• Please be sure to read the rules and adhere to them. Some banned members have complained that they are not spammers. But they spammed us. Some even tried to redirect our members to other forums. Duh. Be smart. Read the rules and adhere to them and we will all get along just fine. Cheers. :beer: Link to the rules: https://www.forumsforums.com/threads/forum-rules-info.2974/

TECHNOLOGYApple Has Threatened To Ban Parler From The App Store

300 H and H

Bronze Member
GOLD Site Supporter
Apple Has Threatened To Ban Parler From The App Store - DailyExpertNews

Apple has given Parler, the social network favored by conservatives and extremists, an ultimatum to implement a full moderation plan of its platform within the next 24 hours or face expulsion from the App store.
In an email sent this morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Apple wrote to Parler’s executives that there had been complaints that the service had been used to plan and coordinate the storming of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wednesday. The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer.
“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,” Apple wrote to Parler. “The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”
Apple said that “to ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store,” Parler was required to submit an update and a “requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of the message,” which was sent on Friday morning. Apple said if it did not receive an update from the company within that time frame, the app would be removed from the App store.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.
Launched in 2018, Parler has become a safe haven for people that have been banned or suspended by popular social networks including Facebook and Twitter for violating those platforms’ rules. The Henderson, NV-based company has billed itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social networks and taken a more relaxed approach to content moderation, attracting conspiracy theorists, members of hate groups, and right-wing activists who have openly incited violence. Recent threads on Parler, for example, have called for the execution of Vice President Mike Pence, and encouraged the conspiracy theory that left-wing antifa activists were behind Wednesday’s events.
Republican lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as well as President Donald Trump’s family members and surrogates have all established accounts on Parler, and have urged their followers on other social media sites to migrate there.
“Content of this dangerous and harmful nature is not appropriate for the App Store. As you know from prior conversations with App Review, Apple requires apps with user generated content to effectively moderate to ensure objectionable, potentially harmful content is filtered out,” the iPhone maker wrote in its letter. “Content that threatens the well being of others or is intended to incite violence or other lawless acts has never been acceptable on the App Store.”
The full text of the letter follows:
We require your immediate attention regarding serious App Store guideline violations that we have found with your app, Parler.
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. The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.
Our investigation has found that Parler is not effectively moderating and removing content that encourages illegal activity and poses a serious risk to the health and safety of users in direct violation of your own terms of service, found here: https://legal.parler.com/documents/Elaboration-on-Guidelines.pdf
Examples of these complaints can be viewed on these links:
Content of this dangerous and harmful nature is not appropriate for the App Store. As you know from prior conversations with App Review, Apple requires apps with user generated content to effectively moderate to ensure objectionable, potentially harmful content is filtered out. Content that threatens the well being of others or is intended to incite violence or other lawless acts has never been acceptable on the App Store.
Your CEO was quoted recently saying “But I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.” We want to be clear that Parler is in fact responsible for all the user generated content present on your service and for ensuring that this content meets App Store requirements for the safety and protection of our users. We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content.
We have now rejected your app for the App Store Review Guidelines detailed below.
Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content
We found that your app includes content that some users may find upsetting, offensive, or otherwise objectionable. Specifically, we found direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action.
Guideline 1.2 – Safety – User Generated Content
Your app enables the display of user-generated content but does not have sufficient precautions in place to effectively manage objectionable content present in your app.
See the attached screenshots for more details.
Next Steps
Nothing is more important to the App Store than the safety of our users. You must resolve these issue immediately for your app to remain on the App Store.
Please remove all objectionable content from your app and submit your revised binary for review. Such content includes any content similar to the examples attached to this message, as well as any content referring to harm to people or attacks on government facilities now or at any future date. In addition, you must respond to this message with detailed information about how you intend to moderate and filter this content from your app, and what you will do to improve moderation and content filtering your service for this kind of objectionable content going forward.
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.
If you have any questions about this message, please reply and let us know.
Regards,
App Review Board
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These ass hole Democrats want to regulate free speech were ever it occurs. This censor ship is flatly Un American, and is just another example of the totalitary regime that has over thrown America. Much more of this shit from Beijing Biden and his traitorship cabinet, and we will have to go to war if we are ever to be free people again. Instead of the Capitol we shall hunt them in Silicon Valley....

