I don't know which social media platforms use AWS to any critical extent, but I can't imagine them ejecting a big name like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc over "finding dozens of posts on the service which it said encouraged violence".
Yes, because "dozens" represents different percentages of content on Parler vs much much bigger platforms like Twitter. Parler is filled with content that encourages violence, while Twitter is used for all kinds of things.
The threshold is if the management at Amazon etc. feel that it would generate too much bad publicity and/or potential legal liability for them to provide service to an organization mired in such controversy.
The distinction, that AWS, Google, and Apple have all claimed, is that Parler refuses to sufficiently moderate the inciting of violence. Perhaps that claim is in error, perhaps such judgements are too subjective. If so, large social media companies might avoid AWS for fear of it.
If that means that Parler refuses to moderate the actual planning or threatening of crimes, the legal system would shut them down. Section 230 doesn't protect social media companies from criminal liability.
If that merely means that Parler allows posts that make people angry with a fair amount of violent rhetoric, well, that's all social media. In that case, the distinction is partisan, not principled.
Probably the ToS has language about when AWS can decide to stop hosting. I would assume the langue is extremely broad, legally speaking, in how much control it gives AWS to their own platform.
If you're going to build something aimed entirely at "taking down/riling up the establishment" you need to make sure you're not entirely dependent on the establishment to keep your something online.
> Over the past several weeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence. [...] It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. [...] This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you.
>You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. [...] This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you.
Assuming this is true, it's why I shed no tears for Parler and their circumstances.
However, things like "sufficient" and "urgency" need to be established in law, after which the rules are clear and all of these platforms can be held to account for the content they host and spread.
Should those things be established by law though? First amendment says the government shouldn’t be able to prosecute your for speech for a reason, letting the entity with a monopoly on violence say what speech is acceptable/how to deal with it is a massive issue. I’d much rather speech be deal with as it has here, with individual corporations and people refusing to work with bad actors as they see fit. This sort of suppression of speech is the free market of ideas in action, in my mind.
If it turns out that gives the current tech giants too much individual power, that’s a separate issue to deal with.
Not moderating their uh, “content”, is very expensive for the rest of us. It’s potentially, an extreme expense for Amazon. No one has an obligation to let their business suffer for you.
It's obvious there should have been more moderation. However, Parler is a 30 employee start up. Their efforts would fall sort of the ideal either way...
Indeed, and I think it's because Parler is best known for hosting violent, far-right content, that is linked to the recent insurrection at the Capitol Building. Whereas the other services you cite are much more generic in their clientele.
So based on this, Amazon made a business decision to deny service to Parler, due to the adverse publicity (and perhaps, potential legal liability) generated for them by hosting this content.
Then maybe AWS should just come out and say "We disabled our services for Parler because it's very unpopular and we don't want to be associated with it."
They pretty much already did. In corporate PR terms, "it contravened our Terms of Service" is essentially synonymous with "we don't want to be associated with it".
"parler is just not worth the aggravation" - they are likely to be a minuscule revenue source that requires constant monitoring to make sure we not facing any liability, as well as potentially pissing off our existing clients. Therefore, its in our best interests just not to bother with them.
Anyone that thinks corporations care one way or another about anything except their bottom lines, has a much higher view of corporations then I do.
I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. That's just capitalism. No master except the almighty dollar.
but if they were at least honest about it, maybe we could stop re-hashing this everyday...
The tweet says: "#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen."
Do you think that is not as bad as what Trump has said?
They're not wrong that it's different, Israel and Jews are two different things. You can be against Israel without being and antisemite, though I wouldn't guess that's the case here.
They're not wrong that it's different, Israel and Jews are two different things. You can be against Israel without being an antisemite, though I wouldn't guess that's the case here.
Israel is a country, Jews are a race. You can be for the replacement of Israel with a more inclusive nation-state without calling for a Jewish genocide.
Now you and I both know the Ayatollah believes in a Jewish genocide, but this particular tweet isn’t proof or evidence of it.
You have to understand things in context though. Trump never said "storm the US capitol". Twitter's official reason for banning him was for glorifying violence by tweeting that “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” and that he wouldn't be going to the inauguration.
If you can twist that into supporting the rioters and calling for violence at the inauguration, I don't see how you can't see calling for the destruction of Israel could cause people to be anti-Semitic.
If Trump tweeted that Mexico was cancerous tumor on America that has to be removed and eradicated, it is possible, and it will happen, do you think Twitter be cool with that? What if he had previously endorsed the genocide of all Mexican people? What if Americans had commonly been committing terrorist attacks against Mexicans?
or the fact that nicolas maduro - a man already convicted of crimes against humanity by the UN - still has an account and has gone uncensored. how anyone here defends such blatant hypocrisy is beyond me
Please remind me when Nicolas Maduro led an armed mob into the US Capitol.
We judge threats not only on their intent, but on their success in executing that intent. On that measure, Parler is much more dangerous than Maduro, Putin, or the Ayatollah.
I don't think "convicted of crimes against humanity by the UN" violates Twitter's ToS, and I'm assuming he didn't use Twitter to commit any of the alleged crimes, so this is a pretty bad faith, whataboutism, complete non-sense, etc.. By this logic you could ban both Bush and Obama, too.
Twitter let Trump spew his garbage right up until the point that it led to an armed insurrection.
So far, Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has. That's why they get taken more seriously.
As Twitter said, it's not just the content, but the context as well. When Iranian soldiers invade the US Capitol, I'm sure they'll face a Twitter ban as well.
The mob nearly succeeded in capturing, kidnapping, or killing democratically-elected members of Congress. Or, as they were chanting, in hanging the vice president. I see no reason not to take them seriously.
The leadership in Iran, in contrast, has not gotten any closer to its goal of destroying Israel since the Revolution.
it's clear that selective enforcement occurs, especially on Twitter. while i'm sure there are examples of violence being incited on Parler, I can find just as many examples (if not more) on Twitter.
I would be near willing to bet that more of the Capitol Hill events were planned on private Facebook groups, chats, etc than on Parler. Signal is a chat app that is secure and group chats are big in planning... So are they going to ban Signal? Conspiracy theories are rampant on WeChat and even over text messages.
I just said they probably were on private Facebook groups, once you meet there you can branch out to Signal and WeChat, etc. My point is that you don't see calls to ban those apps, but everyone is celebrating Parler's death. I think everyone should be careful what they wish for.
Equating private with public messaging is ridiculous. Not sure how laws are in the US, but when doing support here in germany we had to have private in-game messages reported by a participant before we were even allowed to look at them. The company obviously had a much easier time shaping the atmosphere in the public forum.
Also while ensuring those tools can never be used for "evil" is unreasonable, we should expect dominant players to do what they can or at least not do a lot worse than everyone else. Are you arguing Parler tried to moderate as much as others?
Agree. Parler's discovery capability was garbage. You had to search for and follow big name people to get anywhere. So if Parler was really the breeding ground for the Capitol siege there'd be a clear smoking gun on who the organizers were. That never surfaced.
Meanwhile there are lots of private conservative/Republican groups on Facebook no one wants to talk about.
It's not about finding posts encouraging violence, it is about refusing to try to moderate that content, and your suggestion otherwise is disingenuous. If Facebook said "we are no longer going to try and moderate content that incites violence" there would obviously be blowback.
Roughly translated, "everyone who isn't on my side is going to be killed by our side, which might upset you, but I would not consider that 'inciting violence'."
EDIT: I misunderstood "purge" in this context. I disagree that silence on moderating content is "violence" just as I disagree that anything you disagree with is "violence." But I do not believe content will be "purged" unless it's part of a movement to unseat democracy or coordinate violent actions.
I disagree with what he said, but you're seemingly doing your best to make his point.
He's saying that when a person don't like something, the recent trend is to just label it as "inciting violence". He then adds onto that by saying the idea of "silence is violence" means that anyone who does not speak out against the disliked thing is inherently guilty of "inciting violence" as well, so lurkers and moderates are not safe from being labeled.
Again, I disagree with what he said. However, accusing his post of threatening violence against everyone with whom he disagrees does kind of support his point.
I may have misunderstood the grandparent post, because I'm unclear on "you lurkers will be purged." Could you translate that part for me? Are you saying "purged" to not mean removed from society?
Recently, many high-profile social media posts and accounts have been blocked under the pretext of "inciting violence". In that context, I understood his post as saying that lurkers would also be blocked in the same way - as in "purged from social media". I'm definitely concerned with the way he worded it, though.
This myth that Parler doesn't moderate is simply not true. All screenshotted accounts I could find on Buzzfeed - such as ones from @QanonLV were banned from there before it was taken down.
HN is not full of morons. I do agree with you that Parler is generally misrepresented, but there is plenty of dissenters here. Things aren't as unbalanced as you perceive.
"Parler will not knowingly allow itself to be used as a tool for crime, civil torts, or other unlawful acts. We will remove reported member content that a reasonable and objective observer would believe constitutes or evidences such activity. We may also remove the accounts of members who use our platform in this way."
We live in a capitalist free-market system. Amazon (or any entity) is free to choose with whom they do business (oh the irony!). They are dropping Parler because the the current political climate has manifest in such a way that they think it will cost them more financial and/or political capital than the alternative (recall there is a lot of antitrust sentiment out there right now).
Too bad so sad. Sorry not sorry. This is exactly the kind of "freedom" for which many of the above platform's users would advocate. Parler's PR team is missing the opportunity to applaud AWS for exercising their freedoms.
Okay, but shouldn't it at least bother you that Amazon is lying about their reason? I don't think congratulating a company for exercising their rights is appropriate when they're actively lying to our faces.
Unless, of course, they actually stand by what they've said. In which case we come right back to my original post.
Amazon doesn't really come off as the "good guy" by admitting they have weighed the current political climate against their profits. Especially given whose about to be in charge. They made a business decision and wrapped up in some good 'ol PR spin/legalese. It happens all the time. About everything. It's still their right to refuse service.
It's more analogous to a single server host refusing to host a site, while the material components (actual physical servers) are still readily available if likely outside the financial range for a site at their size (tbh though, I have no idea what sort of server needs this site would actual have).
Parler could still go out and build their own servers. The fact that this is a project driven by "free speech enthusiasts" and not actual engineers means they're probably going to have a real hard time getting the engineering stuff back in line.
Apple/Google refusing to sell your app is just that: a store refusing to sell a product.
>Parler could still go out and build their own servers.
Yes, and as someone on Twitter pointed out, as a customer also denied service, Rosa Parks could have gone out and started her own bus line (likely outside her financial range though).
The argument to "do it yourself" is silly. Europe sees it. The ACLU sees it. Why can't you?
For the record: I think these platforms should be responsible for what they host.
The 1st amendment gives all of the companies the freedom of association. They can deny doing business for any reason except for protected class. Are you trying to force companies to do business with entities that they do not wish to do business with?
>The 1st amendment gives all of the companies the freedom of association.
I was under the impression the First Amendment was about the government imposing laws that restricted religion or expression of the citizenry. Can you point to the part that says anything about how businesses (built off of public infrastructure) are to be run?
Citizens United gave corporations constitutional rights (specifically the first amendment). Which means they have freedom of association. The only way to stop AWS from dropping Parler would be if the government forced AWS to host Parler which would be a violation of AWS’s freedom of association.
The only caveat to this is protected class. There are some movements to make political affiliation a protected class, but I personally think that’s the wrong path to go down since it’s not an “inherent” attribute of a person like race, age, sexual orientation, etc.
>The only way to stop AWS from dropping Parler would be if the government forced AWS to host Parler which would be a violation of AWS’s freedom of association.
I don't have an answer to this, because I agree with you.
Maybe if you "arbitrarily" decide to stop doing business with someone, after you've already started, without a breech of any terms of service, you should be financially liable in some way? Contract law should cover that (I'm def no expert). Does it? Like, if Amazon decides to cut me off from hosting, and I haven't broken any laws, rules or ToS, they should have to pay for me to be up-and-running elsewhere. In other words, AWS can't boot someone without establishing wrong-doing.
It feels like this wouldn't require much more than tighter contracts, handing more power to the customer. I'm in favour of that.
If you sign a long-term contract, sure. For example, Pinterest just signed a multi-year $750M contract with AWS. If AWS kicked them off, there would be repercussion for breach of contract. But just signing up for AWS’s generic TOS’s with a credit card means AWS can likely kick you off for any reason.
Pretty much any large company with appropriate risk controls (not to mention the financial incentives) will negotiate and sign custom long-term deals with AWS’s extremely large sales staff.
If there was a law preventing businesses from refusing service to a group of people, then the government is effectively requiring those businesses to associate with those people. Association is protected as free speech, so that's government-compelled speech. And the First Amendment prohibits the government from "abridging the freedom of speech," which means no compelled speech or association.
Still, we do have some laws compelling speech (tobacco warning labels) and association (restaurants can't refuse to serve Muslims). But there has to be a good justification. Warning labels express facts and prevent harm. Protected classes are all things considered "inherent" to a person (gender, religion, ethnicity). But there's a high bar for these kind of laws. And preventing people from choosing relationships based on politics is clearly against the First Amendment.
>If there was a law preventing businesses from refusing service to a group of people
This isn't about refusing to do business with someone. The issue in my eyes is agreeing to do business with someone and then arbitrarily[1] deciding to not do business with someone, with no recourse to the customer because the provider is a massive conglomerate with unlimited resources.
AWS didn't refuse to do business with Parler, they did business with them for years. Then one day, based on ambiguous and discriminantly applied rules that may or may not apply to Parler's competitors on the same hosting platform, decided to not do business with them. I don't think that's right.
Look at Apple's letter to the Parler CEO regarding being pulled from the App Store: Apple says Parler is responsible for all the content on their site. And yet, Apple doesn't live by the same rules, in fact they actively lobby against them.
[1] Arbitrary because AWS, as far as I've seen, doesn't say "here are the rules you agreed to, here's where you broke them. Goodbye". There's a lot of ambiguity. Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
I'm with you for preventing companies from using their size to force very unfair contracts. But I have to say, in this situation, a fairer contract would probably still let Amazon drop Parler.
> Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
From the sound of it, Parler was not responding well to requests for moderation and didn't show signs of improvement. Twitter might be better at it. And, for contracts, it shouldn't matter if one party lets some parties slide but is a stickler for others. The contract was the terms on paper, not "These terms or the most lax behaviors for any parties agreeing to the same terms."
I don't want to force companies to do business with entities they do not wish to do business with, but I do want companies that engage in ideological censorship to lose their immunity to be held liable for damages caused by the entities they do continue to do business with - unless they stop engaging in moral editorializing.
The entire down-voting mob I've been railing against the last 2 days missed this.
"I want things that I like to be available to me and I want people who deny it to me to be held criminally liable because I don't understand the case law".
I think people are misplacing their anger that big-tech has too much control over our world. This is fine to be upset about, but you can't say "they have too much control, therefor it's illegal for them to do the things they're doing". No, the laws you want haven't been written (or repealed).
There's also a ton of pie-in-the-sky dreaming that if we could just undo the "bad-part" of 230 then magically Twitter would have to host things because reasons which is a gross misunderstanding.
TL;dr- HN commenters tend to skew towards "Engineer" understanding and not "Lawyer" understand, and it's causing them friction with reality lately.
I disagree since political opinions aren’t a well-defined class or even an idea. At least with religion you can restrict it to religion federally recognized by the IRS. With political opinions, literally every conceivable declarative statement could be considered a political opinion. It’s a degenerate case.
One major difference: Rosa Parks was an individual attempting to use a private service. Parler is a business attempting to use a private service to do business. Rosa Parks getting kicked off for being black is one thing, but what if she was on the same bus trying to sell candy bars? Weirdly, that's still a reason you can get kicked off a bus.
I mean the question of the era is what "rights" do we have online.
Do I have the "right" to have my site hosted by a private company, or is that a service? Do platforms have a "requirement" to act as neutrally as possible, or is it just better for business?
>Do I have the "right" to have my site hosted by a private company, or is that a service?
It's a good question, and I think we need to figure out where that line is.
Because I agree, AWS should be able to say they don't want this customer. At the same time, when we live in a world where everything is privatized (and monopolized) you very quickly run out of options. Host it yourself? What if all server companies refuse to sell to you, or the internet service providers refuse to provide you with connectivity? Do you need to lay your own fibre and fab your chips? Where do you get those supplies? It's tough.
That is quite the hypothetical. Given that the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems incredibly unlikely that all server companies and internet service providers would refuse their business.
In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong. For example, just look at The Pirate Bay, who have managed to stay online and operational despite years of attempts by powerful corporations and nation states to take it down.
>Given that the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems incredibly unlikely that all server companies and internet service providers would refuse their business.
I can agree that getting up and running is, probably, always possible. But that is no consolation if you're a business that can arbitrarily be shut down on a whim, perhaps without even being given a warning. The financial circumstances might make restarting or moving around untenable.
>In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong.
Yes, and if there's anything good to say about this mess, it's that this particular kind of service is likely to grow.
Yes but considering the business Parler are in, i.e. publishing the sort of controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites, they would have been wise to have a disaster recovery plan for hosting that covered this possibility.
>they would have been wise to have a disaster recovery plan for hosting that covered this possibility.
I agree, and don't feel upset about their particular circumstances.
However, as others have noted, Twitter (moving to AWS) has vastly more controversial content. What are the guidelines as far as what content is tolerable and/or needs to been moderated, and at what rate of "urgency", for them versus Parler? These things aren't spelled out. How can a small business comply?
