How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
By Glenn Greenwald | January 12, 2021
Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.
Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler and gave them 24 hours to prove they had changed their moderation practices or else face removal from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full. A Parler executive detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Apple. “They basically ghosted us,” he told me. The next day, Apple notified Parler of its removal from App Store. “We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now rejected your app for the App Store.”
It is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded Parler will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.
In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that’s what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, “acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple’s customers.” The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors’ access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”
The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet.
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.
Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself “disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that “it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these “young tech titans” for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook and other platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians at Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various French ministers, and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador all denounced the banning of Trump and other acts of censorship by tech monopolies on the ground that they were anointing themselves “a world media power.” The warnings from López Obrador were particularly eloquent:
Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election — found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming. One of that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil liberties, lawyer Ben Wizner, told The New York Times that the destruction of Parler was more “troubling” than the deletion of posts or whole accounts: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the key executives are more associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the CATO Institute than Steve Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never Trump Republican, while another is the former campaign manager of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan Bongino, an investor. One of the key original investors was Rebekah Mercer.
The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they should see. And they were principally borne out of a reaction to increasingly restrictive rules on the major Silicon Valley platforms regarding what could and could not be said.
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is associated with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new enough platform such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. And its destruction preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their voices in protest).
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.
Former US representative Ron Paul locked out of Facebook for undisclosed reasons
RT | January 11, 2021
Former US representative Ron Paul has been mysteriously locked out of his Facebook page and accused of “repeatedly going against our Community Standards.” The platform didn’t explain which content on Paul’s page flipped the switch.
Paul tweeted a screenshot of his official Facebook page on Monday sporting a “You Have Limited Page Functionality” warning screen notifying him that he was “temporarily blocked” from “creating new Pages and managing our existing Pages.”
While the warning implied the former Texas senator had “repeatedly [gone] against our Community Standards,” Paul insisted he had never before been given even a notice of violating community standards, let alone a strike or other official reprimand.
The post that supposedly triggered Facebook’s discipline was not displayed, nor was Paul given any further hints as to what he supposedly did to provoke the wrath of the social media behemoth. Instead, he was only given a link to “review our Community Standards to see what’s a violation.” Facebook’s Community Standards has exploded in size over the past few years as the platform scrambles to root out political wrongthink.
Many on social media saw the move as an ominous hint of censorship to come. While Paul’s page was not deleted, it is one of thousands that have been purged or locked since November’s election, a mass disappearance Twitter has eagerly engaged in as well.
Paul’s podcast, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, was censored on YouTube in September, given a “warning” that the video violated “community guidelines” on “spam, deceptive practices, and scams.” Upon further investigation, Paul’s cohost Daniel McAdams discovered the episode had committed the (Youtube-defined) cardinal sin of disagreeing with the World Health Organization’s guidelines on Covid-19. While the WHO itself has changed guidance on the pandemic several times, ordinary users are not permitted to “dispute the efficacy of the WHO or local health authorities’ recommended guidance on social distancing and self isolation.”
McAdams himself, who served as Paul’s foreign affairs advisor during his time in the US congress, was banned from Twitter in November 2019 after trading barbs with FoxNews’ Sean Hannity. The conservative pundit had recorded an hour-long segment railing against the so-called Deep State – President Trump’s term for the swamp-dwelling unelected intelligence agents and other powerful figures – while wearing a CIA pin, a glaring oversight that led McAdams to call Hannity “retarded.”
Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media platforms rushed to silence President Donald Trump last week after a horde of his supporters entered the Capitol, supposedly egged on by the president. The resulting chaos saw five people die, one shot by police and three due to unexplained medical emergencies. A police officer was also killed in the melee.
Senior House Republican Says Parler Shutdown by Rivals Breaks Monopoly Laws
By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 11.01.2021
Attempts by Big Tech to muzzle US President Donald Trump and his supporters have had mixed results. While conservative social media site Parler has been shut down, Twitter shares lost $5 billion in value on Monday following the deletion of Trump’s hugely-popular account.
California Congressman Devin Nunes has accused Big tech firms of breaching anti-trust, civil rights and racketeering law by banning social media site Parler.
Nunes, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Amazon, Apple and Google committed a “clear violation” of laws when they banned the ‘free speech’ social media platform popular with conservatives.