Fuckers
 

XeVfTEUtaAqJHTqq

Master of Distraction
Staff member
SUPER Site Supporter
Google has banned Parler from the Play Store. I'm sure Apple will pull the trigger soon enough.

Won't be long before Chrome and Safari are blocking conservative sites at the browser level.
 

300 H and H

Bronze Member
GOLD Site Supporter
My bet is the Democrats here are.....................................

Silent about this. They do not care of half the nation is silenced.
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
When I was growing up, with a father and several uncles who served in WWII, there was a saying of that generation and it was: I don't like what you are saying but I'll defend your right to say it.

Many of you know I'm not a Trump fan. I'm way too libertarian to like him. I'm a strong anti-socialists and dislike almost all of the Democratic platform. I believe the GOP long ago lost its way, it only finds its religion when the Democrats are in charge. So that all being said, and while I own/love my iPhone and my MacBook, what Apple and Google and the whole of the "tech world" are doing to Parlor (and I've never been to that website) is simply un-American and totally wrong.

Our "greatest generation" would be rolling in their collective graves to witness this type of censorship.
 

tiredretired

The Old Salt
SUPER Site Supporter
Apps can easily be side loaded onto Android devices because I have done it. I had a hearing aid app that Google Play claimed would only work on newer Samsung phones. I side loaded it onto my Galaxy S5 and it worked perfectly until I got rid of the phone. Not sure about Apple.
 

XeVfTEUtaAqJHTqq

Master of Distraction
Staff member
SUPER Site Supporter
It's harder on Apple. Most people can barely operate their phones let alone figure out how to side load apps or jailbreak the phone.

At the end of the day, the suppression goal will be achieved.
 
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Doc

Bottoms Up
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
I truly hope this backfires on the tech bigots.

I was going to drop my iphone because of the BS itunes forces you go go through. In steps Media Monkey and a few others. I downloaded Media Monkey and can manage all the tunes on my iPhone with ease. iTunes sucks. I hope a similar solutions pops up to counter the BS Apple, Twitter and Facebook are trying to pull. It's wrong and in the end they will pay. 75 million of us, and there is power in numbers.
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
This seems like a relevant article, it goes a bit beyond censorship, more to the death of our culture through 'wokeness' and how the woke generation not just censors people and ideas but the entire society. Full story at link under the headline.


The coming ‘woke’ American Theocracy

By Simon Black via Sovereign Man

Over a two day period in late March of 1979, the people of Iran held a groundbreaking referendum to turn their country into a theocratic Islamic Republic where the religious leaders ruled supreme.

According to the wholeheartedly honest and incorruptible officials who counted the votes, 99.3% of the ballots were cast in favor of becoming an Islamic Republic.

(This bears a striking resemblance to Kim Jong Un winning a 2014 ‘election’ in North Korea with 100% of the vote, or when Saddam Hussein won re-election in Iraq back in 2002 with 11.4 million votes in favor, and 0 against.)


Within months, a new constitution was drafted, and Iran became a theocracy.

In a theocracy, the rules and rituals of the official state religion become pervasive in everything– politics, education, business, news, entertainment, and even your daily routine– regardless of whether or not you’re a believer… if you’re even allowed to be a non-believer.

In its own way, the United States (and much of the West) is rapidly becoming a theocracy where the woke leftist religion similarly pervades our daily lives.

We can already see it.

Just look at the education system, where schools and universities are indoctrinating young people into the virtues of Marxism, Critical Race Theory, and other woke pseudoscience topics.

Children are taught to view themselves as oppressors or victims, and to judge themselves (and others) not based on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin.

And even basic subjects are being radicalized.

The United States was founded in 1619. Biology is intolerant. 2 + 2 = 4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy”.