I think the general guideline is, don't provide your hosting provider with incentives to enforce their terms of service against you, to the point where you're denied any further business from them.
It's not, this has happened many times previously.
Including against similarly far-right sites, e.g. Stormfront, Gab, 8kun/8chan, etc. All of which are still operational, after changing hosting providers.
I mean that's really the crux of my argument. Nothing illegal happened unless AWS violated their TOS/contract. The idea that someone HAS to do business in perpetuity with you or else you'll be ruined is...bizarre? It's the whole reason contracts exist in the first place.
If you don't like the laws, you get the laws changed. There are all sorts of legal, but icky things that exist in the world (bakers being allowed to discriminate based on sexual identity, jobs being allowed to fire you for political affiliation, etc)
I've seen this sentiment before, and I can't figure out the logic.
I used to work for a company that didn't make 300K a quarter and we managed our own boxes. Yes our scale and problem domain was about an order of magnitude smaller, but it wasn't trivially small (optimization was still a relevant problem for us). What did people do 15 years ago before all of these could platforms did all the work for you? Do that. It's really not that hard!
The analogy above is ridiculous. The problem isn't that Rosa Parks couldn't start her own bus line (though at the time this was probably not feasible for more reasons than just money). The problem is that she was denied service because of her race. You cannot change your race by "doing it yourself".
If SpaceX denies me the opportunity to fly their shuttle do I have to build my own spacecraft to get to space? Yes... I do. I'm sure we could come up with all sorts of other fun examples!
The logic is that "your own boxes" is just another layer in the stack of places private companies can deny doing business with you. Did you manufacture those boxes yourself, from the silicon up? If you didn't, you better hope you don't get blacklisted by parts suppliers.
>You cannot change your race by "doing it yourself".
The analogy is: if she didn't like being denied because of her race, she should have started her own busline.
Of course, we have laws in place that say you can't deny someone service based on race. That's great, and solves that problem.
So tell me what law Parler broke? Has it been proven in court? Or did a private company decide that on their own? Why should they have that power?
I mean, I'm not naive; I understand what Parler is/was trying to do, and it's gross. But the process shouldn't be arbitrary, at the whims of liability protected pseudo-monopolies.
Sure we can move the goalposts. No, we did not mine for our own minerals. What is your point? If our company was unable to secure hardware it would have ceased to exist. A shame for the company, its employees, and clients, but that's business.
> The analogy is: if she didn't like being denied because of her race, she should have started her own busline.
Right. The above is not summarizing the reason why our society has a problem with the events that occurred. The problem is why Rose Parks was denied service. It has nothing to do with her ability to start her own bus line. Does that make sense? Again, the analogy is completely missing the point.
> So tell me what law Parler broke?
I have no idea nor the inclination to investigate. They don't need to break a law for another business to cut ties. This happens all. the. time. Your problem seems to be a case of "this instance is different than the rest". If you have a problem with antitrust behavior, argue that. You aren't going anywhere with this line of logic.
Nobody is moving goalposts. The point is that there's always another layer of service providers that can cancel you, some of which are monopolists. If you think that's fine, or "just business", good for you. I do not.
>What is your point?
People shouldn't be able to put you out of business because they have more power and don't like you.
>Does that make sense? Again, the analogy is completely missing the point.
You're overthinking things. For the third time: "If you don't like it, build your own competitor" -- oft-repeated-- is a ridiculous statement in most cases. No one is going to build their own App Store, Play Store, Facebook..or yes, bus line.
I'm glad you can poke holes in an off-hand analogy though. It was never intended to be a literal 1-1 translation, with Parler filling the role of Rosa Parks.
>They don't need to break a law for another business to cut ties.
That is fundamental axiom of free-market capitalism. How do you think it is supposed to work? I'm trying to imagine a system where competition doesn't exist... oh wait. It's called "Communism".
> People shouldn't be able to put you out of business because they have more power and don't like you.
You must be young. "I have a bridge to sell you". In 15 years you'll better-understand how the world works and your idealism now will feel rather foolish in retrospect. I'll leave it at that.
> some of which are monopolists
I think this is actually what you are meaning to argue against. Just poorly. There is nothing wrong with a company deciding that the profit they derive from selling me widgets eclipses the losses they realize elsewhere, and to therefore end the relationship. This literally happens constantly. I could give you an example last month where we had to end a relationship with a client because they are a competitor to a bigger (more profitable) client who didn't like us serving both. It happens. I promise.
What it seems like you are actually railing against is anti-competitive behavior which is protected against in antitrust law. Monopolies are not against the law so long as they don't engage in certain market-making behaviors[0]. That is, behaviors that make "building your own competitor" impossible (i.e. undermining the fundamental axiom of FMC). This isn't a case of anti-competitive behavior. This is the market deciding that the financial/political cost of associating their business with an entity is greater than the profits they gain. It's business. Parler, in this moment, simply doesn't have a sustainable business model. The best thing they could do is to turn the narrative, lean in, and applaud AWS for exercising its freedom. But they are young too...
And for what it's worth I wasn't "poking holes" in your analogy. I was tearing it down entirely. It doesn't hold at all - even a little bit. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the very foundations on which the civil rights movement was based, and some respects, liberal democracy altogether.
[0] Amazon is currently in court fighting the government in this respect. So is Facebook.
I haven't seen amazon claim that Parler broke the law. They have a TOS policy that forbids the hosting of illegal content.
> Has it been proven in court?
If a AWS customer is hosting child porn, does AWS take it down as soon as they're aware of the content, or do they wait for a court ruling?
> Or did a private company decide that on their own? Why should they have that power?
It's not power. You have a responsibility to exercise your judgement, and avoid participating in criminal acts. If you knowingly participate and profit until there's a trial in court, then you're an accessory. Section 230 has some exemptions -- you aren't protected if you maintain illegal content.
What happened on 1/6 was an armed crowd breached the capitol building. A plain reading indicates that this is an act of war, and AWS has enough legal problems without opening themselves to charges of aiding an enemy of the state in an act of treason.
This isn't "power" it's a matter of legal responsibility.
>I haven't seen amazon claim that Parler broke the law. They have a TOS policy that forbids the hosting of illegal content.
If Amazon is saying Parler hosted "illegal content" then they are saying they broke the law. How can it be any other way?
>If a AWS customer is hosting child porn, does AWS take it down as soon as they're aware of the content, or do they wait for a court ruling?
Child porn is illegal, hate speech (and in lots of places, "incitement") is not. In fact, in many jurisdictions the latter are protected speech. There is no moral equivalence here. Society's rules are clear on child porn. They are less clear on what constitutes incitement. That should be evident if you're following these events.
>It's not power.
"ALCU Counsel Warns of Unchecked Power of Twitter, Facebook After Trump Suspension"
> If Amazon is saying Parler hosted "illegal content" then they are saying they broke the law. How can it be any other way?
Because I'm not clear on the specific exemptions for section 230. I can't say one way or another whether Parler itself broke the law.
> That's kind of the point here. Society's rules are clear on child porn. They are less clear on what constitutes incitement. That should be evident if you're following these events.
Did people openly plan an armed attack on the capitol building? Yes.
Did people follow through on aforementioned plans? Yes. Violence was incited. Having read quite a few relevant posts on Parler, I'm reasonably sure that their users broke the law.
There is a lot of gray area between voicing frustration and incitement, but this is not one of those cases.
> Child porn is illegal, hate speech (and in lots of places, "incitement") is not.
Isn't "imminent lawless action" the limit of free speech? it seems clear after January 6th that a part of what was promoted on Parler was both imminent and lawless.
>it seems clear after January 6th that a part of what was promoted on Parler was both imminent and lawless.
Assuming the people planning on Parler were some of the same people who stormed the Capitol then yes, absolutely. With the benefit of hindsight, this was incitement, potentially criminal.
Now the tricky part: from Parler's perspective, content that at one minute is "free speech" is suddenly illegal, or at the very least ToS breaking, in a matter of hours. Were they given a reasonable amount of time to remove the content (and what good would that even do, after the fact)? Did Amazon make Parler a political target, and arbitrarily apply a rule to them that they did not apply to other customers (Twitter)? Likely, imho. Does any of it even matter if "businesses can do what they want"?
Curious to know what the process other than market forces should be. Government? Paaah.. they can't even protect kids in schools being shot, control the pandemic or even distribute vaccine in any competent manner. (lots of other examples also come to mind!)
If the president calls for the boycott of Goodyear [0], isn't it also fair for Goodyear to not sell to any of Trumps companies? (Too lazy to look at other boycott tweets)
1.3B page views per month, with I think 23 servers. Building a mostly (I guess?) view only site is different than something like twitter, but it's doable.
Because Parler would need 500 servers for the traffic they were getting (according to their CEO, but it's not qualified further), and 24 hours is the notice AWS had them.
Parler had no idea AWS would just yank them from service at 24 hours notice - I don't think there is any precedent for this from an AWS perspective. So this is the challenge they had if they wanted to move to physical infra after being given notice - 500 servers in 24 hours.
(As a side note, setting up physical infra at the scale of growth Parler was having wouldn't have been practically possible - they had a giant and rapid spike across the last month or so. It also wouldn't have been financially wise, considering they probably don't have the capital and the traffic spike was probably a temporary surge. Plus if you buy physical infra and then your apps get removed by the other cloud providers, that changes your traffic profile again... Parler really had both their hands tied behind their backs to fight this thing).
I never said they did, you said that they could just set up their own infra so it’s not a big deal - I just said that wasn’t possible as they can’t stand up 500 servers in 24 hours.
As an aside, I actually would continue serving a client if I had sold them a service, they were paying for it at the agreed price and keeping on top of invoices, and if me reneging would cause them to go out of business. And then if I had to end it, I would give them as much notice as I could practically provide (particularly if they were willing to profitably pay during the notice period).
I wouldn’t personally do business with you if I thought you would instantly back out of an agreement that you had already profited on with almost zero notice. AWS is no charity here, Parler were paying them for servers.
So it's not possible. So what? What is your point? We are back to square one. What conclusion are you trying to draw from the fact you can't set up 500 servers in 24 hours?
Are you trying to say it's unfair? I just don't see it that way. If Amazon violated the terms of their agreement then fine, let it be litigated. But if Parler can't get back up quick enough in the mean time that's on them. That's how business works. I know. I conduct it. It's not personal.
You are connecting unrelated dots. While it could be argued that the "cloud provider" space is an oligopoly (though I would not argue that), simply deciding to not serve a specific business, even as group, is not an antitrust issue. No business has a "right to service".
Antitrust is more concerned with anti-competitive behaviors: pricing-fixing, group boycotts[0], buying a competitor with the express purpose of removing competition, etc. Amazon and Parler are not in the same market - they are not competing for anything. Antitrust is not going to be a fruitful legal avenue.
If Amazon were somehow influencing Parler's ability to "do it themselves" (e.g. preventing a seller from providing them with boxes), then yes, there may be some legal standing.
[0] Look this one up. It's not what you are thinking.
Yes, power companies have different regulations than AWS.
Which means the analogy is boring.
There's probably a good discussion to be had about how to regulate services like AWS though. The dynamics are probably different, with power companies not quite having the same potential for wanting to disassociate from noxious customers.
I think the interesting takeaway is that so many people consider social media and internet hosting to essentially be public services. The hidden premise/misunderstanding in the "social media censorship" concept is that they are so critical to participation in society that they should be a right like power or water. There are arguments for moving things like internet access into being a public utility. It is interesting that they have skipped directly to wanting to socialize social media.
Internet hosting doesn’t have as strong a geologic component though. Power and water are utilities because they are “natural monopolies”. UPS and FedEx are not utilities since they have less fixed infrastructure.
geologic component isn't relevant. In our current legal system, the only way to ensure equal access to a service is via regulation as a public utility.
> the only way to ensure equal access to a service is via regulation as a public utility
Right, but afaik the reason water/power/etc are made public utilities is because they are natural monopolies:
> Public utilities, the companies that have traditionally provided water and electrical service across much of the United States, are leading examples of natural monopoly. It would make little sense to argue that a local water company should be broken up into several competing companies, each with its own separate set of pipes and water supplies. Installing four or five identical sets of pipes under a city, one for each water company, so that each household could choose its own water provider, would be terribly costly. The same argument applies to the idea of having many competing companies for delivering electricity to homes, each with its own set of wires. Before the advent of wireless phones, the argument also applied to the idea of many different phone companies, each with its own set of phone wires running through the neighborhood.
Plus AWS does actually make their own power. The own and/or fund wind and solar farms across the globe. They also run their own fiber and are part of undersea cable consortiums.
It's more like if I rent you an apartment in my building and then find out you're using it to manufacture bombs. If you end up blowing up a bridge and it can be determined that I knew about your actions, I can potentially be held liable (in the PR sense, if not the legal sense) for abetting terrorism.
It fascinates me that the people most offended by the recent actions of google, amazon, facebook, etc are the ones pushing for the repeal of section 230.
Yes, it's quite strange, but I'm guessing it's mostly due to media disinformation about section 230. People who are actually informed and in favour of free speech and opposed to megacorp oligopolies are strongly opposing changing section 230. Rather, they advocate breaking up the megacorps or making them utilities.
Maybe not repealed, but amended. Section 230 _allows_ for good-faith moderation, but says nothing about bad faith moderation. As much as I hate more legalese and overregulation, it's become pretty clear that these people can't be trusted to act with impunity, so an amendment to section 230 that prohibits arbitrary moderation might help. If you want to host user generated content, and not be held liable for it in a journalistic way, you can only remove content that violates specific, clear, well-defined guidelines.
Your thesis is flawed. You can't define "good faith" in any real way. You either have to accept that sites will be moderated and some number of people will disagree with the moderation, or you have to swing HARD in the opposite direction and decide all sites are now publishers and responsible for all content on their sites including user created content.
HN posting rules require me to say more than just "LOLOK" so we'll go with this:
That standard doesn't exist and isn't objective. No, even that really clever one you're about to come up with. It's not real. It's all subjective. The entire US legal system is a "Common-law" legal system, meaning it's all subjective. Objective is for mathematics, not the law.
The quality of laws is also subjective, yet we've somehow managed to come up with working governments that operate somewhere between tyranny and anarchy.
I don't think it's possible to define a standard that people with wildly different perceptions of reality can agree is "objective."
If you believe that there is a massive conspiracy that resulted in widespread election fraud, flipping the election results, and that the massive conspiracy is going to ruin everyone's lives in the future, you'll find it objectively truthful to make sure everyone posts as much information about the election being stolen as possible up to and including taking up arms and fighting for your freedom, and there's no way to reasonably interpret that content as harmful to the greater good.
If you believe there was no conspiracy resulting in widespread election fraud, but there is a massive disinformation campaign stemming from a demagogue that now has enough followers willing to take up arms and attempt to overthrow the government, you will find it objectively truthful that posting information about the election being stolen will contribute to inciting those followers and is a grave threat to our model of democracy.
Content is, by its nature, open to interpretation, and often written with persuasive language. If you're persuaded, your beliefs and actions will tend one way, and if you're not, they'll tend another way. The same content can only be evaluated in a subjective manner.
I'd argue that introducing legal uncertainty is part of the goal. When these platforms have to consider that every deleted post could get them sued, they will delete less.
They most likely misunderstand what is being proposed, most people think the proposal is to limit section 230 only to services that do not censor user content.
I am offended by the recent actions of digital giants and I never called for repeal of S230.
This is fairly clearly an antitrust case, which has nothing to do with S230. Behavior of the digital giants is very similar to the behavior of railroad oligopolies of the 19th century which actually led to antitrust legislation.
How is it an antitrust case? Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on hosting internet services. And there is no oligopoly for this line of business, there are many thousands of suitable providers worldwide.
It would be different if, say, CenturyLink were blocking content across their transit infrastructure. That would be more like your railroad analogy.
Antitrust legislation isn't built around 100 % monopoly, but rather dominant force and cartel-like behavior, especially if they act to suppress growth of potential competitors. This is the core of antitrust jurisprudence: markets only work in presence of vigorous competition, but big incumbents are highly motivated to obtain so much influence that significant competition does not have a real chance to grow and threaten them.
There is a longish recent staff report on the Web of the Congress regarding behavior of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook (almost 500 pages) [0]. I actually read most of it. These platforms have already engaged in a lot of stuff that is anti-competitive. And the latest purge of Parler is, among other effects, also a suppression of a potential competitor.
Of course, the tech giants say that they weren't officially motivated by a desire to suppress a competitor, but they acted against potentially competing firms so many times already that one should be wary about their explanations.
Thanks for clarifying your position, but I still don't quite see how this applies to Parler in terms of their decision to host upon AWS. There are many thousands of other hosting companies worldwide, they didn't have to use one of the big three IaaS providers.
It seems more like poor planning on their part: over-reliance on specific services of a single provider, and no disaster recovery plan for if this is made unavailable. Particularly considering the business they're in - publishing controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites. They would have been wise to have a backup plan for hosting.
On the other hand, if you were also passing reference to the app store duopoly (as the report mentions this), I agree with you on that. At least on Android a banned app can be fairly easily side-loaded; iOS users are entirely subject to Apple's whims on what their device is permitted to run.
I could definitely have formulated my opinion better...
