Bad news for Parler: They've gotten ditched by Apple, Google, Amazon, text message services and email providers. Other bad news: Their lawyers left, too deadline.com/2021/01/parler…
Some of the free speech we'll be deprived of while Parler is down
Sad day for @DevinNunes, who switched practically everything over to Parler in November. He's been doing a dramatic countdown of their final hours: "Dark Winter will set in shortly" parler.com/profile/Devinn…
New: Congrats to everyone who photographed themselves doing crimes in the Capitol. It's loaded with phone location trackers, and those (unmasked) pics could work great in a facial-recognition scan. Hundreds of FBI agents are working the case as we speak wapo.st/3hXFcXB
Thousands of well-lit, high-def, publicly available photos of unmasked faces implicating themselves in a crime. Can't think of a more dream scenario for FBI. Former special agent: “Some people were being very blatant about it ... very easy to find" wapo.st/3hXFcXB
Don't go glorifying face-scan surveillance, though, says @evan_greer: "If you really believe that expanding technologies like facial recognition will primarily be used to target groups like the Proud Boys, you haven’t been paying attention to history" wapo.st/3hXFcXB
New from @nitashatiku and me: Google’s star AI ethics researcher @timnitGebru says she was fired after sending a critical email. Highly regarded, and one of few Black women in a senior AI role, she had told coworkers she felt "constantly dehumanized" wapo.st/2VxYys3
@nitashatiku@timnitGebru Hard to overstate Gebru's influence - both for the AI field and for researchers of color who saw her as a Silicon Valley inspiration. Her research (like gendershades.org) shaped global understanding of algorithmic bias and facial recognition's risks wapo.st/2VxYys3
Parler's chief operating officer told us after this story published that 1) they have no automated system for detecting child porn, unlike every major social media site; 2) he didn't know how much porn (in total) had flooded the site: “Why should I know?" wapo.st/36zKdSh
Systems to detect child sexual abuse material online are a decade old now and scan practically every image on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Parler's choice to ignore them raises the risk that a user will scroll past child porn on the site wapo.st/36zKdSh
(And just to be doubly clear, in case my first tweet wasn't: We asked Parler's operations chief about all porn on the site and he said, "Why should I know?" - even though it's, y'know, his site. We talked about child sexual abuse imagery in a separate set of questions.)
New: Sidney Powell's latest ally in the Trump legal long-shot to reverse reality is ... the longtime operator of 8kun, QAnon's online home. The lines between the QAnon qniverse and Trumpworld have never been more blurred wapo.st/3mH9fEF
.@CodeMonkeyZ posted what he called "smoking gun" proof of voter fraud. It wasn't; just a guy with a thumb drive. People doxxed the guy anyway (as "guilty of treason"), sharing his name, number and home address. He's now getting death threats wapo.st/3mH9fEF
He says the 20-year-old was just moving a report. No sinister algorithm; no voter fraud. Now “there’s a noose out there with his name on it. .... He just took a job. It’s just wrong"