“There should be a racketeering investigation on all the people that coordinated this attack on not only a company, but on all of those like us,” Nunes told Fox News on Sunday. “I have 3 million followers on Parler. Tonight I will no longer be able to communicate with those people and they’re Americans.”
Tech giant Amazon shut down Parler just after midnight US Pacific time (08:00 GMT) when it evicted the site from its rented servers. Google and Apple had earlier blocked access to the Parler mobile phone app, although tech-savvy users were still able to download and install it after changing the security settings on their devices.
“The effect of this is that there is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer,” Nunes said. “Poof, it’s gone.”
Amazon claimed Parler was “unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” posing “a very real risk to public safety”. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Parler does not aggressively moderate users’ posts according to a set of “community guidelines”.
Unintended Consequences
On Friday Parler stormed to the number one spot on Apple’s app store after Twitter deleted President Donald Trump’s account — which had some 88 million followers — in the wake of last Wednesday’s occupation of the US Capitol building in Washington DC by protesters attempting to disrupt the confirmation of Democratic candidate Joe Biden as president-elect by Congress.
Twitter shares tumbled by 12 per cent on the stock markets on Monday, losing $5 billion in value after Trump supporters left the site in droves. One pro-Trump ‘channel’ on Russian-founded messaging app Telegram had gained almost 44,000 subscribers by Monday afternoon, just two days after it was created.
Republicans and conservative media figures raised the alarm last week after tens of thousands of their Twitter followers mysteriously disappeared. House Democrats claimed those followers were “neo-Nazis”, “insurrectionists” and “terrorists” who Twitter had purged. But left-wing British broadcaster and former MP George Galloway experienced the same phenomenon.
“Republicans have no way to communicate,” Nunes said, “and it doesn’t even matter if you’re a Republican or conservative.”
Sunday’s New York Post editorial declared: “Big Tech is a cartel, and must be regulated.”
Blanket Ban
Parler CEO John Matze revealed on Sunday not only had the three tech leviathans united to shut down his company, but every firm providing services to the site had abandoned it.
“They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company,” Matze said. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”
French Government “Shocked” at Twitter Banning of Trump
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 11, 2021
The French government has echoed Angela Merkel’s sentiment in saying it is “shocked” at Twitter’s banning of President Trump, asserting that Big Tech is a threat to democracy.
Junior Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune said the decision to silence Trump proved the need for Big Tech platforms to be tightly regulated.
“This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO,” he told Bloomberg TV on Monday. “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms.”
Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire also said that “the digital oligarchy” was “one of the threats” to democracy and should be reigned in by the state.
As we highlighted earlier, the German government also warned that Big Tech’s deplatforming of Trump set a very dangerous precedent.
Communicating via a spokesman, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the move “problematic,” adding that social media giants shouldn’t have the power to decide who has the right to free speech.
“This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators — not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms,” said the statement.
While Republicans were completely toothless in their efforts to control Big Tech during Trump’s administration, Poland could be set to pass a law that would fine social media companies $2.2 million a pop for censoring lawful free speech.
“In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic,” reported Poland In.
Hacker reveals massive Parler data leak: All users’ messages, location info, even driver’s licenses may have been exposed
RT | January 11, 2021
Recently shutdown social media app Parler is at the center of a yet another controversy, after allegations surfaced that the totality of its users’ personal data was leaked in the wake of the network going offline.
Parler, a social network popular with conservative audiences, was removed from the internet on Monday, after Amazon kicked the site off its hosting service, citing “a steady increase in this violent content” in the wake of Wednesday’s riot at the US Capitol. The decision to pull support came after Apple and Google blocked the social network from their online marketplaces over the weekend.
Shortly before Amazon’s move, a self-described hacker from Austria, going by ‘Donk Enby’ on Twitter, claimed to have gained access to all of the “unprocessed, raw” video files uploaded to Parler “with all associated metadata.” The hacker even included a link to the file library in order to prove that the data leak was real.
The development agitated the social network’s audience, especially since it occurred around the same time as Parler’s shutdown.
News of the apparent leak quickly spread online, leaving some to wonder how the hacker could have snagged the entirety of one of the network’s file libraries.
A Reddit user named ‘BlueMountainDace’ claimed to have the answer, and they posted it in the group ‘ParlerWatch,’ which appears to have been created to monitor some of the perceived extreme views of the platform’s users.