If Amazon acted alone, I do not think that there would be an antitrust case. But given that Amazon acted together with the app store duopoly, in what appears to be a coordinated action with the same goal, I think the antitrust case applies. If two very dominant players make a pact with a third not-so-dominant player to squeeze somebody a bit more, it only makes their anti-competitive behavior harsher.
BTW, I believe that Parler really could have prepared better. It is obvious that they did not have a good plan B.
Why do you assume that there was necessarily coordination? In my opinion it's likely everyone who is dropping Parler came to their verdict independently.
It is certainly possible that they all acted independently, but given how many cases of anti-competitive behavior on their part have been documented in the linked report of the Congress - these companies are not completely honest.
Mikhail Gorbachev used to say "Trust, but verify." I would like to see some verification in this case.
In the same way that you'd be fascinated by Trump wanting to "open up those libal laws" when he himself would be severely affected (but could probably mitigate it away with enough lawyers)?
It's a special form of doublethink where aesthetics and actions can go into completely opposite directions. Many republican campaigns have made great use of this, particularly to appeal to rural america.
Whatever you didn't like about recent actions of tech companies, section 230 made it possible.
If they should have cut people off earlier and didn't, or haven't gone far enough, section 230 says they have no liability to moderate, unless specific other liabilities apply.
If they cut people off that you don't think is appropriate, section 230 says they have no liability from moderation that they've taken, other than implicit liability of violating constitutional rights (which would need new case law to establish, if it's 1st ammendment speech)
It's not strange if you view it through from their point of view. Rightly or wrongly, these people just want to see much less centralized moderation. And they feel unherd and oppressed (again regardless of whether that's actually true, that's what they experience and feel).
They see things in a more absolutist free speech lens, meaning any content that is legal should be allowed. And they don't see platforms as being responsible for moderation. They view centralized moderation as inherently biased and illegitimate. If they can't or wont allow legal speech, then they think 230 should be repealed and these sites should cease to exist.
They are reacting to takedowns from social media sites, SaaS providers, IaaS providers, and financial services because they view these sites as an oligopoly acting in unison to bar them from the basic infrastructure of modern life. Imagine if typewriter companies ganged up to stop selling to right leaning newspapers and authors. Or, imagine if telegraph companies said they wouldn't transmit messages for Abraham Lincon.
On 230, they see social media sites as a monopoly due to network effects. Also/alternatively they talk about a bait-and-switch, where the social media sites held themselves out as public squares when they were small. But once they were big, they started enforcing their views.
Generally, I think people are failing to put themselves in a Trump supporter's shoes. Imagine you genuinely believed that the election was stolen. The court cases were almost all dismissed on standing and laches. From their perspective, no one will substantively address their videos, affidavits, statistical anomalies, etc.
And when they protest, people call them violent insurrectionists, despite all year BLM doing very similar things (again from their perspective).
It is the policy of the United States-
(1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media;
(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation;
(3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;
...
Up until now, a Laissez-faire regulatory approach seemed to achieve these goals, but it's hardly fair to call what exists at this point a "vibrant and competitive free market" which "maximizes user control over what information is receives by individuals". Especially if a cartel of tech platforms can completely stamp out individuals' ability to listen to the speech of people they want access to. Regulation is needed now.
Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened to have some disgusting content on it. The disgusting content was literally its reason for existing, despite all of the bland "we're just a free speech site" stuff.
And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes" and social media do not mix. It's much easier to turn a community toxic than it is to keep it healthy, and healthy communities (of any sort) need moderation. Certain people have turned this fact on its head and want you to believe that "completely free speech" and "healthy communities" are compatible because they want to overrun healthy channels with their garbage.
The NYT lied to the American public to whip them up into supporting the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent).
Why won't AWS, Google, and Apple collectively ban them? Their open calls for violence were far more consequential and severe and serious than anything on Parler
The actual reason for the war: an informant fed the government bad intel and the state looked the other way because they wanted a reason to invade Iraq.
The Bush administration officials who sold those lies to the public were zionist jews who had written this policy paper just 5 years before Bush appointed them into the government.
> which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent).
Actually, looking up the numbers right now, the total civilian death rate is perhaps 1 million at most, more likely somewhere in the 100,000s. Iraq Body Count gives ~200k civilian deaths; estimation from the number of internally-displaced peoples (basically figuring that displaced-to-dead ration is between 5:1 and 10:1) suggests a number more like ~700k civilian deaths. Extrapolating excess death counts suggest that the latter number is more accurate.
I see the parallel you're trying to draw here but it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm pretty sure the US was going to war in Iraq no matter what NYT said, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
The faulty NYT reporting gave the government a certain level of cover to allow them to do what they already planned to do. Parler was a forum for participants to discuss and actively plan sedition. And there's already violence threatened in the days around inauguration so it stands to reason it could have served the same role again.
The NYT did not make the Iraq war possible. It did not facilitate planning the war. It did not play any role in convincing the Bush administration to go to war.
When the state is lying, it is not easy for reporters to find out that they are lying. They printed what was at the time a bipartisan consensus which had formed on the basis of lies.
So I guess they were involved, but the journalists in the organization in the time did not have the power or the information to swim against the currents of what was happening. Even if they had shut down their paper, we would have gone to war with Iraq.
On the other hand, Parler has purposefully created a space for people to plan violence against the state, and refused requests to be more careful about moderating.
The Iraq war is a great example because it highlights how rare this is. You had to go back 15 years to find an example of the mainstream media misleading people on this scale.
There's a really good reason for that. Journalistic standards are a defense in court against lawsuits. The truth is a defense against Libel.
But further, even just acting in good faith can be a defense against libel. It's only when you knowingly publish a false statement that you get in legal hot water.
This is why Fox news and the like have been doing 180s on voter fraud lies. It's not because they have the best interest of the public at heart, it's because they are trying mitigate liability.
And I supposed Epstein killed himself as well? Much more often the mainstream media simply "memory holes" things it doesn't want you to know about. I mean they certainly tried to get us into war with Syria (anyone remember the "reporter" who sniffed nerve gas?) The lies are blatant and unending, but we all know what side the bread is buttered on for tech start ups, which is why this "news aggregator" is such a laughable joke for anything related to politics.
I missed anyone on MSN(BC) saying his election was illegitimate. There were questions about it, for sure. There was the essentially incontrovertible fact that he won in the EC without winning the popular vote, which is an unfortunate feature of our system. That does lend a certain sense of "illegitimacy" but not in the sense of something illegal having happened, more a sense of "moral legitimacy". A few weeks after his election, the overwhelming majority of progressives accepted that Trump was the officially elected president of the USA. We didn't like it, but we accepted it.
The issues regarding Russian interference were not centered on collusion, but on ... well, interference (which some believe went so far as to include actual collusion).
Mueller's report and the Senate report did find conclusively that the Russians did interfere, and did so with the goal of getting Trump elected. Mueller said that they did not find evidence of active collaboration between the campaign and the Russians ... here's the current Wikipedia summary:
>did not find sufficient evidence that the campaign "coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities". Investigators ultimately had an incomplete picture of what happened due to communications that were encrypted, deleted, or not saved and due to testimony that was false, incomplete, or declined. However, the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion" but was welcomed by the Trump campaign as it expected to benefit from such efforts
Again, I recall essentially nobody in any position of power (certainly not elected Senators) saying the Trump's election was illegitimate. People did say that his election was aided by Russian interference (Mueller and the Senate investigation state this clearly), and that it was/is unfortunate to have a president elected without winning the popular vote.
I poked around on it some, and noticed something ... disturbing.
I saw what I assumed were bots posting a lot of garbage links to 'articles' like "Obama compound raided!" and "8 Democrats switch to Republican Party" (that actually happened in Feb 2020, but the link was to an undated rerun and the link was posted.. 2 days ago?).
The links were to such trustworthy sites as 'firstusanews.us' (made up, but all variants like that), and they all would throw "update your flash player!" malware popups.
Next to each of these links on Parler were view counts - 207, 412, 897, etc - of people who'd clicked the link to view the article.
I could not reply to the link with a comment like "this has malware" because... my account was not verified. Only 'badged/verified' accounts can comment on 'links'. AND... the only way to get 'badged' is to use the mobile app and take a picture of govt ID (driver license, passport, etc). This becomes incredibly lopsided "free speech" biased against moderating/critical voices.
It was literally a field day for bots to post malware garbage and have thousands of victims per day, and no ability for people to warn others.
On one 'article' I followed there were comments from people saying "I don't understand how Parler works" in the comments on the linked article. Indeed...
I was also curious about Parler but, when going to sign up, it asked for my phone number. Ummmm, no thank you. That kind of association is like going to a protest with your cellphone. Pretty easy to get the wrong kind of association attached to you.
I used the mobile app to sign up. However, I just signed up to lurk (Streisand effect), so I can't tell if the fake mail+phone allowed me to post/comment.
Perhaps another question to ask would be, "How fair is it that others are pigeonholed to platforms like this and undoubtedly get the "wrong kind of association"?
Are we reducing certain thoughts, beliefs and, dare I say, questions indiscriminately down to "crimethink"?
Unless you're WAY outside the political mainstream, you aren't pigeonholed into platforms like this. And if you are that far outside the political mainstream, holding thoughts and beliefs like "six million wasn't enough" then how much sympathy am I supposed to have?
Should it? Society has always judged or kept an eye on people based on who they choose to associate with. If you were active on VK or WeChat I'm sure the government would have a few questions to ask you if you applied for a position requiring clearance.
Beyond that, if a platform is known for encouraging behaviour that you and your peers disapprove of. It might make sense for you to avoid registering there in case your peers get the wrong impression of you should the information leak. While not exactly social media, you only need to look at the fallout from Ashley Madison for why you might not want to sign up somewhere because of "the wrong kind of association".
Why social media would be the only forum exempt from this line of thinking I can't imagine.
No, you're right. I am fully on-board with the idea of being careful about who and what I associate with as it relates to maintaining personal integrity and character.
I guess I was approaching that question from a different angle where "wrong kind of association" was from the perspective of Big Brother. So I probably made an incorrect assumption about what the parent comment intended.
> I guess I was approaching that question from a different angle where "wrong kind of association" was from the perspective of Big Brother. So I probably made an incorrect assumption about what the parent comment intended.
I agree with you that there probably is an element of this in the parent comment. Linking your "Cell phone at a protest" to you is probably going to be at the behest of the government.
What the implications of social media and "big tech" are in our society is definitely a conversation worth having. It's just a shame that it's often only brought up in order to distract or deflect attention from bad behaviour. The conversation would be much more productive if it happened at a time when people weren't so inflamed by the issue of the day.
I believe OP is more insinuating that the combination of (ip, user identity {username, cell number, real-world identity}) is an attractive data source for such an agency.
Of course they already have all government IDs. But tying it to a username helps correlate data across other services, and additionally if the user checks from mobile phone or other device, tying it to recent IPs could also be useful. OPSec could prevent some of that, but how many users are doing that?
Seems like scaring away people by asking for cell numbers and photo ids goes too far. The IP address would give the FBI/NSA everything they need to track down an individual's household. After that, it'd be a simple case of monitoring them to figure out who the extremist is.
To me, the more realistic (and scary!) explanation is this thing is just one huge identity theft machine.
I certainly agree that it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. To suggest that setting up a honeypot to have fringe elements actively expose their views in what they deem as a safe environment is not outside of what security agency may do is a bit of stretch
It's a interesting thought to entertain but Parler is most likely not this.
> Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?
The best way to get a bunch of white supremacists and insurrectionists to robustly, undeniably identify themselves might be to ask them to upload their ID. :P
> Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?
The best method for target acquisition, sure. If someone is so perturbed by their reality being rejected by the mainstream that they're willing to sign up for an alternative to maintain their worldview, then running that alternative would be a fantastic way to identify people at risk of radicalization, domestic terror risks, etc.
And if we're being clear, the USIC has run companies with this explicit mission in the past. In fact, running a company to provide one service at face level while providing a different service to the IC underneath is the mode that yielded some of the biggest intelligence wins in Western history. See Crypto AG.
That said, no reason to run it themselves; they're well aware that someone else will end up running it for them, and with security nowhere near front-of-mind for any startup, they can just pick up the key from underneath the doormat and take the farm.
They don't need IDs. They need to positively identify account owners with the IDs. @JohnSmith is not a lot to go on if you want to send the FBI after them. @JohnSmith of 123 2nd Amendment Street, Jackson County Kentucky is a lot more useful.
It's also a pretty good argument against anonymity being the cause of toxicity, considering these chucklefucks were literally uploading their legal identity so they could then shitpost about genocide.
Actually why the flying fuck would someone think it is a good idea to plan an insurrection on this site in the first place?? It's like opposite day opsec
The key to this kind of insurrection is that it is a privilege escalation. If they sufficiently upset normal process, enough emergency control goes to Trump, he will protect them (why stop pardoning now) and make sure all future elections are too risky and anyone who objects and sides with the principals of the republic is fired.
Turkey and Russia are good examples of how this attack works. It relies on a large number of people, possibly even a majority, to overthrow the republic with a populist government with no rules the leader can't change or selectively enforce. The leader shuts down one threat to himself at a time, making his control permanent.
IMO the military is obligated to arrest Trump for treason, which was the turkish backstop, and after a few rounds Turkey finally missed the last time. So once it is used, you have to patch your system to drop privileges from the Presidents office for the next round.
> the only way to get 'badged' is to use the mobile app and take a picture of govt ID (driver license, passport, etc).
<puts on tinfoil hat> Maybe the entire site is just an FBI honeypot for right-wing extremists? (It's obviously not an NSA honeypot, because they could afford to self-host.)
It's interesting how the natural inclination of the folks drawn to this kind of product leads to them being willing to provide a lot more personal information than they otherwise would to other similar platforms.
I'm not 100% sure on that. I saw a lot of 'non-badged' accounts, meaning they weren't providing much info. I guess, though, presumably many (most?) were providing real phone numbers, but Twitter tries to force that from people, so perhaps not much more than Twitter?
The idea Parler is a "free speech" platform or "unbiased" is a lie, in actuality its just a "safe space" for far right provokers. Users have been reporting they're been banned for posting leftist content or for criticism of Parler itself.
If they were so concerned with "freedom" why would they have the following in their terms of use?
“Parler may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason.”
I was never on Parler even to check so I don't know as much as you about the situation, but isn't ID requirement normally a way to combat bots? Maybe it just backfired in this case?
Twitter doesn't have a leg to stand on when Iranian leadership has tweets literally calling for the genocide of Israel, or the CCP has tweets using ethnic slurs against Uigher peoples. Yet why is it that lack of censorship is fine and "healthy"?
One of the things I do, generally, when there's a call to ban something is to actually go and check it out whether it's a site, a book or a movie. And Parler is overwhelmingly just conservative twitter - and just like actual twitter, it has some nasty and gross content. Yet nobody is suggesting we take twitter offline despite their repeated failures to police their own content.
Yeah as a centrist, the double standards we are seeing is what concerns me the most. Instead of all violence and hatred is bad it's "well this is different because they are on our side", that's for "the right reasons", etc to read between the lines.
Actually, Parler has been use to literally plan an overthrow of the US government. That's why it's banned.
So far, Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has. That's why they get taken more seriously. Neither Twitter, nor Apple, nor Amazon want to be responsible for the rise of a fascist regime in the US.
Too often, you can't see the rise of authoritarianism until its too late. This time, we saw it in time. I commend these companies for taking a stand, despite the obvious backlash they'll suffer as a result.
Uh, the "rise of authoritarianism" is the tech companies acting -- at the moment that Congress confirmed Biden's win -- to silence conservative voices (yeah, yeah, private companies, I know). Twitter and Facebook have given Marxism (i.e. BLM) a platform during these past few years, whose explicit goal is to dismantle American democracy.
We're indeed seeing the rise of authoritarianism...I think you're confused as to who the authoritarians are.
A private company cannot be authoritarian. Authoritarianism is a form of government. BLM is not anti-democracy, while those who invaded the Capitol obviously are.
If you consider the silencing of organized threats to overthrow the US government by neo-Nazis and Confederates to be acts against "conservative voices," this tells us a lot about what "conservatism" means now.
When a private company acts in union with, on behalf of, and/or in support of the regime and its political objectives, it is part of the authoritarian system. I think you'd say the same of Twitter were it aligned with the right instead of the left.
Then why does it feel like authoritarianism when Twitter and Facebook remove all content from and lock out the President of the United States and any of his supporters?
You're the only one who's confused. BLM is both a sentiment and a real political organization. The sentiment is overwhelmingly popular whereas the actual political movement is not. You're attempting to lump them together in a way that most people don't
It's really hard to argue that conservative voices are completely silenced when the have the largest network news television station in the country. Take a look at the New York Times best seller list sometime and look at how many conservative authors make the list.
Yes, you can't spread fake bullshit on Twitter anymore about how the election was stolen but even that would've been ok until 5 people died trying to overthrow the capital.
Actions have consequences, and unfortunately for conservatives those consequences are a purge from social media as big business seeks to distance itself from radical right-wing politics.
If you read your first sentence, you might see how funny it actually is:
"You're the only one who's confused. BLM is both a sentiment and a real political organization. The sentiment is overwhelmingly popular whereas the actual political movement is not."
Yeah, that's not confusing at all. Kind of like "Hey, 'Defund the Police' doesn't mean defund the police" Maybe the organizers should hire (better) PR firms.