Entertainment is dominated by these same ideals. You can’t even watch a basketball game anymore without having a woke agenda thrust in your face.

And the mainstream media is clearly playing a major role in championing these principles to the public, including shaming of any intellectual dissent and burying information they don’t want you to see.

Big businesses have completely sold out to the wokists. Huge brands like Gillette wag their fingers at their own consumers, presuming that all men are sleazy, oppressive scumbags.

Tech companies which once stood for the free-flow of information are zealously censoring content.

And most large companies are now overtly prioritizing top executives and directors based on identity characteristics like race, sexual orientation, and gender, rather than talent and integrity.

(Ironically they all sing the praises of the Chinese Communist Party, which is conspicuously exempt from abiding by these fanatical woke principles.)

The wokist religion is invading daily life as well. You must participate in the rituals– raise a fist in solidarity, say the names, support the peaceful protesters, etc.

Any dissent is greeted with rage and cancellation. Daring to utter the words ‘all lives matter’ can result in you losing your friends, your business, and your reputation.

You must use only the words that have been prescribed. For example, “women” has been replaced with “people who menstruate.”

(And you must feign OUTRAGE on social media when someone uses the incorrect words.)


This 1984-style language cleanse has become so ridiculous that even the word “pedophile” is being quietly replaced with “minor-attracted person” so as not to ‘unfairly’ stigmatize… the pedophiles.

This religion is also a major influence in government now.

Elected leaders rush to show their constituents how pious and virtuous they are, whether they’re kneeling in solidarity for a photo opp, or changing their own rules to banish gender-specific language in the House of Representatives.

And we saw last year how government policy has started to become driven by the supreme religious leaders, i.e. American Ayatollahs who wield extraordinary, unelected power.

They control a perpetually outraged Twitter mob through hashtags and memes. They get to tell people whose life does and doesn’t matter… who’s an oppressor and who’s a victim. And they rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in donations with zero oversight or transparency.

It’s important to point out that this new woke fanaticism is a polytheistic religion with many gods to exalt.

There are the cultural gods whose followers wage jihad peacefully protest against everything in their path– monuments, buildings, and businesses run by infidel non-believers.

But there are also fanatics who worship Covid… or more appropriately, they worship the FEAR of Covid.

Theirs is a god of panic and outrage who demands strict obedience.

And they follow the commandment to terrorize anyone who isn’t afraid or commits the blasphemy of asking a rational question about the disease or a vaccine.

There are also the Marxist gods, whose worshipers demand you make a routine sacrifice of your hard work to the failed altar of Communism.

And there are plenty of other gods in the mix, like the Green gods whose devoted followers at the World Economic Forum want to eliminate cows and condition humans to eat weeds and “drink toilet water” because of climate change.

It is a busy religion indeed.

Bear in mind that I’m not talking about the future here; this fanaticism has already taken hold in the Land of the Free, and much of the West...​
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Somewhat left leaning, sometimes libertarian this assessment from SPIKED


The woke purge

Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump is a chilling sign of tyranny to come.

Brendan O'Neill
The woke purge

Cancel culture doesn’t exist, they say. And yet with the flick of a switch, billionaire capitalists voted for by precisely nobody have just silenced a man who is still the democratically elected president of the United States. With the push of a button in their vast temples to technology, the new capitalist oligarchs of Silicon Valley have prevented a man who won the second largest vote in the history of the American republic just two months ago — 74million votes — from engaging with his supporters (and critics) in the new public square of the internet age.

Not only does cancel culture exist — it is the means through which the powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the internet era and their clueless cheerleaders in the liberal elites interfere in the democratic process and purge voices they disapprove of. That’s what Twitter’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump confirms.

The new capitalists’ cancellation of the democratically elected president of the United States is a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world. We underestimate the significance of this act of unilateral purging at our peril. It demonstrates that the greatest threat to freedom and democracy comes not from the oafs and hard-right clowns who stormed the Capitol this week, but from the technocratic elites who spy in the breaching of the Capitol an opportunity to consolidate their cultural power and their political dominance.