According to ‘BlueMountainDace’, it was not just the videos, but the entirety of Parler’s users’ data that was exposed.
In their viral post, the Redditor asserted that one of Parler’s hosting platforms, Twilio, accidentally exposed the app’s security authentications via a press release. This in turn could have allowed any person to create a blank administrator account and access all of Parler’s private content, which, besides message history and geo data, might have included users’ driver’s license photos, which were used to create a verified account.
Currently it is unclear which press release by Twilio might have led to the Parler data being exposed.
According to tech writer Matthew Sheffield, the breach was possible due to Parler’s long-criticized lax security standards. Specifically, Sheffield blames the potential leak on the app “never actually deleting anything its users posted,” while keeping the data accessible to administrator users.
However, Sheffield notes that it will likely “take a little while” for such amounts of data to be processed in order for it to end up in an accessible “WikiLeaks-style data dump.”
Parler and Twilio have yet to comment on the allegations.
EU Citizens Initiative calls for ban on biometric mass surveillance systems
By Katya Pivcevic | January 8, 2021
A European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI), ‘Civil society initiative for a ban on biometric mass surveillance practices,’ has been registered by the European Commission, calling for a permanent end to the disproportionate uses of biometric data in ways which can lead to mass surveillance or any undue interference with fundamental rights. Dozens of civil society groups have supported the movement.
The ECI was made part of the Lisbon Treaty in 2012, and introduced as an agenda-setting tool in the hands of citizens. An ECI allows for 1 million citizens from at least one quarter of EU Member States to invite the European Commission to propose legal acts in areas where the Commission has the power to act. Since 2012, 76 Citizens’ Initiatives have been registered.
This initiative for a ban on certain biometric applications urges the Commission to cease their development and deployment of arbitrarily-targeted biometric systems, even on a trial basis, recalling actions by EU agencies which have resulted in violations of EU data protection law. Under such law, the processing of biometric data is forbidden except where there is a “substantial public interest,” subject to strict necessity and proportionality requirements.
Should the ECI receive one million statements of support within one year from at least seven different Member States, the Commission will have to react within six months. The initiative hopes to gain transparency, protection from discrimination and respect through the Reclaim Your Face movement, which opposes biometric mass surveillance systems.
Erdogan’s press office ditches WhatsApp as Ankara urges Turks to use domestic apps in fight against ‘digital fascism’
RT | January 10, 2021
The media office of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reportedly shutting down its WhatsApp groups over privacy concerns. The move comes after Ankara called for a nationwide boycott of the Facebook-owned messaging app.
Starting on Monday, the office is switching over to encrypted messaging app BiP, which is developed by Turkish firm Turkcell, Bloomberg reported, citing internal messages posted to the WhatsApp groups.
The decision comes amid growing consternation over WhatsApp’s plan to begin sharing personal data with its parent company, Facebook. The policy comes into effect on February 8, and users who refuse the new terms will not be able to access their accounts on the messaging platform.
The updated user terms have been met with hostility by the Turkish government, which has used privacy issues to promote homegrown apps and internet services.
Ali Taha Koc, head of the presidency’s Digital Transformation Office, released a statement on Saturday in which he warned that foreign-made applications “contain significant risks to data security.” He urged Turkish citizens to switch over to “local and national software,” claiming the move would help Turkey safeguard its data.
“As President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated, let’s stand against digital fascism together!” he concluded.
The message seems to have resonated. Turkcell reported that around one million new users joined BiP Messenger in the past 24 hours. The app has been downloaded more than 53 million times since launching in 2013.
Why doesn’t Facebook just buy your data if it’s so valuable? RT’s Boom Bust digs into WhatsApp privacy controversy
Meanwhile, Turkish media outlets have been highlighting high-profile individuals who have joined the exodus. State-run Anadolu Agency reported that a senior executive at Baykar, a Turkish drone company, announced that he was dropping WhatsApp due to its new data policy and would begin using BiP.
Erdogan has previously warned of “digital fascism,” arguing that the monopolization of data control would spell disaster for the world. In a speech from November, he said that remaining “human” in the digital age would be one of the greatest challenges going forward. However, his own government has been accused of policing social media platforms and websites for political views it deems unsavory.
Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild ‘From Scratch’
“This Was A Coordinated Attack”
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – January 9, 2021
Update (2210 ET): Parler CEO John Matze has issued a statement (emphasis ours):
Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.