BLM has fantastic PR for an organization that has pretty far left views. That was exactly my point. People are generally positive towards to main stated goals of the organization, preventing police abuse against black people. It resonates with their own experience and the experience of black people they know.
You're trying to conflate the detailed political views of an organization with people who tend to agree that Black people need to be treated like human beings by police officers.
I also agree, 'Defund the Police' is a shit term for Police Reform.
Can't reply to davewritescode but... BLM as a political movement believes that American law enforcement disproportionately targets black citizens with violence disproportionate to the alleged crimes or situations in which the violence occurs. This is not a far left view in my opinion, as someone who hold "far-left"/left-libertarian views on a variety of subjects. "Defund the police" has been proposed by some people who share this core beliefs proposed by the BLM movement as a way to reduce the disproportionate violence against black citizens in the US. Unfortunately, I think it is a vaguely and poorly phrased slogan because I have seen that for some it means abolishment of law enforcement and for many others it means restructuring the funding of law enforcement to provide alternative public services to people who are having a mental health crisis, for example. The idea of reducing law enforcement budgets or redirecting some of the resources currently budgeted for law enforcement to alternative public services doesn't seem to me to necessarily consist of a "far-left" policy either, though that is because I think the notion of reducing law enforcement violence when unwarranted should and is a concern of people of most citizens other than a distinct minority. Of course we are all awash in the propaganda and media messaging of disparate groups with various agendas so understanding all of this in a shared and cohesive manner as a society is messy and somewhat difficult, but well-worth trying.
I just wanted to be clear that the “far-left” parts of the Black Lives Matter movement I was referring to wasn’t demanding police treat of people of color equally, more about some of the economic justice and reparations policies advocated for by the Movement for Black Lives. I’m not saying I disagree with any of them, just acknowledging they’re further left than the most well known policies of the group. They’re also the reason a lot of right wing people denounce the movement as ‘Marxist’.
> Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has
The USA isn't really a democracy. For it to be democratic it would have to use more democratic voting systems than FPTP and the electoral college.
It's an oligarchy, but by the ruling class, which includes the big tech companies.
> Neither Twitter, nor Apple, nor Amazon want to be responsible for the rise of a fascist regime in the US.
Unless it's one where they are in charge.
It's self-evidently impossible for Trump and the red tribe to overthrow the US system of government, they simply don't have control of enough of the levers of power.
It would be a lot easier for Biden/Harris and the blue tribe to do so, as they control a lot more of the levers of power (e.g. academia, journalism, big tech).
An armed mob very nearly did succeed in overthrowing the government. And I suspect we haven't seen the last of them.
We have the closest thing to a democracy that any country has. I'm not going to split hairs about what a "real" democracy is. The fact is, our democracy is good enough that we, the people, (barely) stopped a fascist leader from maintaining power for the indefinite future, despite his very sincere desire to hold on to that power.
To be fair here, they didn't come anywhere near overthrowing anything. One woman protestor got shot by a CP officer. Three had medical emergencies (e.g. heart attacks). A CP officer died from a heart attack after getting hit in the head. A tragedy, yes, that never should have happened, but it wasn't organized enough to take over anything.
Now you are denying the large number of photos of heavily armed insurrectionists there?
And they weren’t stopping their co-“protestors” from beating cops, there were more assaulted.
And we know who planted the bombs, they already arrested multiple individuals who were armed, had pipe bombs or Molotov cocktails and who were photographed at the building.
First, I am not denying they were armed with various weapons, but asking about guns that was claimed.
I agree that people who attacked cops and watched it happen were willing to do violence. They should be in jail. They appear to be a minority of the rioters. That is all I was trying to say.
There was a van that had some molotov cocktails and bombs. These appear to belong to the rioters. I am talking about the bombs placed at the capital and at the RNC headquarters. Just because someone has a bomb doesn't mean they planted bombs nearby. I don't like assuming things like that.
They were chanting about hanging Mike Pence and several were carrying flexicuffs. But I'm sure they were just planning to peacefully air their grievances.
I think it was hyperbolic about Pence betraying Trump. I could be wrong, but I don't think there is any proof that any of them were planning on hurting congress.
They were literally chanting "Where's Pelosi" and "Where's Pence". They were carrying flexicuffs. They made a beeline for the Speaker and Majority Whip's unmarked offices. They broke windows, barricades, and one of them got shot trying to enter a hallway not a minute before was filled with Congresspeople.
What in the hell do you think would have happened if they had caught up to any member of Congress? Seriously. Even if you foolishly assume the most charitable and peaceful of intentions, the size of the mob and physical violence on display going through the halls of the Capitol should make it painfully obvious that any Democratic member of Congress they happened upon would have ended up seriously injured. The mob beat a cop to death.
There's simply no way a rational person could come to the conclusion that the mob wouldn't have injured or killed Congresspeople. If you can't see the mob's intent you're either being willfully obtuse or disastrously ignorant. There's not a charitable middle ground as these people documented themselves during the riot and months leading up to it.
I am not saying that the rioters would not have done violence towards congress people. I am saying I would like to see evidence they were intending to do violence. It is possible most were being hyperbolic with their words.
Do you believe that BLM rioters who chanted at politicians and cops and had various weapons intended to murder them? BLM rioters broke through barricades and smashed windows as well. Some BLM rioters killed multiple cops as well.
If I saw a BLM riot break into a building with politicians I would hold the same view I hold with these people. They may do violence, but we don't know for sure.
When people broke into the Wisconsin capital years ago over act 10 I didn't assume they were going to murder people.
I don't like to assume entire groups are going to do violence. When some individuals do violence in a group I don't assume the entire group wants to do violence.
> We have the closest thing to a democracy that any country has.
Your overall point is reasonable, but this is a reach there are many countries now that are at least as democratic as the US by any reasonable definition, and some pretty supportable arguments that some of them are meaningfully more democratic.
It's not that interesting to argue about I think though, because the differences are pretty small, and there is a huge gulf between all of the democratic countries and the non-democratic ones.
Not by themselves. In coordinating with politicians who absolutely were trying to overthrow the government, yes. They were all part of the same movement.
I agree theres a lot of people who want to overthrow the government, and that politicians are trying to incite them to do so, and that we me yet see a real attempt to do so.
But its naive to think the most heavily armed and powerful government in the world was nearly overthrown by a mob of people armed with fire extinguishers, zip ties, pepper spray, and little to no guns.[1]
Here is the scenario I’m thinking of: suppose the violence scared enough legislators into going along with the efforts to throw out electoral slates from those five states. That seems like something that very well could have happened.
LOL - That crowd wasn't anywhere near "overthrowing the government." Don't be ridiculous. And armed insurrection or coup looks very, very different than that. More guns and explosives. Fewer selfies.
"Storming the capital" had as much legitimacy as the "raid on AREA 51."
Those people dressed like Huck Finn Braveheart had as much chance of overthrowing the US government as memelords did kidnapping an alien and bringing intergalactic peace.
This feels like 9/11 all over again. You got the worst legislation in US history as a result of 9/11. (the Patriotic Act)
What's going to be the Patriotic Act for the internet now everyone is convinced we are being attacked? We know they want to get rid of Section 230. How bad is the law going to be that replaces it?
Really? They overwhelmed police and entered the building. The Vice President was moved to a "secure location." If they had arrived 5 minutes earlier, they'd have entered the House full of representatives, who could have been killed or taken hostage. We were a hair's width away from losing democracy and you can't take it seriously.
We are, literally, being attacked by fascists, anarchists, and neo-Nazis.
As I said, it's hard to see these things until it's too late. What happened on Wednesday was nearly the end. If you still don't see it, you're wearing blinders.
Like I'm saying powerful people want to convince America we are being attacked. The best way to do that is to make it look like a real threat. They basically left the front door open, where BLM protesters got tear gas immediately. Do you disagree that the response to the two groups of protesters was a little uneven?
The only difference in our opinions is that I think the response was on purpose. Huck Finn Braveheart is not a criminal mastermind. The number of protesters were miniscule compared to the BLM protesters. If the secret service and police actually wanted to stop them it would have been very easy.
Well, US institutions are being attacked. But I agree that the mob is just a mechanism in the system that was wielded poorly and got out of control.
We don't need to crack down on the mob, but we do need to address the situation which led to it's rise.
The electoral college is an outdated piece of government 'software' that has been repeatedly exploited in recent years. Through 2016, there were 58 presidential elections. In 5 of these, the popular vote didn't match the electoral vote. About 8.6% historically.
But for the last couple of decades, excluding this last election which is apparently still being argued, that percentage has been 40% instead of the 6.8% historically.
If Trump's re-election argument fails, that life number will likely drop to 33.3% in my recent subjective experience compared to 8.5% historically, or rise to 50% in recent experience compared to 10.2% historically.
Either way, these numbers mean something's wrong. "That's just a statistical variation you see in any set of data when giving it enough numbers" is not likely with 58 and 59 datapoints. Particularly with the inclusion of other data.
If you check the history logs, you'll see a technological explosion the last couple of decades that coincides with these electoral results that suggest exploitation of the system. Technology allowing fine grained microtargeting is only getting better, and it's being used to exploit the electoral system.
This time with disinformation campaigns and fine grained behavioral tracking and analysis (eg, Cambridge Analytica).
"Yes, we say we're a democracy but technically we're a republic so that means everything is fine and we don't need the numbers to always match up with the voting majority." I mean, I guess. Sure. Until we decide to push exploitation further, beyond the boundaries of the game we've set up.
This time it looks like the actors in the system missed the margin of exploitability within the game and went searching for new exploits. Instead of acknowledging the loss, they spammed every court they could find with useless lawsuits.
Like a malware bot checking every port to try to fingerprint services and check for vulnerable versions. And they turned the disinformation dial up to 11, inciting their base to keep their political machine operational since it's got a 4 year reboot cycle and it'd take time for their port scanning to finish.
This tactic led to a mob rioting. And it's unfortunate, but the mob were ultimately a system mechanic that got out of control. They were the tools or were 'acted upon' in a systems thinking perspective, rather than actors in the system. The actors were wielding them as a tool, and like any tool, irresponsible handling resulted in injury.
Overthrowing the government? Certainly not. But I would not think it unreasonable to say that if the mob had found the actual senate, they would have killed some of them. Let's not construct artificial goal posts about what is utterly and extremely beyond the point of acceptable behavior. They killed a cop with a fire extinguisher. I have no reason to believe they wouldn't swing weapons at Democrat political leaders. Or even Republican political leaders.
When I read other comments expounding on how close we came to a coup, I can't help but roll my eyes as memories of being stuck in Egypt at the beginning of 2011 surface again. It's tough to not go on a rant about the order of magnitude of violence, uncertainty, fear, etc. between what happened with the violent nuts at the capital and a coup.
Not to say that the safety and/or lives of some political leaders weren't at risk, but once you've huddled in a dark apartment while a true overthrow is in play, you'll have no problem distinguishing between the two.
Also, these people knew exactly how to find the offices of Senators Clybourn and Pelosi. Apparently Pelosi's office is unmarked, nondescript, and pretty well hidden down a maze of offices. And Clybourn has two offices, a "public" one, with his name tag on it that he rarely uses, and his official one, which is obscured in a manner similar to that of Pelosi's. Attackers knew which one to choose. Some are suggesting that this indicates support from someone with insider knowledge of the Capitol.
Then there's the whole topic of Boebert and her obsession with carrying a gun around Congress in the days leading up to the event then tweeting their locations live during the incident. It looks like telegraphing in hindsight; like she knew what was going down.
The capitol building itself doesn't have that many offices when you get right down to it. Just wandering around and stumbling across Pelosi's office is quite plausible.
I mean, I've not been there, but according to Congresspeople affected, they feel that it would be impossible for someone unfamiliar with the building to stumble upon their offices. Especially since even members who've worked at the capitol building often still get lost in the complex.
> House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) mentioned that looters had found their way to his unmarked, third floor office and stole his iPad. He questioned how they could locate that office but not his clearly marked ceremonial office in Statuary Hall.
Let's call it a couple hundred offices in the building itself. There are hundreds of people roaming freely, checking what's behind every door. It would be strange if they didn't come across particular offices.
Three and a bit years ago, someone who'd been radicalized by Facebook actually shot at members of Congress after asking about their party affiliation. This wasn't some hypothetical, it actually happened. Not only was there not this kind of concern about Facebook radicalization back then, the House Minority Leader Pelosi and most of the press outright lied and falsely claimed that the party whose Congressman was in hospital fighting for his life were the ones who had incited the attempted murder of a member of Congress, pointing at the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. This was almost the exact, precise opposite of reality; that was inspired by a really bizarre personal disagreement with her which had nothing to do with national politics, whereas the shooting of Scalise seems to have been entirely about that. Nonetheless, the entire mainstream establishment pushed this bogus line.
Bizarrely, the FBI even concluded Scalise's shooting wasn't politically motivated because the assailant was a wife-beater whose wife had got fed up with him and left him, and everyone in the press went along with it - even though if we applied this principle to domestic terrorists in general, the US probably wouldn't have anyone who counted as a domestic terrorist.
Respectfully, I think you missed the point. There are many voices on parler not out to overthrow anything. You may disagree with them, but they are within the mainstream of political debate. The power of a tech oligarchy to take out its competitor is a serious violation of anti-trust law. There are less ham-fisted approaches to dealing with illegal activity. The DOJ and FBI have effective means to do it.
But, as a consumer, they have the right to choose the platform they want to be on. Twitter and Facebook have their problems. The element of user choice should be a constant incentive to improve.
Whether or not there are some rational voices on Parler is beside the point: Parler is not moderating the voices that support and plan actual violence. That means that any company that supports Parler, including Apple and AWS until recently, is potentially also complicit in that violence. Those companies have warned Parler that they need to moderate, and Parler has not acquiesced.
Apple and Amazon absolutely have the legal right to not do business with anyone, for any reason; and they have the ethical obligation to not do business with anyone openly proposing violence.
They are not objective arbiters of the content on Parler, since they are competitors. They do not have the right to oust a competitor. There's similarly very nasty comments on twitter that they let stand.
I've read that Twitter and Facebook were used more than Parler to orchestarate the capital takeover. But, being founding members of the high tech corporate cartel, they will never get banned.
Your right though -- you often can't see the rise of authoritarianism until its too late. Sometimes it comes from the place you least expect.
Twitter operates in the US so it is in its best interest to do what it can to maintain stability in its own home. To anyone working in US Government, Iran saying stupid things is common. What is not common is for US citizens to incite insurrection and chaos and then a sitting US president endorsing it.
Traditionally, the DOJ and FBI handle serious threats quite effectively. The concern is a tech oligarchy using a ham-fisted approach acting to take out its competition.
A reasonable comment was flagged and killed so I will repost it:
> The NYT lied to the American public to whip them up into supporting the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent).
> Why won't AWS, Google, and Apple collectively ban them? Their open calls for violence were far more consequential and severe and serious than anything on Parler
The question is a good one. In the hope of avoiding a similar fate, I'll state the original implicit question explicitly: Where on earth does the authority come from, which authorizes Amazon, ostensibly a private corporation, to arbitrate ANYTHING to do with public speech? Beyond just, say, their raw power and the inability of anyone to stop them.
It's truly shocking to me that so many people are celebrating this. Not just, "Yeah, it's an overreach but these are weird times," or something like this, but just totally, brain-shut-down, unwilling to think through future implications, etc. This sets a precedent for the very, very small number owners of core tech infrastructure--not just media platforms, but physical server infrastructure!--to decide what we all get to see, and ultimately what's right and wrong (right: endless war, wrong: right-wing insurrection, however inept).
Even if you think it was a necessary move (I don't, but surely reasonable people will), if we want to be adults about politics, we have to grapple with it and take these kinds of questions very seriously, not just heap censorship on top of censorship, avoiding the question.
I agree, but a lot of the arguments made seem to hit the wrong target. The issue is not 'First Amendment' rights (this applies only to government, not private companies), but monopoly, which causes many problems - this being just one. (Although actually I think the specific decisions made here are the right ones.)
Now, in practice, it might be more accurate to call these markets oligopolies (certainly cloud infrastructure is more this), but this still leaves a few companies with dramatic power over important parts of society.
And monopoly is a problem for the government to solve; these companies aren't 'evil' (any more than most others at least, except in virtue of their size), and the lasting solution is not to try and shame them or call them out here or claim victimhood (as the right has done) - though exercising voice can work as a short term tactic sometimes.
While I agree with you mostly on the censorship from private companies on public discourse, I have difficulties to see how amazon is censoring anybody really. With the media platforms and social networks I am also very concerned with every action they take in regards to deleting content and banning users, since they basically operate as a monopoly for public discourse. But infrastructure services such as aws or google are only offering a completely optional service in regards to hosting a webpage/forum/etc. Everybody can buy a server and give others their ip address. By not offering their services to certain parties they're not silencing anyone, they're just not helping them. Parler could just as well buy some racks, like the many other companies that already do. So how is amazon deciding what people on the internet see and what they don't see?
At some point this becomes about what is right for society versus what you can legally get away with and what you feel like doing because you can.
Is this, legally, a free speech issue on its own? No, and I support Amazon’s right to “nope” out of anything they want.
But in the current context of the rush to also prevent open Trump support in other areas like payment processing, and the way the media is hellbent on trying to inextricably link Trump support with terrorism, it should be apparent that there’s a larger effort in play here, that feels highly politically motivated.
