Parler removed from Play Store and App Store

Yes, it's happened in the dark corners of the internet but it's also happened in places like Facebook and twitter and in our homes. It's happened outside polling places and on the streets of American towns. I grew up with people who used violent rhetoric to talk about the people that they disagreed with and back then I thought it was hyperbole. But over the last six or seven years not just the last four. I have learned that people really do mean what they say and if they are appropriately radicalized, they will act on those words. It was not surprising to me though it was infuriating that the capitol police and the metro police department were not prepared for this violence, then instead they turned down assistance and prepared for a peaceful protest. It upset me that they prepared for violent insurrection this summer when protesters went into the streets to fight for the rights of black Americans, and justified that over preparation by instead instigating that violence themselves.

They did that through inescapable curfew kitting and whatever the it was that happened at Lafayette square but while it upset me with the exception of Lafayette square I was not surprised.

Despite what the president-elect says, this is the America that we know. I think people are starting to see that the tech companies are sure opening their eyes to it this week we've seen a lot of bands that people like me have been asking for a really long time. It started out with Facebook twitter and YouTube removing a video that the president put up to supposedly ask the rioters to stop but really, he was just egging on this insurrection.

You well know that his twitter account was finally taken down. You probably know that he tried to tweet from the pouts account and those tweets were taken down. You may know that the trump campaign account was taken down for ban evasion. Michael Flynn and Sydney Powell’s accounts were taken down for similar reasons. Rush Limbaugh left the platform. A bunch of q related accounts were taken down I hope that doesn't get this video taken off of YouTube eight admin Ron Watkins account was taken off of twitter and these bands were outside twitter as well. Discord banned the server the Donald for instigating some of this violence. YouTube banned Steve cannon’s show from the platform, twitch banned trump, Shoplifty, PayPal and Snapchat banned trump. YouTube is now handing out strikes for election misinformation. Tick-Tok is limiting the spread of misinformation related to the events at the capitol, Reddit has banned the r Donald trump subreddit after they had already banned are slash the Donald before.

One of the most interesting ones to me is that d live a notoriously open platform. Almost too open has banned streamers, who were at the capitol. Now I am not going to engage with any of this first amendment free speech this is censorship. That is disingenuous and you know it. The argument is so basic and it is like nine rounds ago. It is far below the conversation that we're having. If I were to engage with it, I would be stooping to a level and assuming that you were less smart than you actually are.

You very well know that a private company is different than a government. You are smarter than that. I know it you know it. So, I am not going to engage with that but I do want to talk about one of these bands and that's the ban of the parlor app from the google play store and the threat of a similar ban from the apple app store. If you do not know parlor is a social network that centers around free speech but it's really just a conservative social network it's kind of a place where people who are kind of sick of twitter for limiting the things that they can say to go and say kind of the vile that they can't say on twitter.

You can imagine the kind of people that brings the kind of content that brings and it's honestly not super moderated unless you are saying something that sounds liberal or lefty to them. A lot of the planning for what happened at the capitol this week and a lot of the threats of violence for between now and January 20th are happening on parlor. They are happening a bunch of places like 4chan places like aecium places like the Donald but they are also happening on parlor and google didn't want any of that. They said to parlor you could no longer have your app in our store unless you start actually moderating this out of your platform. Apple has said that if parlor doesn't start moderating within 24 hours, they will do the same. I think this is the right move and so do a ton of people but there's a take that I keep waiting for that I haven't seen yet. But I imagine that I will see it when apple eventually does remove parlor from their app store like I expect them to. And I expect that it'll come from one of these center-left techie types.

It goes something like are not you happy that apple has those app store rules these days that they removed the thing that you didn't like? Looks like those app store policies are a good thing and there actually shouldn't be a way to get things on the iPhone that apple doesn't want there.

Look I’m not going to lie once I had like a 30 second brain break to stop thinking about the end of democracy in the united states that thought entered my brain.

Once I thought for more than a few minutes on it, I came to a few conclusions

1
Parler has always existed as a website.

2
It is always had a way to distribute its vile content to the people that were looking for that. That didn't go away when google took the app out of the play store. And it would not go away if apple takes the app out of the app store. In fact, the way that users are getting this on android phones right now is by using the PWA. In fact some of that has caused some hilariously idiotic moments where people see the word progressive in the term progressive web app and don't want to install it. But my point is that the app store and the play store are not going to stop parlor.

3
When we've talked about things like this before we talked about classes of apps that I believed would be worse off if they were not native apps. However, nothing about parlor is going to be worse off just because it's a web app not that I care about its user experience.

4
Parlor's content deserves to be harder to reach. Unlike an email app or a parental controls app or fortnight. Parlor's content is reprehensible it's violent and in some cases it's illegal. And it deserves to be harder to find. It needs to go apple deciding that fortnight can't be on the app store that's a financial dispute. These are different issues entirely and it's totally normal for me to come to different conclusions.

5
I still believe that apple has some app store policies that don't make sense. Things like their cloud gaming policies or that you cannot use private APIs and distribute in the app store or hell actually really disagree with their policies against porn. Google has some policies too that I don't love very similar policies to some of the ones that apple has.

6
Lastly, I do think that you should be able to get either an alternative app store or have a different way to install apps on your iPhone besides the app store. There are ways to do this on android.

I do think that that would mean that it could be possible that parlor could find a new distribution method. However, any app store business worth anything would struggle to justify keeping parlor in their listings if google and apple had already pulled it.

If it was a small store that was kind of edgy and breaking all these rules and was a little taboo, that would push parlor further into the shadows which is exactly what you want. You want the extremists to be hiding you want them to be afraid of sharing their views in public.

That's fine, I’m happy that these app stores have these rules and when the world's not crumbling around us, I’ll still find reason to complain about them. But right now, they are working just fine.