asking for there is a republican safe space that suppresses dissent, not free speech.
In other words, it's hardly surprising that the user base of Twitter leans left.
(For example, when they suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!".)
Looking through the recent Biden's posts, I don't see the opposite effect you mention. There's lots of criticism at the top.
Edit: Conversely here is one of the house minority leader's most recent tweets celebrating the 4th:https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/14116560387938140...
8 out of the first 10 replies for me are anti-Republican talking points and anti-McConnell memes. The replies / discussion on every politician is clearly astro-turfed to create a specific narrative that always flows one direction. The house minority leader can't even celebrate the 4th without getting a lot of hateful replies and gaslighting in that anti- replies are boosted even if they have no or few likes or retweets.
If you want to deny the obvious reality that's fine, but there is a huge demand for this from plenty of non-deplorables who aren't ever going to be ok with some jackass at twitter determining what is ok to say. They showed their hand, they are willing to lie and censor and fake fact check enough true and relevant things they don't like that creating alternatives is the only path forward, however long it takes. This is not about allowing _actual_ hate speech, _actual_ harassment cyber-stalking, pedo shit, or planning violence, but if it's not one of those there is demand for a platform that shuts the fuck up about it.
This, to me, is what's gone crazy about US politics. Facts are now considered political. Someone who is out and out spewing lies shouldn't be called on that, because my lies are as good as your facts and you're oppressing my politics if you label them that way.
I wish you luck with whatever you're trying to do, but these sites are little more than right wing safe-spaces where reality can be prevented from intruding. Their own policies (whether stated or just how they are acted upon) show that this is the case, and that the free speech angle is merely lip service.
(and where sites do, really, genuinely allow free speech, as mentioned before, they degenerate into places nobody normal really wants to be)
When nobody trusts the fact checkers anymore, as no intelligent person still does to any significant degree, they're not doing any good.
What I have seen is the people who have been fact checked mount a campaign to undermine fact checkers, and in fact undermine the idea that there are such things as facts.
I don't have the time or energy to try to present a researched case here about this, but to millions of people the "our narrative is your truth" bs has been so thick and obvious that we just don't take most media or the fact checks based thereon seriously. I get it, it's a dangerous game, there are a lot of dumb people who will believe a lot of dumb conspiracy shit, which will inevitably 99.9% of the time devolve into some form of "the jews did it", targeting me, but that's why it's so dangerous to sacrifice all credibility pursuing some political goal.
As for fact checking, well with the attempts to stump out the Biden Laptop story and the ban on anybody thinking loud about the lab leak theory, we should assume that political fact checking cannot be neutral.
For some platforms, that's a feature, not a bug.
Oh, yeah, the typical libertarian daydreaming: "eventually markets will always fix themselves" .
Because it worked so well for the last 30 years, right? We didn't get any oligopolies/monopolies in the tech industry, right?
/s
There are some people that you may not want as your customers.
Gab's was a result of a patch they've made on top of Mastodon. Since Mastodon's license required them to share the code, here's a commit that introduced it (https://github.com/d0nk/gab-social/commit/fb3b7545705153022c...). They've since "fixed" the problem by sharing just an archive of the code, and password protecting it with "JesusChristIsKingTrumpWonTheElection").
I find it quite hilarious.
Very un-Christian of them to be spreading straight up lies.
Edit, can I guess that this isn't how to do proper sql parameterized input?
> s.account_id = #{@id}
I don't know ruby at all...
"https://thewebsite.com/the_url?max_id=); DROP TABLE orange_face_paint ; [.. make the remainder valid sql here]"
I would think. Essentially, it allows user-provided input to do anything; it's the most trivial form of SQL injection vulnerability.
It's fairly well known that more diverse teams (different education, backgrounds, universities, as well as racial/gender diversity) produce better products because they have fewer blind spots on things, and a diversity of approaches tends to weed out issues. An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches.
These apps are essentially built on a premise of lack of diversity, and so I'd imagine that the teams that work on them are much less diverse than they would otherwise be.
The only one that seems to be more immune to this is Gab, which is based on Mastodon I think (funnily enough a project with incredible diversity).
The likely answer is lack of funding. The median app is very poorly made.
==Women pioneers have been a part of AT&T since 1878. That’s when Emma Nutt joined a team of teenage boys at a telephone exchange in Boston to become the first female operator. Within a few years almost all the telephone operators were women. Those female operators rose to the occasion during World War I, operating the telephone switchboards for the U.S. Army in France.==
==“As a result, AT&T and its subsidiaries became the largest employer of women in the United States,” he said. “At its peak, in the early 1950s, AT&T employed over 200,000 women as telephone operators.”==
https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female...