What bothers me at this point isn’t whether Amazon has the legal right to do this (they do).
What bothers me somewhat is that there is a clear chilling effect that is intended across the board for a huge portion of the country.
What bothers me even more, is that so many intelligent, well intentioned people are practically giddy about it.
We don’t all have to agree politically in any capacity, but I would at least hope we would have enough empathy to judge this in the context in which any reasonable person would see this on the other side, and be willing to advocate, at the very least, that we do this carefully and with respect for our fellow neighbors. Instead, I see absolute celebration about what can very fairly be seen (whether rightly or wrongly) as an attempt to ostracize millions of Americans.
The worst part about the giddy, gleeful way in which they are shutting down these echo chamber apps is the complete lack of thought as to how this impacts and further radicalizes the users. I have a brother who is into Qanon and Alex Jones. All of this just feeds into and cements the narrative, and pushes him into alternative platforms where he is even less likely to hear or see more mainstream view points.
It literally makes the problem that the people supporting this are CLAIMING they are trying to solve worse. I think it works wonderfully for the problem they are ACTUALLY solving, which is to cement an image of normal members of the political opposition as radicals on the verge of terrorism.
I spoke to my brother last night.
In an utterly predictable fashion, the Parler shutdown has made him worse. It turns out that when multiple global corporations collude to halt the communications of people who think they are being persecuted by a colluding body of global corporations, it makes their movement stronger. Who would have thought?
In the past, I would be able to help talk people through their conspiracy theories to come to a logical conclusion that what they were hearing was too big, too harmful, or otherwise incapable of accomplishing anything to actually be true.
That approach is becoming harder the bigger this becomes.
I think perhaps you are correct, but I think we have come to the realization that people like your brother are gone and not likely to come back without serious help (medication, therapy, etc.) Just being exposed to other points of view does not seem to cure them.
So given that, the only reasonable conclusion I can come up with this that this is essentially an enemy force living in our country - thousands of terrorists and perhaps millions of terrorist sympathizers. Our only goal at this point is to deny them aid, support, and the tools to organize effectively.
Like it or not, we have entered into an era of asymmetric warfare with what amounts to a terroristic cult in the United States.
"I think perhaps you are correct, but I think we have come to the realization that people like your brother are gone and not likely to come back without serious help (medication, therapy, etc.) Just being exposed to other points of view does not seem to cure them."
This is exactly part of the problem:
The hyper-dramatic reaction to a mob of political extremists that forcibly took over a public government building that occurred when the mob was right-wing, and when the building was the DC Capitol, that didn't at all occur when entire neighborhoods, court houses, police precincts, and Federal Courthouses had the exact same occurrence, with a minimal reaction from the press.
My brother isn't mentally ill, anymore than the people dressed in black shooting green lasers in the eyes of Federal officers guarding the Federal Courthouse in Portland are mentally ill. If anyone had bothered to focus on the dangerous radicalization when it was people who they happen to agree with politically, maybe we'd be a bit further ahead on countering it. Instead, we waited until it was people on the other side of the spectrum to notice how dangerous the echo chambers have become, and will label these people members of a cult, without acknowledging the absolute nut jobs on our own side. I was in Portland over the summer, and the crowds around the courthouse were mirror images of the crowds around the capitol. The amount of derangement on display was equivalent. Instead of MAGA gear, it was all black bloc gear, but that's about the only difference.
You are clearly a part of this sectarian viewpoint, because I'm sure you're going to tell me numerous reasons why ONLY these people are terrorists, and not the people who occupied several city blocks of Seattle with assault rifles for months over the summer (with no permission from the residents). I view them all as lunatic, dangerous terrorists, whether they have a MAGA hat or BLM shirt on, provided they are engaging in destruction of property or violence.
I had multiple friends text me from Chicago, etc., about how the media wasn’t covering what was going on right around them.
To me, it boils down to something simple? There are apparently two groups of people who will lie to you about whether it’s raining outside right now. One group just tried to overthrow the government, so I’m obviously hoping they lose. But that doesn’t make me thrilled about the other group using this as an opportunity to press their advantage and further dominate media outlets.
> It turns out that when multiple global corporations collude to halt the communications of people who think they are being persecuted by a colluding body of global corporations, it makes their movement stronger. Who would have thought?
A great point. I have yet to hear any response at all to this problem from the pro-censorship camp, much less a convincing one.
Every attempt to solve the problem creates more problems.
Trump's opposition is going to be giddy about Trump's downfall and Parler's removal, the same way Trump's supporters were giddy when Trump won. It is not reasonable to expect the mass of political partisans on Facebook and Twitter to adhere to a code of civility.
If your principles are altered by the behavior of strangers on Twitter, they aren't really principles, right?
> Trump's opposition is going to be giddy about Trump's downfall and Parler's removal
Sure. But seeing how many of these “giddy” people are blue checkmarks at real news organizations makes folks antsy about conservative news outlets (including mainstream ones) coming under attack as a response to the the Capitol Hill riot.
That's fair and it's a real problem I have with CNN, who I trust at this point slightly less than I trust MSNBC (who I trust not at all). But to take a counterexample: Tim Alberta, who wrote for The National Review, is very close to conservatives (his book _American Carnage_ is fantastic and incredibly well-sourced) is just as open about his personal opposition to this administration. This will sound glib, but a real problem we have in this moment is that there are two sides and one of them is simply correct.
> the way the media is hellbent on trying to inextricably link Trump support with terrorism.
Trump has moved himself outside of the system of American democracy and to this day refuses to acknowledge a democratic election result[1]. So yes, actively supporting him at this point is supporting an end to American democracy, pretty objectively. Linking the overthrow of the democratic order with terrorism, just after a mob entered the capitol and successfully interrupted the democratic order for multiple hours, doesn't feel a huge leap.
Being conservative isn't linked with terrorism. Being libertarian isn't linked with terrorism. Supporting somebody who rejects democracy is linked with terrorism. It's seems pretty clear cut to me.
[1] He said that a new administration will enter office but never that it does so rightfully based on a legitimate election.
> Supporting somebody who rejects democracy is linked with terrorism
No. "Rejecting democracy," a position held by myriad political currents, each of which probably means something different by the term, is basically a run-of-the-mill ideological position. (It's not one that I hold personally, in case anyone is thinking about downvoting for "extremism.")
You know what's linked with terrorism?
Terrorist acts. That is: sporadic acts of intense, spectacular violence and devastation designed to rock and destabilize some existing political order. Usually but not always from "below" (sometimes it's literally from above, like from a B-52).
I'm concerned pretty deeply, but very, very far from being terrorized by the pathetic spectacle at the Capitol. One reason for that is I don't take the extremely hyperbolic US press as literally as so many seem to.
> No. "Rejecting democracy," a position held by myriad political currents
Terrorism is subjective relative to the system in power. And I said "linked to" not "is". Having the opinion isn't terrorism. But giving money or vocal support to people who then invite others to or themselves try to violently overthrow a form of government is - from the subjective perspective of people in the current system - closely linked to terrorism. If they had succeeded in installing Trump as the continued leader in a post-democratic US, it wouldn't have been terrorism. Because they would've been judged under the new system of government. But they didn't succeed so far. So from the perspective of a post-Trump democratic government, it was terrorism. Terrorism doesn't mean every single person is scared afterwards, so your personal feelings towards it aren't the defining factor.
Nah, you're just letting the definition of terrorism float all over the place, like everybody else. Terrorism is whatever you don't like. Terrorism is bad guys. This is Bush playbook stuff.
Is it a coincidence that the world’s oldest democracy also happens to have many of the most robust corporations?
These corporations are societally expected to uphold a cultural respect for free speech and the rights granted in the First Amendment, but there is no legal basis to compel them to allow speech or activity they do not approve of.
Extrajudicial behavior such as terrorizing a legislature is harmful to these corporations’ profitable predictability. Operators would be in violation of their fiduciary duties to allow such a direct threat to their bottom line to continue, let alone grow.
In other words, money cares more about itself than anyone’s feelings.
> money cares more about itself than anyone’s feelings.
No argument.
> terrorizing a legislature is harmful to these corporations’ profitable predictability
Strongly agree. This explains AWS's economic motivation. It's not that they just care so much about democracy and rule of law, though a liberal (read: Democrat loyal) employee culture there is probably also a source of pressure pushing them toward the move. In this case the stars align: liberal employees want it, and they can have it because it aligns perfectly with AWS's economic incentives.
I think where we part ways is in thinking this is good for society. My problem with it is not that it violates any laws, but that it amounts to an incredible concentration of power in the realm of cultural production.
I never said this was good for society. My only intention was to illuminate a corporation’s point of view and why it would make such decisions given the constraints and incentives at play.
The first amendment protects you from the government: you can't be prosecuted for things you say (then there are some case-law carve outs for inciting violence, etc).
The first amendment does not prevent businesses from terminating a relationship.
edit: my opinions are my views and dont represent anyone elses
The 14th amendment overrides the 1st in this case. You CAN be prosecuted for providing aid or comfort to an insurrection, even just verbal support (or, providing hosting services.)
To clarify slightly: Some supreme court cases have settled that speech can be a form of engaging in "insurrection or rebellion"
based (presumably, but I'm not a constitutional scholar) on the 14th amendment's section 3:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
You don't see a difference between what was occurring on Parler vs the New York Times writing an op-ed? You're intentionally conflating reasonable discourse vs facilitating a violent mob. Do I agree with that particular NY Times op-ed? No, but publishing is a reasonable way to share your views in a way Parler was literally being used to coordinate an attack on US politicians that has lead to the death of 5 people.
Websites like 4chan, 8kun, Stormfront, etc have been pushed out of mainstream hosting providers since forever. This isn't new. What is new is venture funded hate sites. This is big money trying to make a buck on selling ads to the most radical. Literally anyone who's watched the rise and fall of these free speech zones on the internet knew that relying on infrastructure provided by companies like Amazon was beyond stupid.
You can put whatever you want on the Internet, there's lots of hosting companies around the world that are willing to help. Just don't cry when big American business wants nothing to do you with.
This is precisely my point! Who gets to decide what's reasonable discourse?
I personally don't think the whole rank and file of establishment press jumping over each other to get in line behind the US state and starting two truly godawful wars is reasonable.
If I was in charge of distributing news to people in the early 2000s, I'd have simply disallowed all of it and made sure people only heard opinions about how the USA is the world's leading terror state. How would you like it if I did that? Luckily, you'll never have to find out because I don't have the power Amazon et al now have.
> Just don't cry when big American business wants nothing to do you with.
This is a deflection. I hate these idiots. Most reasonable people do. They're dangerous (not as dangerous as the US military, but I still wouldn't cross them). My objection is to the structural/cultural development of a tiny handful of companies amassing for themselves a huge cultural and epistemological power. They're increasingly able to shape reality in ways 20th century culture industry couldn't even dream of.
> This is precisely my point! Who gets to decide what's reasonable discourse?
If it escalates to violence it's not reasonable, that's it. It gets muddy around state sponsored violence but the assumption is that we already have controls around that. I think that's a reasonable line to draw. If I go on Twitter and make specific threats to other users I believe that Twitter is within reason to prevent me from using their platform.
> I hate these idiots. Most reasonable people do. They're dangerous (not as dangerous as the US military, but I still wouldn't cross them). My objection is to the structural/cultural development of a tiny handful of companies amassing for themselves a huge cultural and epistemological power. They're increasingly able to shape reality in ways 20th century culture industry couldn't even dream of.
I agree with most of what you're saying. We as a society have handed over what I believe to be the vast majority of our day to day communication to a handful of companies that have no motive in mind other than profit. Social media has been shaping our society for the worse in way less overt ways for the last 15 years by driving eyeballs to controversial posts/topics to keep up engagement.
I'm not pretending to have the answers, what I'm trying to point out is the phenomenon of big companies avoiding hosting questionable content is not new. What is new is the ubiquity of social media in our lives and politics.
> You're intentionally conflating reasonable discourse vs facilitating a violent mob
I know you think "facilitating a violent mob" applies more to Parler than the New York Times piece...but I'm going to disagree. Parler was anything but 'reasonable', but The New York Times (or individuals thereof) creating propaganda to lead a nation to war...can be described as facilitating a violent mob.
> Where on earth does the authority come from, which authorizes Amazon, ostensibly a private corporation, to arbitrate ANYTHING to do with public speech?
Where would the authority come from to force Amazon to support a message board they believe is for the purpose of inciting and organizing violent insurrection?
Why shouldn’t Amazon be able to make judgements about who it’s safe to do business with? Why should Parler’s decisions about who to do business with override Amazon’s?
Suppose Amazon did something Parler didn’t like, and as a result Parler decided to move to a different provider... should Parler be forced to stay with Amazon after all?
Yes. Legally probably no one did anything wrong. My claim is not that any party behaved inappropriately according to law or the ordinary norms of doing business. Amazon is "within its rights." No argument.
But if you look at this situation and don't see problems that are expanding beyond the ability of laissez faire contracts to account for (I'll be specific: it's the concentrated accumulation of communicative and cultural capital to a tiny number of minimally publicly accountable, opaque, private, exceedingly deep-pocketed firms), you're burying your head in the sand.
> Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened
> to have some disgusting content on it.
You can't state that as fact. The platform itself was not inherently about spreading objectionable material. It was about being more free than Twitter.
> And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes"
> and social media do not mix.
As with all free speech, it had legal limits, such as threats of violence. We can argue about how effective the moderation system was in Parler, but I know for a fact that they repeatedly removed material that broke the law.
> You can't state that as fact. The platform itself was not inherently about spreading objectionable material. It was about being more free than Twitter.
No man, it wasn't. They are just lying to you. Try to be more credulous.
I find it comical that the more egalitarian solution[0] to enabling widespread free speech is outright rejected by the typical Parler user with some indistinct shouting about government overreach, regulation, or "competition in the marketplace".
[0] mentioned in the article: "I wish they[sic] were interoperable implementations of a protocol, rather than individual silos, but..."
That's just their word - I would want to see the exact reason they were banned. Perhaps they were playing the internet troll game of "see how quickly I can get banned for Twitter points". Some amount of context seems fair surely?
Also the Parler system is that you essentially are sandboxed for a short period of time when you first join - if you get tonnes of negative responses you get removed. So the fact they got removed in the first 24 hours makes sense.
So: No man, it wasn't. They are just lying to you. Try to be more credulous.
I saw multiple posts & comments at the end of December with people literally calling for the murder of members of Congress on Jan 6th. I reported them when I noticed. I checked back after the Capitol Riots and the posts were still there. If they had any moderation it was not at all effective even for the most obviously unacceptable content.
If an armed mob flew in from all over the country with nooses, hoods, and zipties, to invade Richville, CA... And five people died, before it was dispersed by the police, the FBI, and the national guard, I'd expect #eattherich might also get banned from Twitter.
Observe: That's generally the point when political speech crosses the line from 'soap box' to 'bullet box.' [1] Trump and his friends crossed that line on January 6th. #eattherich, Chapo Trap House, etc, has yet to do so.
You're drawing false equivalences.
[1] Despite having lost its case at both the ballot box, and the jury box. [2]
> I reported them when I noticed. I checked back after the
> Capitol Riots and the posts were still there. If they had
> any moderation it was not at all effective even for the
> most obviously unacceptable content.
That's clearly a failing of the moderation system. I imagine they were very overwhelmed that day, as all social media platforms probably were (including Twitter and Facebook from what I saw).
One problem Parler specifically are up against is that they were already unofficially blacklisted in multiple places that would allow them to raise the funding to hire moderators, due to cancel culture and the fear of it. They already couldn't get advertising, investments, etc. Now the situation is even worse, and when it reappears, it will likely have even less resources for content moderation.
The only way out for them will be to distribute the problem of content moderation as some other platforms have apparently done (I am told Minds do this). Of course you have to rely on randomly selecting a fair jury in order for it to work - something that won't happen now.
For the first link, there was just one upvote in 23 hours. For the second link, there was 6 up and 3 down votes in 2 days. The third link has all information removed, to the point it can't be verified. The fourth link had four upvotes probably in 1 day or more.
There's no doubt the material is objectionable, but it was only up for a short time and got very little reach, even getting negative reactions within their own circles. And bare in mind, these aren't exactly random examples either - this is supposed to represent the very worst - and it's just some random people with little reach who get negative reactions from their own followers.
Meanwhile over on Twitter you've got people sharing a picture of Trump's severed head, you've got "Hang Mike Pence" trending as a hash tag, you have people celebrating the death of the lady who got shot in the capital, etc.
>For the first link, there was just one upvote in 23 hours. For the second link, there was 6 up and 3 down votes in 2 days. The third link has all information removed, to the point it can't be verified. The fourth link had four upvotes probably in 1 day or more.
I don't see how upvotes or views are relevant.
>There's no doubt the material is objectionable, but it was only up for a short time and got very little reach, even getting negative reactions within their own circles. And bare in mind, these aren't exactly random examples either - this is supposed to represent the very worst - and it's just some random people with little reach who get negative reactions from their own followers.
It's only supposed to represent the 15 seconds of work I performed in going through the dump of parler data. There's plenty more if you're interested. Again, whether or not it reached a lot of people is hardly relevant.
>Meanwhile over on Twitter you've got people sharing a picture of Trump's severed head, you've got "Hang Mike Pence" trending as a hash tag, you have people celebrating the death of the lady who got shot in the capital, etc.