Twitter’s ban on Trump is extraordinary for many reasons. First, there’s the arrogance of it. Make no mistake: this is the bosses vs democracy; corporates vs the people; exceptionally wealthy and aloof elites determining which elected politicians may engage in online discussion, which is where most political and public debate takes place in the 21st century. Those who cannot see how concerning and sinister it is that a handful of Big Tech companies have secured a virtual monopoly over the social side of the internet, and are now exploiting their monopolistic power to dictate what political opinions it is acceptable to hold and express in these forums, urgently needs a wake-up call.

Secondly, there is Twitter’s deeply disturbing justification for why it suspended Trump. It says Trump’s account ran the ‘risk’ of ‘inciting violence’. And yet the two tweets of his that it cites do nothing of the sort. In one, Trump describes his voters as ‘great American patriots’ and insists they will have a ‘GIANT VOICE’ in the future. In the other he confirms that he will not be attending the inauguration of Joe Biden. That’s it. In what warped moral universe can such standard, boastful Trump-made statements be interpreted as calls for violence?

In the warped moral universe of pre-emptive, precautionary censorship being built by our tech overlords, that’s where. Strikingly, Twitter says its censorship of the president is based on how other people might read and interpret his words. It says its censorious motivation is ‘specifically’ the question of ‘how [Trump’s tweets] are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter’. Trump’s comments ‘must be read’ in the broader context of how certain statements ‘can be mobilised by different audiences’, Twitter decrees. So Trump’s words, strictly speaking, are not the problem; it’s the possibility, the risk, that someone, somewhere might interpret them in a particular way.
This sets a terrifying precedent for the internet age. It legitimises a new regime of online censorship which doesn’t only punish inflammatory speech — which would be bad enough — but which punishes normal, legitimate political speech on the grounds of how other, unnamed people or groups might respond to it.

There would be no end to what could be censored. Trans-sceptical feminists, already victims of Silicon Valley’s woke purges, would be completely wiped out on the basis that some idiot might interpret their intellectual, non-bigoted critiques of genderfluidity as an instruction to bash a trans person. Christians sceptical of gay marriage, pro-life campaigners furious about abortion, radical leftists who say ‘smash the system’ — all could potentially fall foul of this new diktat that says we are not only responsible for what we ourselves think and say, but also for the myriad interpretations that everyone else, from the man in the street to the weirdo incel, makes of what we think and say.

On this basis the White Album should be banned, given its songs ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ were ‘mobilised by different audiences’ to terrible ends — the killings carried out by Charles Manson’s Family. Catcher in the Rye? Censor it. Don’t you remember how it ‘mobilised’ Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon? As for the Bible, the Koran and any number of political texts and anthems — the risks of ‘mobilisation’ that they pose are clearly too great, so, to be on the safe side, let’s scrub those too.

It isn’t just Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg (zero votes) had already indefinitely suspended Trump (74million votes) from Facebook. Reddit has scrubbed its Donald Trump thread. All social-media accounts that promote the mad Qanon conspiracy theory are being suspended. Mike Flynn and Sidney Powell have been banished from Twitter. YouTube is now banning any video and account that says the American election was fraudulent. This shows how ideological Silicon Valley oligarchs have become. For four years leading members of the media and cultural elites in the US and the UK have said the American presidential election and the EU referendum of 2016 were frauds. That they were meddled with, illegitimate, should be overthrown. You’ll find tens of thousands of videos on YouTube featuring people saying the vote for Brexit was a fit-up by Ruskies or an ‘advisory’ vote fraudulently turned into an instructional one. They won’t be taken down. Because our tech overlords are engaged in acts of openly political censorship.

And then there’s Parler, the libertarian alternative to Twitter. Google this week removed the Parler app from its store on the basis that it doesn’t control its users’ inflammatory speech strictly enough. Apple is threatening to do likewise. All those who said ‘Just make your own social-media platform’ clearly underestimated the tyrannical determination of the woke elites to erase ‘offensive speech’ from every quarter of the internet. This is a full-on purge of any voice that significantly runs counter to the worldview of the anti-populist elites.