#speakfreely
* * *
Update (2130 ET): And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it finds someone else to host it.
* * *
Update (2100 ET): As expected, Apple removed Parler permanently from its app store on Saturday. “[T]here is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” the iPhone maker said, according to CNN which adds that Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms.
“The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. “Specifically, we have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action in violation of Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content.”
Apple’s notice said Parler’s responses to an earlier warning were inadequate, including Parler’s defense that it had been taking violent rhetoric on its platform “very seriously for weeks” and that it had a moderation plan “for the time being,” according to Apple.
A search for the Parler app as of 8pm showed that the app was no longer there, with the search query returning recommended substitutes:
“Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety,” Apple said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”
Apple’s decision follows a similar move by Google to drop Parler from the Google Play Store, and after Amazon (AMZN) has come under pressure by its own employees to stop hosting Parler’s website on Amazon Web Services.
John Matze, Parler’s CEO, wrote in a message on his platform that Apple “will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive policies like Twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursuing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.”
“They claim it is due to violence on the platform,” Matze wrote of Apple, whom he also accused of being a “software monopoly,” a particularly relevant attack right now given an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple from Fortnite maker Epic Games. “The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today.”
Matze promised to share “more details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options.”
* * *
Earlier:
A coalition of Amazon corporate employees have demanded that the Seattle-based megacorp kick Parler off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform unless ‘posts inciting violence’ are removed, which would force the Trump-friendly Twitter competitor to find another host.
According to CNBC, an employee advocacy group – Amazon Employees for Climate Justice – said in a Saturday tweet that AWS should “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.”
More via CNBC:
Pressure has been mounting for Amazon to stop hosting Parler on AWS after other tech giants took action against the social media app in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier this week. Google on Friday removed Parler from its app store for Android users, Google Play Store. BuzzFeed News reported on Friday that Apple has threatened to pull Parler from its App Store.
Parler, which launched in 2018, has emerged as a popular platform for President Trump’s allies in the last year by billing itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social media services like Twitter and Facebook. –CNBC
To justify censoring Parler, critics have pointed to posts calling for ‘firing squads’ – like one from attorney Lin Wood (who some say handed the Senate to the Democrats by openly calling for Georgians not to vote in the runoff election unless the GOP candidates backed Trump’s election fraud claims).
In 2019, Amazon pulled the plug on their AWS partnership with Twitter alternative GAB over user posts. CEO Andrew Torba essentially blamed the CIA – claiming that a “PSYOP campaign started back in early December” in which newly created accounts were “popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence.”
Torba’s letter continues:
After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.
Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims. I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading.
Meanwhile, Parler has jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store.
Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email. -TechCrunch
And as conservatives scramble to download the app before it’s deplatformed at yet another social media giant, we now have to wonder if they’ll even be able to find a new home among a collusive constellation of big-tech – at least one of which used to value the phrase ‘think different.’
Trump’s Last Stand
By Israel Shamir • Unz Review • January 9, 2021
President Trump was decisively beaten, if not fair and square. The hopes of millions of American voters were squashed and extinguished. The saga of the Orange Man is over. The victors used a gambit: they sacrificed the sanctity and security of the Capitol, allowed intruders in, permitted them to take selfies in the Speaker’s office, and then faked horror and outrage. The attempted calls for electoral transparency were deflated in real time as huge crowds were dispersed, electors were confirmed, and the ascendancy of Biden was assured, while Trump followers were branded ‘domestic terrorists’.
Donald Trump denounced the people whom he personally called to protest. His close political allies withdrew their support. Within hours, or even minutes, this ruler of the world admired by millions became a non-person. Like a boy who posted an obscenity, he was banned by Twitter and Facebook. Time will tell whether he will go to prison, as so many Dems pray for, but his political life seems to have ended, even if his cause may live.
The deck was stacked against President Trump from Day One. His orders were ignored. The US courts, judges, police, the whole system of law enforcement was against him; his orders were blocked or overturned, while the media made fun of him and the opposition relentlessly delegitimised him. He was blocked even by Fox News. Dem-run states adjusted their laws to assure the elections’ result. Trump was a lame duck from the very beginning of his presidency to its bitter end. He was kept on a short leash by the almighty Deep State, and when he tried to free himself, they pulled the leash.