And that shouldn't be allowed either. What's your point?
Of course it's relevant. If your hate message is received by nobody - who is the victim? You're just shouting into the ether. The larger your reach, the more moderation becomes important.
> And that shouldn't be allowed either. What's your point?
Because Twitter isn't been wiped from the internet for breaking the exact same ToS. It's clearly selective enforcement.
It isn't relevant in regards to why they were de-platformed, but if you want to look there are plenty more with higher view counts.
My understanding is that Apple wanted some form of auto-moderation. Parler's self regulation by user votes is a joke and leads to the opposite of free speech. They wanted a plan and a conversation, Parler refused. So, bye bye.
Apparently everyone has abandoned them, including their own lawyers. They could have fixed this, but they decided not to, and are now crying foul.
I remember very well as a middle eastern how ISIS was freely allowed to use Twitter, Facebook and Youtube for recruitment and propaganda in 2015 and none of those platforms did anything about it. Also just today this story was on the front page in HN: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
So spare us all the "No hate and violence on our platform" BS. Either you go after all hate and violence or you are just a hypocrite.
A world where American lives aren't considered more valuable and "hate" and "inciting violence" is taken seriously when the victims aren't just American politicians.
The US government asked Twitter and other social media sites not to ban certain groups of ISIS twitter accounts until they were able to gain enough information... afterwards Twitter had no problem deleting hundreds of thousands of ISIS/other extremist accounts en mass.
I mostly agree with this, that we should do more about hate and violence. And do it more consistently and transparently.
To the best of my knowledge, YouTube tries hard to do this. And Twitter has been trying to do a better job at this. And Facebook hasn't been particularly good about doing this at all. If I am completely wrong about this, someone should set the record straight.
Perhaps their position is evolving. I'd be curious to revisit the evolution of this problem 365 days from now and take another checkpoint.
There’s plenty of hate on Twitter. They won’t go after all hate and they don’t care that you think they are hypocrites.
Stop trying to convince these people of hypocrisy. They aren’t listening to critics and they lack the ability to see the world outside of the tight frame they were provided. We are all like this most of the time but I find that the moral panics have created situations where online communication is not possible along political lines.
Focus on you, not them. People who build ideas from self-reflection are less volatile and not as susceptible to moral panic than those who define themselves by politics.
If all people tried as hard to understand each other as they do framing their political opponents as evil, we wouldn’t be in this place. Interesting times.
A lot of this is true, but I believe. I'm guessing you aren't from the USA, but here, "disgusting content" is completely covered under the concept of freedom of speech. Our Supreme Court has already ruled that there's no Constitutional idea of "hate speech". The concept of freedom of speech is here to protect things that other people think are despicable.
This whole deplatforming thing will have vast unintended consequences. It will hit people like you, because these movements always eat there own.
>A lot of this is true, but I believe. I'm guessing you aren't from the USA, but here, "disgusting content" is completely covered under the concept of freedom of speech
Free speech doesn't apply to non-government resources. A company can ban any speech they want. Plus there is speech that isn't protected, like certain violent threats, which is the biggest problem with Parler.
> Free speech doesn't apply to non-government resources.
Where did the parent comment mention the government? They referenced the concept of free speech. That is not the same thing as the first amendment which is what you are referring to.
> Free speech doesn't apply to non-government resources
Of course it does! That’s like saying ethics don’t apply to corporations.
If you meant the first amendment you would be correct but free speech is a long standing liberal ideal and is absolutely not the same thing nor is it what is being discussed in this context.
> > Free speech doesn’t apply to non-government resources
> Of course it does!
Well, it does in that free speech is exactly the liberty of owners of non-government resources to choose how to control their use in expressing, relaying, and amplifying speech.
But “free speech” doesn’t provide any entitlement for any other party against the interests of the owners of non-government resources.
In the early noughties I really believed that free speech online would work with just a very light moderation. We tried that approach with a rather small online community for an Italian political party where already all participants had pretty similar ideas.
What I learned the hard way (as hard as having light PSTD) in the course of 3 years is that just doesn't work. You only need a handful of motivated people who won't stop at anything to push their agenda and narrative to create an extremely toxic environment which only favors the best liars and the most unprincipled people.
To be fair, any social media platform built on the idea of protecting free speech will be the only platform on which "disgusting content" can be posted. That means it will inherently have a disproportionately large amount of "disgusting content".
And that's before considering the insane uphill battle any social media platform has to fight to become as popular as the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc - assuming the presence of "disgusting content" does not limit its ability to ever scale that much to begin with.
Btw, I'm using the phrase "disgusting content" to quote the OP because I can't think of a more appropriate phrase, not to indicate sarcasm or cast doubt on the nature of the content. I've never been to Parler, but I trust that there was some pretty awful things being said there.
Sure, but every Trump supporter I've talked to objects to what happened last Wednesday. Even if the Trump supporters I know are not representative of all Trump supporters, clearly not all of his supporters seek to commit or condone acts of violence. Just because the site was originally built for Trump supporters does not mean it was inherently built for "disgusting content".
You can't really "mute" a murderous mob that shows up at the capitol. This isn't about seeing stuff you don't like, this is about a platform being used to directly incite political violence.
The Capitol has its own police (they're literally called, the Capitol Police). You can't mute them, but you can make it clear that any attempt to breach the Capitol will result in deadly force.
> The disgusting content was literally its reason for existing, despite all of the bland "we're just a free speech site" stuff.
I disagree with this. My experience with Parler was very limited, but from a quick glance, I was not able to find any call for violence. I'm sure it exists, but the sense I got is that the vast majority of content and accounts are simply posting conservative content. Do you have evidence that "disgusting content" (whatever that means) is its "reason for existing"? That seems like a self-serving editorial conclusion rather than something borne out by hard evidence.
so much politization in a single comment... the news often opens with disturbung content, and the world has many people who says daily pure garbage and we do not want to shut down any of those. Free speech is a fundamental part of western civilization, it cost us way too much to achieve it to just give it up like that. Stop with all those fallacies, they still worked on 2019 but not on 2021, at least not on HN.
We do need to think about the precedents we are setting with respect to free speech. It’s possible that action might be needed in the short term to moderate these channels. But we must also consider the longer term in a world that is rapidly evolving.
I’m less concerned about specific, currently existing platforms like Parler, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These “social media” platforms are mere trinkets and could go away and society would carry on. In moderating or completely dissolving them we lose little.
I am more concerned about the nature of communication when the channels of communication are centrally controlled and/or controlled by private entities. We have no idea how digital communications will evolve or how important they could become.
Our lives are increasingly become digital… Imagine a world 50 or 100 or X years from now when people never leave their homes (except perhaps through VR?) and nearly all human interaction is via digital means. There’s a good chance those digital means will be run by private entities. So if we want to preserve the liberties we have today we need to think about how those would be protected in the future, and that means being careful about what precedent we set today.
Are we really willing to have all of our communication moderated or potentially terminated in a such a future?
It’s true that we might need to take action in the present, but let’s not forget that we are simultaneously shaping our futures.
> So if we want to preserve the liberties we have today we need to think about how those would be protected in the future, and that means being careful about what precedent we set today.
The doom may be inevitable. who knows? I don't mean to be a defeatist. But I would say if a single private entity (or alliance) did control all digital communication, any actions they took could be invisible to anyone that opposed them, assuming they had sufficiently advanced machine learning capable of preventing subversive communication. You would need alternative options for communication, digital or otherwise to have any hope of overcoming such a hypothetical scenario.
My hope would be that we continue to have utilities such as phone lines, that internet would ultimately end up treated as a utility in the same sense as phone lines (especially if it completely replaces them, which is largely is doing), radio (just as ham radio operators believe in the importance of maintaining their systems), etc.
And my other hope would be that we continue to legislate and enforce against monopolies, not just on capitalistic entities but especially on privately run communication channels.
>> Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened to have some disgusting content on it. The disgusting content was literally its reason for existing, despite all of the bland "we're just a free speech site" stuff.
I don't know if that's true. I downloaded the app a few months ago to check it out. I followed some of the same folks I followed on Twitter (I guess you'd call them center-right?) and it was basically civil discourse about politics.
I didn't see anything "disgusting" and I didn't work hard to avoid it. Granted I didn't spent a ton of time in the app and didn't explore deeply, but the claim that it was just filled to the gills with something terrible doesn't ring true to me.
Unless the definition of disgusting is "someone who may not have voted for Biden" - but I don't share that definition and I don't think most sane people do.
Many movies, music, and other forms of art are chock full of 'disgusting content'. Should we take those of the Internet? There are lunatics out there that will believe anything they read whether it is couched as fiction or not.
Our right to say and read what we want cannot be determined by the lowest common denominator of what is 'acceptable'. That is how you arrive at an authoritarian monoculture, fast.
The only correct response to disgusting speech is good speech used to tear it down. Both sides here, (I am not a part of either) have dug in so deep that they essentially live in two different realities or dimensions. When perception and the interpretation of the world differs so much between two groups there eventually becomes a point where they cannot coexist. This is where we are headed if we don't start trying to find common ground instead of the current environment of complete, unquestioned intolerance of the other.
Self examination is what the world needs right now.
The term healthy is doing a lot of work for you. If you mean signal/noise ratio, then yes, and HN truly optimizes for that, so it makes sense that you're here. But HN doesn't optimize for total amount of signal, for example, buried underneath a lot of noise. Personally, I care about content a lot more than I care about "community."
disgusting is anything anti-lgbt, anti progressive, anything that is a bi-erasure or trans smear. Disgusting is that which marginalizes or unfairly imputes the character of a minority community whether black, jewish, or hispanic, since these voices are not adequately represented
Trump himself attended several gay marriages in public way before running for president, late 90s/early 00s. None of the examples Amazon or Twitter gave were anti-LGBT. Trump got 72 million votes. Statistically, there is 7 million LGBT atleast who voted for him.
This is absolutely the kind of thing that should not be a red line for when you get banned off the internet. LGBT is still something people are going to debate for thousands of years. It's silly and shortsighted to think that people who are accepting of every strange idea to come out of LGBT (multiple genders, opting out of genders, etc.) are right and everyone who questions these concepts are wrong.
All I’m going to say is that I’m all for free speech and setting fair rules for everyone to play by (ie regulation), but looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles this is beyond simple free speech. I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. If Parler doesn’t want to do any content regulation then fine (though this should be any easy place to draw the line), but I can’t blame Amazon for saying “we don’t want that here”.
"... looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles" is another way of saying "I ate the cherry pie made from the cherry-picking by the cherry-pickers." Buzzfeed is about as even-handed as the Norse god Tyr.
oh com'n. As if twitter doesn't allow people to post stupid junk? Multiple accounts that posted "Kill all white women" "Today seems like a good day for another reminder that all republicans deserve to die" are still active along with plenty of other insane things. You can cherry pick bad stuff from any social media site.
Twitter puts an active effort into removing those posts. You can definitely make the case they don’t go far enough, but Parler did the bare minimum. You would have to cherry pick the reasonable content off that site.
Not only did twitter end up removing it, but it was a hashtag in response to a video from the protests of people yelling “Hang Mike Pence”, primarily not people actually calling for Mike Pence to be hanged. That I keep seeing this example being thrown around from conservative sources shows either a desire to argue in bad faith or a complete inability to research things beyond the absolute surface level. And it’s not like there aren’t other examples one could use to make reasonable complaints about censorship bias on twitter.
In fairness, I don't have a habit of applying tight scrutiny to things that appear, on their face, to be blatant calls to violence. It's usually self-evident by reading the words.
Twitter's actions aren't even self-consistent here. If these tweets were all innocuous, then why remove the trend? If they were primarily discussions of other people's activity, rather than explicit calls for violence, then there was no good reason to do this.
Also, there's nothing "moving goal posts" about asking people to at least try to substantiate what they post. The person I responded to didn't even bother posting a link.
"Hang Mike Pence", as has been noted many times, was trending because people were discussing the videos showing Trump rioters chanting that.
People were not banned for using that phrase for the same reason you and I are not going to be banned/flagged for using it here: we aren't calling for violence and murder.
edit: previously called this a bad-faith argument, but that's not fair.
A big problem on social networks (including right here on HN) is that it's very easy for people to behave disingenuously and ask questions to which they already know the answer.It's a very effective wayt o either spread misinformation or steal the time of people who are concerned about misinformation, because it's much cheaper to repeat a BS allegation than it is to debunk it.
Another problem (more peculiar but not unique to HN) is that calling out such behavior is often regarded as uncivil. To my mind disingenuity is far more uncivil; I prefer a rude truth to a polite lie.
Yet another problem is the common willful conflation of simply being wrong with bad faith or disingenuity. People generally won't correct themselves if they know they're going to get screamed at or dogpiled either way.
That's a lesser problem, because people who get something wrong once are typically fine with being corrected, and contrariwise people are unlikely to dogpile someone for making a single mistake.
Examples of disingenuity include people asking naive-seeming questions to which those same people have already received detailed answers in the past, or repeating factual assertions that they made previously and which were shown and acknowledged to be false. It's not so common on HN but sadly very common on big social media sites or on news commenting platforms like disqus.
If people are required to upload official identification before posting, why would you not want this site up? It seems like a low-effort honeypot by the FBI. Let all the radicalized people come, easily tie their online & offline identities together, then monitor them.
A friend of mine got permanently suspended from twitter because she and a friend were bantering with each other and she made a joking threat. Her friend who the "threat" was directed at has tried to petition twitter to undo her suspension, but they've just ignored her.
Twitter regularly bans people for anything that smells of violence, even when the "threat" is one person joking with their friend.
Those two examples are likely rhetorical and are (as far as I can tell) not intended to and extremely unlikely to incite violence, much less imminent violence. If there were, however, organized groups actually planning and carrying out killings, and those groups used those slogans as a rallying cry, then indeed people and groups distributing those slogans ought to be banned from social networks.
> I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech
This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.
If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers won't be associated with it and thus hosts can't or won't afford to host it, that's on the author.
> This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.
I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication.
I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm not even allowed outside to go and talk to friends - people are getting fined and arrested for just sitting on a park bench because of the latest lockdown. All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. If they lock me out, I'm totally screwed. What is free speech if I can't talk to anyone? Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying?
So one could argue, that actually if we want free speech in the 21st century, and want to honour the intent of what it means to have free speech, there does need to be some protection here.
The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said - and I think the legislators would have been horrified!
> censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said
But you have to keep in mind the other side of that - the protections around freedom of speech were put in place at a time when it was inconceivable that a majority of people in the country had the ability to be seen and heard _by the majority of other people in the country_. In near real-time, anytime. And that they could do so in a way that meant often they did not have to accept any consequence for the wider-ranging effects of their words.
Separately I also have to wonder if the knowledge acquired as a result of that would have affected their framing. In particular the advances in psychology and group psychology, and in understanding how it's possible to use this instant mass communication to manipulate even people who are on guard against manipulation.
If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.
Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps?
Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses?
Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square.
So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.
Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.
>If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.
That's completely absurd. Tens of thousands of people are silenced by corporations every day for speech that is considered offensive by one metric or another, but is by no means illegal. An associate of mine was permanently banned for, "deadnaming" someone else. Certainly very offensive according certain standards but hardly something that you wouldn't be allowed to say in the public park.
You can reasonably argue about the right of private corporations to choose to do business with who they want, but you cannot reasonably argue that people are only being silenced for explicitly illegal behavior that would also be illegal offline.
If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs? Despite retaining access to hundreds of unmoderated channels by which I can communicate?
>If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs?
That's completely unrelated to the issue at hand - whether or not you'd be able to ramble insanely or make personal attacks in a public park (you would).
There's two different sorts of "you" here. There's the big platform of "you" that AWS shut down, that was shut down for the not-allowed-in-public-sphere speech.
Then there are the "you"s that are posting on individual platforms that get to choose their own standards of conduct. AWS stopped business with a platform that would not be allowed in the public square.
An individual that got banned for dead naming can just start another account anonymously, as far as I know.
The delusion and mania gripping the country is evident by the downvotes to the above post. It is beyond dispute that the standards used by tech companies to silence people go far beyond speech that violates the law. Reading the TOS of any of these tech companies will confirm this. Its rather astounding that otherwise intelligent and presumably literate people are so jarred by this statement of indisputable fact. Unfortunately its impossible to have a thoughtful, reasoned discussion about the free speech issues raised by recent events when so many are living in denial of reality.
> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no
Right. Even the Post Office is not required to deliver pipe bombs.
The issue is that right now, that's not the standard. Amazon /hasn't/ taken down sites in the name of political censorship, but it /could/. The implications of that are important, and they're why I find it hard to be satisfied with justifications like "Amazon is a private company, they can do what they want".
Right now, the US military could side with Trump, launch a fascist coup, start rounding up enemy politicians for assassination, and eliminate any freedom at all for anybody who doesn't who enough MAGA support publicly. They haven't, but they could, and it's happened frequently enough in other countries.
Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.
So my question is, why the F are we even talking about Amazon? Because it's just a BS distraction from the elephant in the room.
It's time to stop engaging with sophistry and fight back the fascists that are trying to take away all our freedoms. And this big fear of big tech is exactly the type of distraction that lets fascism flourish enough to gain a stronghold.
> Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.
Politically motivated refusal of service by Amazon or other Silicon Valley firms is at least an order of magnitude more likely than any coup by the US military, much less a Trumpist one.