It’s also worth point this out as well while we are talking about AT&T and politics: “ Cramer calls AT&T the ‘most Republican of any publicly traded company’”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/cramer-calls-att-the-most-re...
> An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches.
How is this relevant? Diversity of thought is not the same as diversity of race.
As for the fact that many important innovations were developed before diversity was valued as much as it is today, I am reminded of a blind inventor, who achieves great things in spite of disability: imagine how much more he could do if given the power of sight!
Let me give you a concrete example:
If your business is based on "cloud" and "docker" and "dynamically typed languages", how likely are you to hire someone who thinks the cloud is overrated and that using docker is over engineering and that statically typed and compiled languages are better for productivity and reliability? The chance you would hire such a person is nil. And if you do by mistake hire such a person, it's probably because there did not voice this opinion during the interview process and just "played along" to get the job.
So you will hire a bunch of people from different ethnicities who all buy into the "cloud is the future" mindset and who think that learning a 100 different tools and configuration languages is how to build a modern website.
I think the reality is that new software usually sucks until it takes enough of a hammering that it becomes decent.
Let companies do it, and you will only get more of the same crap.
At the time they (Parlor) were working with the FBI and there were a few posts regarding Jan 6 (nothing compared to what was used on Facebook with thousands and thousands of posts). By pulling their hardware they actually impacted the FBI investigation.
They also pulled them from both the Apple and Android app stores.
After crushing them, they then removed all these restrictions after a few weeks.
So yeah, they’re too strong. Then again, we should be building decentralized apps at this point.
Maybe this is a publicity stunt? I would never have heard about this site otherwise.
Trump is (was?) good at this: feeding the media exactly what they want so they write about him.
This is too good a bait to ignore. "lulz trump's social network got pwned on launch day! what a lozer lul"
There's a way where he deeply believes that any press is good press and is willing and able to push crazyness to get it
I find the lack of inclusivity in hacker stock photos to be appalling
Well, that's a bit of a kiss of death.
I'm all for irony, but did they put any though into this app at all? (Given that they also inadvertently leaked their source code, perhaps not.)
I don't think it's meant to be ironic at all, I think it's entirely purposeful and on brand for them.
Is my reading correct here? Trump, after bringing the ban-wave and replace twitter rhetoric to the foreground, isn't even on the platform?
Same reason his blog lasted about a month.
Gab refused. Trump later joined Rumble, which Torba claims changed their TOS that day to ban "hate speech" with an explicit ban on anti-semitic messages (which Torba says is also known as "any and all criticism of Israel and/or Jewish people").
It's funny because all of these platforms launch to "combat cancel culture!" and "protect free speech!" then almost immediately start restricting what can and can't be posted.
It's almost as if putting unrestricted spaces up on the internet necessarily causes a race to the bottom ...
That's pretty funny. And "old men in underpants" style of defacing was started by a youtuber called "Internet Commentiquette" if anyone is interested.
They don't look lewd to me, on the vice article. Most of them are sunbathing or just stock photos of a man in his underpants in the screenshots there.
So it would be ok with you if someone went to the beach, took pictures of women sunbathing, and posted them on Twitter without their permission?
Absurd.
Funny that you choose to get upset over some pictures of old guys on holiday. Also you have no idea what the permissions are around these images, you’re just confecting outrage here.
Bullshit. If these were pictures of women in underwear being spammed by conservatives on Twitter hashtags without their permission we'd all be outraged. I'm upset by the act and by the double standards.
Response to post below: this discussion is turning into a pointless argument that isn't appropriate or welcome on Hacker News, so I won't add another post to it. If you find spamming pictures of people in their underwear without their permission acceptable, I can't change your mind, but don't try to tell me what I find outrageous.
> you don't even know if the photos are being posted by the individuals in the picture themselves
unless permission is verified, the photos should be removed, even from a free speech site.
Not if the pictures were as neutral as the pictures in the article. And especially not if they were stock photos as many appear to be.
> I'm upset by the act and by the double standards.
No, you're confecting outrage from whole cloth.
> If you find spamming pictures of people in their underwear without their permission acceptable
Stock photos have permission. As for the rest, you don't even know if the photos are being posted by the individuals in the picture themselves, you're merely looking for some way to justify your outrage.