On January 6, a massive demonstration in his support gathered in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands Americans came to the capital to demand justice after the election fraud became obvious. They hoped that the Republican representatives would refuse to certify the fraud and appoint a commission to check and recount the votes. Some of the protesters managed to break into the Capitol, or were let in by the police. This peaceful Occupy Capitol action, the exercise of a natural right to protest, was met with lethal fire, and a young female protester from San Diego, Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by the plainclothes police. The Republican representatives were cowed and surrendered; Biden was confirmed to take office.
The horror and outrage of the Dem politicians and media were as faked as their news. During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings.
“Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting “Break down the door!” and “General strike!” Moments later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside, joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes. The area outside the Assembly, which is scheduled to take the bill up at 11 a.m. today, was crowded with protesters who chanted, “We’re not leaving. Not this time.” …
Department of Administration spokesman Tim Donovan said although protesters were being encouraged to leave, no one would be forcibly removed. … Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he had instructed … Police Chief Noble Wray not to allow his officers to participate in removing demonstrators from the building.”
This was what happened in Madison, Wisconsin in March 2011, as Steve Sailer reminded us. Indeed, this is what the protesters expected; some were dressed in flamboyant carnival attire; they behaved well and peacefully, within acceptable limits. It was not an insurrection; they didn’t try to take over the Congress in any meaningful sense. For them, it was an honest and funny way to express their indignation. But the real gambit plotters intended to frame them. They even murdered four protesters hoping they would respond with violence, but in vain.
White American protesters are exceptionally non-violent lot; as with Occupy Wall Street a few years back the January 6 Capitol protesters were timid and obedient as lambs. For this reason, BLM was invented, for Blacks are able to riot violently, as opposed to well-trained whites. It is not a race thing: lily-white French Yellow Vests and Ukrainian nationalists have fought the police all right. But US whites are not prone to riot, not since the Civil War. Being a foreigner, I do not understand why the Americans want to keep their guns if they never use them, but that’s the way they are.
Anyway, their non-violence didn’t help them. The president-elect Biden begrudged them even the name of protesters: “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.” Indeed, the name should be preserved for Deep State-authorised looters and their brethren all over the world, whether in Hong Kong or Minsk, in Seattle or Portland.
Russian social networks were comparing the Washington DC events with those nearer to home and complained of ‘double standards’. The US media expressed no indignation when their appointee Boris Yeltsin shelled the Russian Parliament in 1993. The New York Times and the State Department had encouraged the nationalist mob to storm Ukrainian government offices in 2014. They cheered on the opposition in Minsk in taking over their parliament after failing to win elections. The Belarus protesters claimed their country’s election results were rigged, just like Trump supporters did for the US elections, but Biden didn’t call them “domestic terrorists”. (Actually, neither did President Lukashenko: he called them ‘protesters’, and their violent demos were dispersed without a single shot fired.) In such cases, Jews respond with “How can you compare?!”
The Russians compared the Capitol ‘coup attempt’ with their own semi-staged ‘coup’ of 1991, a partly pre-planned provocation. In 1991, the feeble coup organisers could not detain Yeltsin and surrendered as if on cue; the wave of indignation removed Gorbachev and the Communist party from power. In the Capitol, too, police waved the ‘invaders’ in, as you can see on this video forwarded by the BBC. More videos suggesting Capitol police involvement in the ostensible provocation are presented here. The orchestrated indignation allowed the victors to censor and purge the defeated Trump and his followers. Just as the USSR went down in August 1991, Trump’s America went down in January 2021, and the liberal elites representing the big corporations came to power. It was achieved by a provocation, but ordinary Trump followers were really angry with the Election Steal. Likewise, 1991 was a provocation, but ordinary Russian citizens were angry at Gorbachev’s perestroika, while the liberal elites used it to dismantle the Soviet state and transfer all assets to their oligarchs.
People with a good knowledge of history refer to the Reichstag Fire of February 1933, the arson contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume emergency powers. Alternatively, other researchers have contended that there was no proof of Nazi complicity in the crime, but that Hitler merely capitalised on the Dutch Communist van der Lubbe’s independent act. The fire is the subject of continued debate and research, says the Encycopaedia Britannica. Probably the same will be said about the Capitol “invasion”, and researchers will argue whether duplicitous Biden’s minions organised it or just capitalised on the Trumpers’ sincere protest.