Preposterous, the ranks of Q anon and MAGA are filled with ex-military and law enforcement. They flashed their badges at the Capitol police force! We are that close!
Meanwhile, this political shutdown is pure theory, a straw man floated to distract us from the violence that seethes on the platforms used to organize a fascist overthrow of the government.
But even if we take your probability assessment, the damage times the probability places a violent military coup as a HUGE problem compared to Amazon stopping business with someone.
I’m curious what was your estimate of the likelihood of what happened last Wednesday before it happened? Were your priors updated in any way since then?
Many may not support it, but nearly half do including many elected Republican politicians. This isn't a fringe Trump supporter issue, but a major issue within the Republican party and with American conservatism in general. Maybe the perception of conservatives being censored is just a reflection of the reality that they support using violence to obtain their goals at much, much higher rates than liberals do and are just suffering the consequences of their actions?
Thanks for the numbers. Good to see some evidence my hunch was right - I'd say 43% of the sample is "many".
YouGov speculates in their presentation of the data they gathered that perhaps more Republicans approved because they saw the actions as basically peaceful:
This is what everyone decided they wanted twenty years ago. Loss of public space was a huge topic of conversation, and the end consensus (IMHO) was that the internet itself was the public space and everyone was free to make something.
From that perspective this looks like a conversation about ease of access rather than free speech. Amazon's the only way to build something on Amazon, but nothing's stopping me from creating something myself.
I don't see being able to buy eyeballs on the cheap as a fundamental right. If you care enough, build it. If others care, they'll come.
All well and good. But say for instance you lived in nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon. And yet they would be true and right for you. In your mind you would have every right to express yourself and undermine the government outside of democratic means.
The point is we can never know how far outside of what is "good" we currently circle. It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action. It is right that a state that believes itself true defends itself. It is all part of the process, all of it. Who the hell are you to know with certainty that you, specifically you, have the the eagle eyed vision to discern right from wrong? To somehow miraculously step outside of the tiny little context in which you live and know with 100% certainty that you are right.
You are the product of your surroundings, a container for thoughts passing through, a ghost in the machine. Don't be so God damned arrogant. You cannot know truth, you cannot know right. The world is unfolding as it should.
Oh come on, this is a not very old debate, and within living memory of many of us we actually had to fight against the Nazis and then determine how best to prevent fascism from taking hold. This is the basic debate about government. This is why any technologist who hopes to influence the world should read deeply of history and the prior debates along these same lines.
The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance, where we must stop some speech in order to make room for as many as possible. Fascists hate this, because fascists are the ones who demand total and perfect freedom to act and speak as the wish, up to the point of being allowed to perform violence on those whose speech they don't like. Which is why the fascists were chanting "Hang Pence" as they stormed the capitol.
Don't you dare try to accuse me of being arrogant for judging fascists, and don't you dare accuse me of trying to be the ultimate arbiter of good and evil. I can name fascists as unacceptable to society without being an ultimate arbiter.
We are in dangerous waters in the US, and all our words mean something right now. Will we fall for the lies of the fascists who say "let us violate all social norms with our speech, and we promise we woke take over with violence than force you to follow our norms with violence," or will we stand up to them and enable as open a society as we can?
So the slave holders who were all adamant that owning slaves was cool, they were totally right to not question their own views? They believed they were right. You believe you are right. Create a logical argument for me describing how you just know you are right.
You seem to be asking me to jump through some hoops to distinguish what I posted from justification of slavery. Also, as best as I can guess, you are advocating for nihilism.
How "logical" is it to say that because I have some values, they are indistinguishable from justifying slavery?
This sort of "there is no truth or good or bad" is exactly the sort of reasoning that's used to brainwash people into supporting anything and everything. Because once there's nothing true, there's nothing false.
If somebody is feeding you this line of reasoning, or some group, or some forum, I would recommend trying to reconnect with mainstream human thought and value of human life for a bit, and see if the nihilism still seems logical. Try to read a mainstream history of the Nuremberg trials, for example. Or read a book about the Reconstruction and the oppression that happened even after slavery was abolished.
> "The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance"
It never ceases to surprise me that people wave around the Paradox of Tolerance as if were an immutable law of physics rather than merely one philosopher's opinion among many.
Which people would be doing that? Since you quoted my "clearest guideline" text, are you misinterpreting that as "an immutable law of physics"?
It seems that if you can't deal with what was stated and have to fabricate positions in order to argue against, that you are not posting in good faith.
Why would anyone quote or expect others to follow a guideline if they didn't believe it was true? Please provide a counterargument instead of using thought terminating clichés[0] like "not in good faith".
So you are claiming that it is I who "wave around the Paradox of Tolerance as if were an immutable law of physics" by referring it to as "clearest guideline I have seen"?
This is a complete misrepresentation of what was written, as if you were talking about somebody else's comment. It is bad faith to misrepresent the position of others, not a cliche.
What exactly is your point, other than ad-hominem attacks?
OP made no claims to know that “good” is other than
> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.
Struggling to see a world that would consider incitements to violence as a “good” thing. I mean sure it’s possible, but so far away from our reality as to be entirely pointless as a basis for argument.
> nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon.
What does Nazi Germany have to do with any of this? That was a government suppressing a minority population and invading Europe. Your not suggesting that AWS is about to attempt the same thing?
> It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action
Glad we agree that people at AWS who have a strong belief to drop Parler are allowed to act on those beliefs.
> The world is unfolding as it should.
Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?
> Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?
I'm annoyed with the histrionics. Making arguments from places of moral outrage. Of extreme emotion. Each looking at the other with righteous indignation. Unable to see that what they feel is what the other side is feeling. What is needed at a time like this is for people to step outside of themselves. To understand that they do not know everything, that there is more than one way to think and to live. To be humble. When their amygdala screams that the other is dangerous, that the other is alien and dark and inhuman... To breathe, to understand their own weaknesses and move forward from a place of humility.
Who determines what speech gets shut down in the public square? In the US, it's a mixture of courts and legislation setting laws and their interpretations, lawsuits establishing damages for certain types of speech, and then of course cops on the ground making individual decisions on a case by case basis and using violence or threat of violence to arrest people.
I am not sure how any of this is apologizing for corporations instead of any other aspect of our system though...
I mean, the UK is still has vestigial Monarchal components as opposed to the US constitution which was built from the ground up with severe limits and federation of power. We'd likely see that distopia in england long before the US justice system can adjust itself to allow it.
The difference with the phone companies is you’re talking one on one communication. Not a publishing platform which is what these social media services really are. You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.
These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort.
Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing).
Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled.
If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather.
If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process.
Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me.
You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash.
And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance.
“ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”
> You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.
Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?
Well Signal is free and open source. So feel free to boot up some servers on any other platform, or your own hosting and run it from there. Maybe signal the foundation needs to pay more or move platforms to support the app and make it easy to install, but again, why would or should AWS, Google, Apple be forced to host them? Don't those companies have a first amendment right to block speech they don't like?
It's like walking into the mall or public place, and saying, "You have to broadcast this message to everyone because 'freedom of speech'"".
In fact it's better to assume that private companies have such ability anywhere in the world. Signal fosters more access to defy censorship precisely because it realizes that. Making the software open source is how you allow people who need such tools to have them available.
And honestly... you've got the airwaves. It's called radio. Shortwave, can reach halfway around the world.
Again, the entitlement to these services astounds me. The internet didn't exist 40 years ago.... and now somehow the ability to assault people with misinformation, provide unfettered access for propaganda from state actors, permit the dissemination of hate speech is being called a right??
It makes no sense, and is completely devoid of historical perspective.
Like it or not private companies currently have a monopoly on the communication infrastructure of our planet. There is no "public option" for AWS. If they have a monopoly (which Apple and Google clearly have on the app store), then it comes with specific obligations to not discriminate and a requirement to provide services to everyone equally. That's the price you pay for banning competition from the market.
If Apple and Google allowed alternative app stores in their ecosystem, then there would be no problem with them kicking off any apps for any reason under the sun.
The argument is more nuanced for AWS as there are viable private competitors. However, it is stunning that they would cancel their contract with a customer by giving them only 24 hours notice. It's making me seriously consider why I would trust AWS as a partner.
I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication.
Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault?
> All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies.
Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.
That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value.
> The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said
It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach.
I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.
“Control communication” is intentional - Content is scanned to understand intent, promoted/demoted based on an invisible algorithm, and your communication can be labelled or shut down if you have a dissenting opinion. In-between your conversation political adverts are inserted, specifically tailored to your demographic data and personality profile (and rather than encouraging you to vote for the party, they are actually designed to disenfranchise you and make you not vote for anyone).
This isn’t a future dystopia - this all already happens on Facebook. And that’s why this involves a level of control over being a neutral communication channel.
> Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.
Yes be thankful to mega corp. mega corp good. Mega corp has our interests at its heart.
Free speech and the First Amendment are not the same thing.
Free speech is a moral principle/ideal that exists independently of the US Constitution.
The First Amendment guarantees a certain form of free speech in the United States.
Private-sector censorship / restriction of speech is not in violation of the First Amendment. However, it may still amount to a restriction on free speech.
Fair, but in this case we're talking about a US company hosting another US company's data, so I think talking about free speech in the context of the First Amendment is reasonable.
It's not unreasonable, but I think it's incomplete. We may be headed towards a world in which private companies exert a great deal of control over what an individual can say. Not only by controlling communication platforms, but also by withholding employment from people who say certain things.
I don't want to join the argument about whether that's good or bad, but I think it's a huge mistake to simply say "It's consistent with the 1st amendment, therefore it's OK." If we're going to let private corporations use their market power to police individual speech, we need to have a real debate about what that means.
The distinction between private and public sphere is not completely clear.
Let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and asks him nicely to squish certain people, and MZ complies. Is that a First Amendment issue or not?
Or, let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and offers him some concrete support (in an anti-trust case or taxation matters) for squishing certain people, and MZ takes up the offer. Is that a First Amendment issue or not?
The trouble with both scenarios is that they are certainly possible and hard to prove or disprove. That is one of the reasons why concentration of power in a few hands (even private ones) may translate into bad politics.
I agree with everything you say, but I don't see that "free speech" needs to be the hammer you use to drive in that nail. Concentration of power in the few is bad for many many reasons independent of free speech.
When the government is threatening regulation against the private-sector because these companies don't censor, then I think this could potentially be considered a 1st amendment issue.
I don't think the people that end up on Parler have a strong grasp of constitutional law (no offense to anyone that does and uses app).
The general people that end up on that app are hardcore trending extremist and you're not going to find intelligent debate on the role of private companies and the government. It's probably closer to propaganda than it is a true social media site.
There are plenty of extremists on Twitter and Facebook. Thats where the double standard is. People organized on twitter when they stormed the white house and the pres went into a bunker as an example. Facebook is accused of much worse in foreign countries currently.
The reason Parler was banned is because all these corporations are very aware they are under the anti-trust microscope. This was a favor to the new party in power in hopes of getting something back.
While I absolutely agree with the idea that every social media has extremes, I completely disagree with the end conclusions.
Other social media services do not actively shape the debate through intense political moderation. There's no "Post tsar" the validates the political health of things that people host.
Sounds like hyperbole to me. Again we can flip this to "twitter is a left wing extremist platform" quite easily by finding the right tweet snapshots and pointing to prior events. And nobody knows the exact algos or moderation mechanisms for any of the platforms, the screenshots you linked say essentially nothing even with whoever that person is narrating. Im not saying hes wrong, but I'm certainly not taking it at face value. On other platforms there are similar reward systems. Blue check-marks for instance, and shadow banning is obviously a thing.
I don't think the argument isn't that other platforms don't have things like "verified" and "shadowbanned". It's the connotations attached to them. On Twitter, just about anyone can get verified. Shadowbanning requires a serious fuck up (for example, Trump was only banned after inciting a riot).
Seems that Parler has taken a very different approach. Attaching political goals and ideology to the business model of a social network.
Absolutely, we all know that Twitter and Facebook have been far greater vehicles for the political unrest that's been growing for the last four years. Parler is a convenient scapegoat.
As far as posting online, people aren't allowed to post child porn - anywhere. You don't get to complain about your free speech, or about hosting companies not hosting your child porn.
In this case, it looks like they also don't want to host your death threats.
There was no line to begin with. Nothing was crossed. This isn't anything new.
Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Sure, the Bay Area could start their own farms to meet that need, but I could hardly imagine the whole population living there saying "This is fine, they're well within their rights."
This feels to me like a situation of "fine for anyone to do, problematic for everyone to do". With political ideology not a protected class in many states, anyone is free to refuse service to an outspoken Democratic voter, but if a whole town did that it would be unthinkable. The specious answer of "just make your own business" wouldn't be practical in that scenario (are you going to start your own grocery, gas station, etc?).
To be clear, I'm not trying to make a defense of Parler; my understanding having never signed up is that it was an unmoderated cesspool.I am, however, trying to point out that the end result of individuals making totally reasonable and rational decisions within their rights can produce outcomes that most people would view as wrong.
At the time the constitution was written "everyone" in any given industry was thousands of small businesses each of which was only subject to the public pressure of the people in the town in which they were based. So it was literally unthinkable that a whole industry could deny service to one person. I bet if the founders had envisioned an entity as powerful as Amazon, they would have written in constraints for private entities too.
This is a great example, I think it exemplifies the problem well. Individually, farmers/distributors absolutely have (and in my mind, should have) the right to avoid shipping to areas which would actively lose them money.
When everyone avoids those areas, though, bam: food desert.
I honestly don't know the right balance to strike here. On the one hand, I fervently believe that businesses shouldn't be forced to act against their interests. On the other hand, though, the sum of these individual actions produces an unacceptable outcome.
I'm sure there's some balance of regulation, incentives, and public-private partnerships that would strike a good balance here, but both the extreme solutions (Groceries can locate wherever they want vs. groceries have to establish branches in food deserts) seem to be totally unsatisfactory, at least in my mind.
It’s not so much the farmers as it is truckers. CA has a lot of agriculture but some places like NYC have a very limited food supply. For some reason a lot of people have no idea how dependent they are on rural areas. I never forgot this tweet from some politician from out East who was flying back from Denver or somewhere and posted a picture of the ground below the airplane (farm fields with patterns from circular irrigation systems) and he says “No idea why the ground looks like that!”
The First Amendment, obviously, doesn't address TV or the internet but your statement "any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host" is false, television stations must adhere to the "equal time doctrine" and allot broadcasting time (the equivalent of hosting) to political candidates regardless of party affiliation or agenda. We also had a "fairness doctrine", the reinstatement of which had the support of many of today's prominent Democratic leaders (Pelosi, Durbin, Kerry).
Point is, the government has, multiple times, recognized the power of "big media" to suppress political speech, and acted to regulate that power.
Every private company in the U.S. is compelled by law to offer goods and services regardless of race, religion, etc.
Adding political affiliation to the list of protected classes probably makes sense. It seems odd that it's not on the list, doesn't it?
The bans we're seeing here are very clearly political. Parler is not breaking laws. It seems obvious that if Parler was being used by BLM to organize violent riots they would not get banned.
As usual, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Anyone simplifying this whole thing into good vs bad is behaving like a member of a tribal mob.
One thing that is certain is that private companies should not be the ones deciding these major cultural issues. The Supreme Court should resolve these issues.
But since this action appears coordinated across major platforms and likely in response to political pressure from the now in power Democratic party (Amazon is being paid for hosting, so no advertisers fleeing issue), I think there now may be a real first amendment issue.
These things are different. First Amendment protections restrict the US government from censoring protected speech. Free speech is a broader concept that covers any restrictions upon speech, including restrictions that are legal in the US.
It seems that the right to free speech must be balanced against the harms that speech can cause, but I am tired of this meme that just because they're a private company, AWS et al should be able to block whatever they like. These tech companies have more power and knowledge than many governments of the previous century. We should be cautious advocating for a totally hands-off policy on how they use that power.
are you not just highlighting the fact that there is a First Amendment right but not a broader "free speech" right, which is the very point people are trying to make.
Apparently Amazon sent them 98 examples of posts directly inciting violence, Parler replied with a proposal to manually moderate such posts with volunteers, and most of the posts Amazon gave as examples were still up (including some urging for systematic assassination or blowing up AWS data centers.)
Perhaps if Parler had suggested they use mTurk to moderate, AWS might have given them a bit longer? What position would that have put Amazon in, if the moderation was being done via their service, but the end result of the moderation was still 'unacceptable'?
All of those posts barely have any interaction or views so it doesn't seem like they are actually that big of an issue. Every social network has people saying crazy things.
At first I very much agreed with you, all these posts have < 10 'likes', so it seems pretty unfair, as I'm sure you could find the same content on Twitter or Facebook.
However reading the exact complaint made me change my mind; they specifically provided them with content which they found to be inciting violence, and Parler took no action on them. If they actually wanted to remove them, at the bare minimum they could have at least removed the ones directly sent to them from their hosting provider. They also have no plan to moderate content themselves. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc all have report buttons which then trigger an employee to review the reported content, and Parler needed to at least say they had plans to do the same.
exactly! Parler could have a report button with options like "Incitement to violence", "child porn", "other." Send the "other" reports to their manual jury system and have the rest reviewed for legality by staff. they've chosen not to, so they can go burn.
the damning thing for Parler though is that they didn't remove those posts - which I remind you are illegal because they unambiguously incite violence - after AWS reported them. there is no excuse for Parler not to have removed those posts. they chose to ride or die with their jury moderation system, and died.
this isn't a 1A issue. incitement to violence is not protected by 1A - that's been settled by the Supreme Court. that's why I have no sympathy for Parler's plight. also note that they're not protected by section 230 - these posts are a criminal offense, akin to not removing child porn.
