Last year the Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report that found QAnon’s following had grown considerably in Australia during 2020, with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter driving increased engagement.
The report found Australia was the fourth largest country for QAnon activity, behind the US, UK and Canada. Its presence in Australia is also evident on less mainstream sites. For example as Canadian QAnon research Marc-Andre Argentino has pointed out, there were at least six Australian Q “research boards” on the site 8kun with about 4,000 posts by January last year. That had increased to 11 boards by the start of 2021.
Last year, Guardian Australia revealed QAnon had found a follower in Tim Stewart, a family friend of the prime Scott Morrison. Stewart was behind one of Australia’s largest QAnon-linked accounts, BurnedSpy34.
SkySilk, a Web infrastructure company based outside of Los Angeles, is now hosting Parler, SkySilk’s chief executive, Kevin Matossian, confirmed to NPR in an interview.
Matossian refused to comment on the terms of the arrangement, or under what conditions SkySilk will do business with Parler, which was heavily used by the rioters in connection with the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In new content guidelines released by Parler on Monday, the company says it will deploy a “privacy-preserving process” using an algorithm and human moderators to police content that threatens or incites violence.
Additionally, Parler says there will be a “trolling filter” in which content that attacks someone based on race, sex, sexual orientation or religion will be covered up. Yet those who want to view the content will be allowed by clicking through the filter.
Mark Meckler, one of the early creators of the Tea Party movement and now Parler’s interim CEO, said the platform has been rebuilt on independent technology and is “not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations.”
Indeed, Parler has turned to Web infrastructure companies that have welcomed extremist and hate-filled websites, including Epik, a firm based outside of Seattle that supports Parler’s domain, as well as sites including InfoWars, BitChute and Patriots.win, previously known as The Donald.
Six or seven years ago, the idea of “canceling” someone was largely used among younger people online, particularly on Black Twitter, as Vox’s Aja Romano has explained.
Data: Anything represented in digital form, including non-executing knowledge stored in digital form.
Information: The momentary extraction of structure from data that modifies the perspective to the interpreter by creating new data or insight. Information only exists at the time of active data interpretation. Information creates the context that reveals discontinuities between what is known and what is new, triggering the need for learning.
Knowledge: Rules, algorithms, interpreters (such as pattern recognizers) or other mechanisms, including those that exist in the human brain (regardless of our ability to describe those mechanisms) that transform data into information. Knowledge may be changed by its interaction with information.
Wisdom: Specialized knowledge that acts to filter/active the knowledge that is best used to extract the appropriate information from data. Like, knowledge, wisdom may also be changed by the experience of its use through positive or negative reinforcement.
My note: Both “The Guardian” and “Outside the Beltway” are left-leaning and these publications may be perceived as “political.”
The significance of preserving documents, however, is well presented in both publications.
The Guardian, however, present a well-done overview of the history and mechanics for preservation of documents, in this case, presidential.
Historians having to tape together records that Trump tore up