That the left is cheering this on is cretinism of the most remarkable kind. They are green-lighting the most thorough assault on freedom of speech that the capitalist elites have ever carried out. They are sanctioning the control of speech by billionaires. They are celebrating as corporate oligarchies interfere directly in the democratic process. They are making a fetish of private property rights, insisting that the corporate rights of virtual monopolies like Twitter and Facebook, in this case their right to throw people off their platforms, override the social, democratic good of free public debate.

I know this is unlikely anytime soon — given the entirely bullshit and pseudo ‘leftish’ posturing of the Silicon Valley elites — but imagine if at some point in the future the tech overlords decide that Bernie Sanders or some rabble-rousing organiser of protests outside Google’s HQ might ‘mobilise audiences’ to do something bad and decide to ban them? What will the left say? Nothing, presumably. Or nothing that should be taken seriously, given they will have helped to create this web of tyranny. They have forgotten the cry of the true radical Thomas Paine: ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’

There is danger in the current moment. It comes not from horn-helmeted idiots and racist scumbags who paraded through the Capitol Building for an hour, but from those who wish to turn that despicable incident into the founding myth of a new era of woke authoritarianism. The business and political elites, determined to crush the populist experiment of recent years, will busily launch wars on ‘domestic terrorism’, clamp down on inflammatory speech, purge from the internet and from workplaces anyone with ‘incorrect’ thoughts, and blacklist those who believe populism is preferable to technocracy. They’re already doing it. The Biden administration isn’t even in power yet and this is already happening. Imagine how emboldened the new oligarchies and their woke mobs will become once Biden and Co are ruling. Brace yourselves; the purge is only beginning.
 

tiredretired

The Old Salt
SUPER Site Supporter
This is no longer America. Trump, like him, hate him was our only hope. Once big tech realized they were home free of Trump, we had Black Friday. There is no going back from this in most of our lifetimes. To those of you that took little interest in Sociology at University, study up on the concept of the Overton Window. A new window has opened and the view is right out of your worst nightmares.

May our Good Lord have mercy on us.
 

300 H and H

Bronze Member
GOLD Site Supporter
We need Trump to order up the rally in Silicon Valley to destroy Face Book and Twitter head quarters.
Level the place, and anyone who is dumb enough to stay in the buildings. :furious: :gun1: :gun2_smi: :flame2:

My bet is thousands perhaps hundreds of thousand of Trump supporters would show up to do the deed.
I bet to Mark Zuckerberg does not go out into public ever again with out a raft of body guards with guns.
If not, he is a bigger fool and moron than I think he is.
If he were to some how some way end up in my part of rural America, you can bet he would never been see again.

This fear big tech has of the American people is right in front of us, and is exactly why they are censoring him.
At heart they are a bunch of yellow bellied pussy's, and they know they are now never going to be public again in their movements.
No going out on the streets any more. No more freedom in public ever again..
And they are very correct in their fear.
 

tiredretired

The Old Salt
SUPER Site Supporter
We need Trump to order up the rally in Silicon Valley to destroy Face Book and Twitter head quarters.
Level the place, and anyone who is dumb enough to stay in the buildings. :furious: :gun1: :gun2_smi: :flame2:

My bet is thousands perhaps hundreds of thousand of Trump supporters would show up to do the deed.
I bet to Mark Zuckerberg does not go out into public ever again with out a raft of body guards with guns.
If not, he is a bigger fool and moron than I think he is.
If he were to some how some way end up in my part of rural America, you can bet he would never been see again.

This fear big tech has of the American people is right in front of us, and is exactly why they are censoring him.
At heart they are a bunch of yellow bellied pussy's, and they know they are now never going to be public again in their movements.
No going out on the streets any more. No more freedom in public ever again..
And they are very correct in their fear.
I could NOT have said it better myself. Kudos. Lets rumble.
 
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