There is no doubt that to an objective observer the 2020 elections were profoundly unfair. I won’t trouble you with too many published details about the statistically impossible results, but here is one example of fraud. The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko would murmur, “How can it be done?” It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved in the following way.
Detroit Dems outsourced ballot harvesting to local drug lords, offering them as a prize – recreational marijuana business licenses. These licences are the best thing since a licence to print money. Having such licenses is like having your own ATM. Here you can read about their profitability and the lengths criminals will go to obtain them. Detroit Dems had changed local laws allowing the sale of marijuana in their fine city (it was forbidden until November 2020). They changed local laws prescribing the issuing of marijuana licences to drug dealers with previous convictions for drug dealing. They let drug lords out of jail. They changed local laws to allow ballot harvesting; that is, collecting postal votes and assisting with the filling in of ballots. After that, the drug dealers went around collecting postal ballots and filling them in immediately, if they were conscientious, or just filling them in at their leisure, if feeling lazy. They had a judge at their disposal, Cynthia Stephens, who single-handedly changed Michigan election laws, and then rejected Trump’s claims of fraud.
Yes, Virginia, there was election fraud in many American states. They are used to gambling; they aren’t surprised by a beautiful hand of four aces, as Mark Twain suggested. Usually the two parties deal in turns, and cheat in turns. Only this time, Trump convinced many people that it is different; that this is their last chance.
The problem is, Trump was a poor organiser. He could win elections, if he could prevent Cynthia Stephens’s kind of legislation, outlaw postal ballots, enforce obligatory IDs for voting, mobilise his people for election control. A formidable task, but not impossible, while dealing with a prone-to-cheat adversary. He could even do a revolution on January 6, tasking the right people to act, forming a revolutionary HQ, planning a strategy of takeover, but he didn’t do anything of the sort. He probably thought Congress would see the vast crowds and allow for the checking of election results.
Alternatively, he was so naïve that he believed revolutions just happen by themselves, as in the movies. They do not. Behind every successful revolution, there is a lot of planning, armed force, weapons ready for use, supply lines, logistics, media support, and communications. Trump had none of that. It was enough to turn off Twitter to make him deaf and dumb.
There was no coup attempt, as correctly stated by Tyler Durden: “Trump has never had the concentration, organizational acumen, or ideological coherence to mount a bona fide “coup,” and a mob intrusion which was swiftly dispersed by armed agents of the state doesn’t change that. Shortly after the breach, he released a video instructing his followers not to take Senators hostage or imprison Mike Pence, but to “go home.” No factions of the federal government joined the mob on Trump’s orders, because he didn’t bother issuing any. The whole episode never stood the remotest chance of preventing the certification of Joe Biden, much less overthrowing the government. It was just another goofball charade, and in that sense, a fitting end to the Trump presidency.”
Conspiracy theories played their disappointing part in the debacle. Many Trumpists believed in the QAnon and Kayfabe conspiracies; they posted reports of bad guys being arrested, of servers snatched by the FBI, of Clinton and Biden waiting for rough justice behind bars. This belief disarmed people who would otherwise have fought to achieve this very result. That is the problem with conspiracies: imaginary conspiracies prevent real action.
Still, I do not want to finish this piece on such a sad and disappointing note. President Trump was a great leader. He succeeded against enormous odds in improving the lot of American workers: for the first time since the 1970s, their incomes rose in relation to the other classes. He stopped mass migration to the US: legal immigration went down to a trickle. He avoided new wars; he tried to make peace with Russia. He refused to bomb Iran even in the last days of his presidency, though some pro-Israel supporters promised him a second term if he would.
His fight against the corona madness was his great achievement. He was against the lockdowns that are about to destroy our world so completely that few things will survive. The last great US ruler who didn’t wear the cowardly mask will be remembered. He could not defeat the mighty medical complex, or FAGMA, or the Masters of Discourse, but he tried.
The day of his defeat, January 6, was the Epiphany, or Adoration of the Magi, of the Three Wise Men who came to worship Jesus in his cave. It was also Christmas Eve for the Eastern Church. It is the darkest time of the year; from now on, the day will increase and so will our hopes.
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
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Book Review
Shattered Dreams: The HPV Vaccine Exposed (2019)
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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