If Twitter wasn't willing to at least attempt to moderate then yes. What's going on here isn't new. Web hosting services have been dropping hate speech platforms and forums since the internet began.
The real problem is that is seems like the hate speech/Qanon wing of the right side of the political spectrum has the loudest voice and it's ruining it for actual conservatives.
That's exactly I found Elon Musk's and Sam's tweets disappointing. There are very few free speech absolutists who support violence. This is not a case of whether we need moderation or not but rather "was this the right level of moderation". I can't really blame Twitter or even AWS for it.
People really have no idea what the "left" even is anymore do they?
I was once down voted here for mentioning that the NYTimes is not an extreme left wing publication. The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left.
It's amazing to me that the media (not just Fox-news and co) has constructed this bizarre bogey-man of the left as some control hungry liberals. Those people certainly exist, but they aren't, by anyone who is engage in leftist politics and theory, remotely left.
Believe it or not people on the left have been critical of the growing role that corporations have in setting public policy for decades. Sure, centrist liberals my be cheering, but nobody on the left wants to see corporations be the unchecked regulators of society.
However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy.
The entire fact that the will of the people has no direct power over corporate action is exactly why the left doesn't like the perpetual growth of corporate power and of its deregulation.
The unfortunate conclusion of all this confusion for me is that this is clearly not political in the slightest. Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.
> However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power.
I think its because the ideal vision of people who like minimal regulation is that they don't really think of mega-rich monoliths that have a direct impact on how an entire country chooses to consume its information. At least for me, I was one one of the annoying "but they're a private business" people until my optics shifted from viewing the issue as someone with an entrepreneurial mindset to someone who sees power concentrating and now being flexed by a small collection of mega-rich monolithic advertising companies that also happen to be collected in the same geopolitical region and possibly have an ideological bias.
In other words I reconsidered my principles in light of new information--my posting history here even shows this evolution. FAATG's decisions about how to handle what happened at the Capitol have actually scared the hell out of me, even more so than if the protesters/rioters/insurrectionists had actually succeeded in doing any of the wild shit people keep saying they intended to do. Those companies collectively own the most effective ways to communicate with others as well as almost complete control on the supply chain to create new competitors. I don't want to live in a world where that power exists in the hands of anyone, especially one that is willing to take political action and whose executives and employees vote and donate for one party.
> Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.
In the same post you lament people not knowing what the "left" is, you dismiss the right entirely as being comprised of nothing but valueless curmudgeons. This isn't meant to be a personal attack, I just want to point out the bias here in a fairly lazy jab at at least half the US since I've seen it a lot here the last few days. The right (and conservatives) do actually have a more coherent ideological standpoints than you assert, and I suggest digging into what they're saying. It'll be important now more than ever as we in Big Tech figure out how to deal with the massive class of people we've just alienated.
At least in the mainstream right wingers are the left wingers of yesterday. Two good examples are how free-speech and free-markets are considered right wing today.
> However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy.
I wouldn't say these are in conflict. The biggest reason I oppose political movement in SV corporations is because I believe they'd become even more censorious than they are now. Today's corporations are evil to make money and protect their brand, but I don't want tomorrow's corporations to be evil for a political ideology.
> The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left.
This is a very different characterization than what most people would offer.
The New York Times is a staunchly left publication, and the past few years have seen the few centrist people at the company driven out (e.g. Bari Weiss). It is definitely not "reviled by anyone on the left", it's by far one of the most widely read publications among liberals.
I say this as a lifelong Democrat and liberal. This seems like one of those statements that only olds true when one draws the line between the left and right such that the overwhelming majority (easily >90%) are categorized on the right.
> People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people.
Can you elaborate on what this is referring to? If you're talking about Coinbase, the company was asking employees to check their activism - of any political leaning - at the door. Not that people should be driven out. In fact, a big part of why this was well received is because often times activism in the company leads to employees trying to drive each other out.
But the prospect of a few powerful tech companies putting their competitors out of business should concern everyone. And there's no reason for such harsh measures.
Are these platforms prohibited from removing unionization and strike organization activities? My fear is that the labor movement (which is just starting to make significant headway in some of these companies) will be the next targets. If the companies do not have to pay to host hateful content, are there legal protections for labor which may be seen as the next major threat by these companies?
The main thing I'm afraid of is that there will be a renewed push to make encryption illegal. Optimistically, I think the actions of these tech companies might help avoid that - if they had done nothing, it would be easier for politicians to demand the ability to take matters in to their own hands.
I voted for Biden, but I can easily find thousands of examples of "threats" on Twitter coming from far left leaning accounts. Some even from verified accounts. I still love the fact that Twitter banned Anna Kachiyan of the Red Scare podcast, assuming it wasn't a mistake?
Companies bowing to play nice with the state is troubling regardless of your politics.
What's interesting here is it's not really "the left" trying to shut it down: it's more like "People who believe in the civic religion of the United States" vs people who do not.
A ruthlessly self-interested left would benefit tremendously from the successful assassination of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. It would be a galvanizing event that would ultimately turn most of the country against the Republican party. It would likely clear the way for younger, left-leaning Democratic leaders (AOC, Cori Bush), and it would eliminate a major contender for the 2024 presidential race. Biden would enter power with the same level of political capital as George W. Bush after 9/11.
Amazon taking down Parler is some dirty business. The fact that we might be ok with that, pragmatically, doesn’t detract from it being, at best, a morally dubious action.
In a state that protects speech, one shouldn’t stand by when default-web-megacorp does the censorship dirty work on our behalf.
Or maybe we do. If this is a once in a generation aberration then it can slide. Time will tell.
I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform.
Popper's paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
To my eye, that has been happened since 2016 and DJT took office.
I totally get why people in the thread are raising the sentiment that free speech is a core tenant of a democractic society that is worth protecting, regardless if you're a private entity or a government.
However, democracy itself is actually an exceedingly fragile system, more so than many people realize. We have lived in a golden age for democracy for centuries now, but that actually only represents a tiny blip on the time scale of human existence, which naturally tends towards tyranny.
What we need to protect above anything else is the democratic systems and institutions that make free speech even possible at all. And sometimes that means placing restrictions on forms of speech that seek to destroy the very foundations on top of which free speech protections is built upon.
Without those limits on free speech, it'd be a very realistic possibility for those who are in fact against free speech to co-opt it to gain enough power to then turn around and abolish it. I think we'd all agree that would be the worst possible outcome, considering all the progress humanity has made on this front.
Just curios. How about uber, could they refuse to service employes from parler :) ? Or lets say refuse service some right wing people. I mean it is just a private company...
Probably yes. Neither company affiliation or political opinions are protected attributes. Possible outcome would be uncertain only if people claimed that their association with political party/company is based on their love towards it and thus its protected as sexual orientation or gender.
Apparently it depends on the country. Facebook deleted personal profiles of NSO group employees because they hacked WhatsApp but then an Israeli court ruled that was illegal. Sometimes Facebook does the right thing.
I think Uber should refuse service to those added to the no fly list.
That's the case for protected classes. I just think it should be expanded.
It shouldn't be that way if media companies weren't coordinating behind the scenes to ban stuff together. But given that it's happening, it's better to have more freedom.
Left wing democrats and Trump supporters want to eliminate each other, in a sense of eliminating their defining idea. Sadly in their war they are weaponizing the shared infrastructure, harming themselves and the people not interested in their war. (e.g. triggering the new wave of internet regulation in other countries, delaying a flight because there is someone with red hat etc.)
The economy and civility that allow billions of different people to cooperate is a fragile thing. So we need to explain the warring sides that they need to go throw their stones in another place, e.g. try to use courts and legislation if they want to ban each other, or have different laws in different states.
The situation is remarkably similar to the situation with religion in 1600s England, when people were trying to blend it with state, and only after long wars did they understand that not allowing someone into shop based on religion is not acceptable.
> Anyone not using these hosts to promote terrorism
The power always changes hands, and people who were passing laws calling random things "terrorism" end up on the other side of their laws. I guess for now you can have fun watching how Patriot Act championed buy republicans gets used against themselves. Sadly with full control over all branches, democrats will continue eroding freedoms and laws restraining the government, which eventually will be used against them too.
AWS' response wasn't based on 'calling random things "terrorism"'. it was based on things that actually happened so I think the response is proportional.
> I guess for now you can have fun watching how Patriot Act championed buy republicans gets used against themselves
The government didn't get involved here. This is two companies deciding not to do business with each other
> Sadly with full control over all branches, democrats will continue eroding freedoms and laws restraining the government, which eventually will be used against them too.
The great irony here is that these de-platformings are only concerned with non-state violence (or so they claim). There is no censorship of people advocating for disarming the entire population (using political violence) or depriving them of property (again, using state power).
And as far as I can tell, none of the politicians who initiate and perpetuate war are de-platformed.
In May 1996 Madeleine Albright, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq,
LS: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
To which Ambassador Albright responded,
MA: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Twitter has hosted the Revolutionary Communist Party USA for at least ten years. It would seem they have no ethical problem with hosting calls for a coup.
This vicious lethal (effectively kills Parler) action by Amazon - driven by a mob of woke employees - will cause long term damage to AWS. I had plans to use AWS for a potentially huge SAAS business, even though it is not likely to be contentious, just the thought of them being able to destroy everything overnight, without due process, without recourse - sends chills down my spine. I cannot now imagine, being able to trust Amazon for critical infrastructure ever again and I'm sure many other entrepreneurs will feel similarly.
This sounds like a reasoned moral choice for you and I applaud it. Some entrepreneurs will feel the same. And some would also be looking for providers other than AWS if they didn't hold Parler to the letter of their TOS in this case.
It is also true that AWS and all network providers exist within a societal context where the speech and actions of the participants can result in consequences. Where the line is drawn and why is a never ending tension. Very, very rarely is the extreme moral position universally true IMHO -- there is possibly content you would like kicked of AWS, and there will be poeple who can defend anything in the name of free speech. Good luck with the SAAS, and may your customers not be scoundrels!
Are we supposed to pretend that the same people that pushed for this to happen don't actively fantasize about banning people like Steven Crowder and The Daily Wire/Ben Shapiro?
This is hyperbolic in the extreme, and to blame "woke employees" with everything going on right now is just plain silly.
When deciding whether to choose to host your services with AWS you can answer a simple question: are you planning on violating their terms of service? If the answer is yes, do not use AWS.
I'm just commenting on the decision to evict Parler from AWS, there were several news articles that it was employee driven maybe these reports are wrong, I don't know, the MSM is not exactly a reliable source of facts lately. I also don't see how Parler is responsible for the illegal behaviour of the rioters - surely the poor preparation by the security forces for a well publicised rally is more of a contributing factor than Parler.
Yeah, I just don't buy this at all. This has been the case with any hosting provider, unless you have a signed SLA guaranteeing you otherwise. The free market is free both ways.
I'm sure they'll survive. This is probably part of a calculation they have to ingratiate themselves with a group that can give them an order of magnitude more GovCloud business than you can public cloud.
They've always been able to. Its amusing that only now is this a concern when nothing has changed. Gcp has done the same for much less or nothing to people. Azure, do, linode, &c have always had their tos state that they can discontinue service for any reason.
This isn't some new threat. This is literally the way things have always been.
It’s more about social norms than moderation, and frankly things have gotten worse not better.
I remember when most posts that posited any “fact” were cited with references, and often any lack of sources was responded with a request for supporting documentation.
HN is slowly becoming a brainier alt-Reddit with every snide quip or uncited statement of opinion masquerading as fact.
This has been my experience as well, and I've been browsing HN since at least 2009. Downvotes/flagging are used much more heavily to express political disagreement as well now (which biases what gets downvoted due to the left-leaning bias in tech) and I think there is more politics in general (but that is true of media more broadly).
I find it slightly ironic that the fruits of the whole ARPANET project around network routing resilience in the face of node failure due to enemy attack (domestic or foreign) ends up threatening the health of the Republic because we can no longer tell who is an ememy (domestic or foreign) on the resilient network.
Serious question, it seems AWS is by no means a monopoly on web hosting (Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, Linode, the list goes on). It seems to be they're well within their rights as a company to not host Parler, and Parler can try to go somewhere else. If no other companies want to host Parler, isn't that more a reflection of Parler than the hosting companies? It doesn't seem like they should be obligated to host, since that's as slippery a slope as not hosting is. Perhaps this is a decision where not everyone will ever be happy, and that's just how it's going to be?
> If no other companies want to host Parler, isn't that more a reflection of Parler than the hosting companies?
Yes. The funny thing is that it happened to people who foam at the mouth about the rights of private businesses to do what they want and decry government intervention.
You're conflating different groups of people because you don't understand the nuances of the different groups at play. These are not the same groups in the slightest.
Since when do people only vote for people they completely agree with and not the "better of two evils"? If the choices are the party that actively wants to censor you and the party that doesn't want to pass legislation to protect you from censorship, the choice is obvious.
You're the one claiming they're not the same group in the slightest. How do you quantify that?
Surely if they're voting for the same people, some of them must share the same beliefs. Unless you're saying all Parler users are completely distinct from all non-Parler conservatives?
You're the one who said these people are the same group, the onus is on you to provide evidence of your claim. But it should be self-evident that tech giants maintain a near oligopoly of social media discourse and people aren't going to "foam at the mouth" to support their own ideological destruction.
Agreed. This kind of situation is perfect for separating the true freedom loving (i.e. "you do what you want with what you own") from the conservatives (i.e. "you do what we want you to do"). Those who like freedom says "that's fine, it's their call" or even "I won't do business with them anymore because I disagree with this call", but the conservatives say that "it's wrong and the gov should intervene".
You can ask the question of whether you think in general that marginalized voices should be allowed to exist. Obviously, you don't like these particular people (and neither do I) so you don't see any problem with eradicating their voice. If Amazon were just one provider and there were other options it might even then still be OK. But it's not just a choice of Amazon. Any provider hosting them will be subject to the cancel mob.
Picture instead private businesses who all refuse to do business with Jews. Anyone who does business with them are subject to reprisal and boycott by their vendors, friends, and neighbors. The Jews themselves of course are fired from their jobs if anyone finds out they're a Jew. In practice the Jews cannot do business and must live a marginalized existence or hide who they are. So it's not enough to say "well it's a private business they can do what they want" when you would not consider this valid in other contexts.
And of course all this is ignoring the question of whether any of this is likely to be successful in the end or if it will further justify reprisals and enrage anyone subject to this mob justice. Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.
> Picture instead private businesses who all refuse to do business with Jews.
This is a false equivalency.
Race, religion, etc. are protected classes. It's impossible for people to change their race, and our society has agreed that we shouldn't force people to change their religion.
Political beliefs are not protected classes. When your political beliefs include inciting violence by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, then private companies have a right to kick you off.
> Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.
In my opinion, the far right is already too far gone — they are already conspiracy theorists. Any contradictory information will be used as evidence to show that the conspiracy is much wider and bigger than one could have imagined — adding to the weight of the theory. There is no reasoning with them unless someone they truly believe (read: Trump) dismisses the theory convincingly.
Protected classes were defined in the law only because we decided they should be. Nothing says it can't include more or fewer things as the winds of opinion blow in a different direction. A religion isn't really much different from other belief systems after all.
This is a common error in reasoning by the way: looking to the way current law happens to be and inferring from that what the right thing to do is. For example, it is not against the first amendment for Amazon to ban Republicans. This does not mean it would be a good thing for Amazon to ban Republicans. Similarly I'm sure, if you tried, you could come up with all kinds of unjust laws that punish things that should not be punished (I certainly can think of many).
A religion is similar to politics only in that they are both beliefs. Your argument is essentially that any belief could/should be protected. I don't think you mean that, so I urge you to try to come up with a more coherent formulation.
I would start by exploring the differences between what it means to hold a religious belief vs a political one. Maybe start by comparing how each of the above has changed, or the associations thereof with their respective ideals over, say, the last 1000 years. Maybe then proceed to identify from where a religious belief manifests vs a political belief. Finally, you could look towards the kinds of answers of which each respective belief offers explanatory power (i.e. What kinds of questions does religion answer vs politics?). We could probably even take this a step further and look at the history of each as well no? Political leanings have existed at least as long as religious beliefs. At one time these were likely the same! So what is it about the history of politics and religion that has lead us to the the kinds of separation we have reached today?
I have confidence you can come up with many kinds of differences. Good luck!
Amazon is not banning Republicans. Amazon is dropping a risky client after having more than reasonable doubts about that client's ability to operate in good faith. Republican views are not being censored. The fact that this site happens to cater to a lot of "Republicans" who feel marginalized by public discourse is merely a very telling correlation between a political view and a tendency towards violent tendencies and conspiratorial beliefs.
> This is a common error in reasoning by the way: looking to the way current law happens to be and inferring from that what the right thing to do is.
I understand this, and the understanding is implicit in the way I phrased: "our society has agreed that we shouldn't force people to change their religion." It's also worth noting that "religion" here usually refers to practices and beliefs that don't infringe on other people's rights. To evaluate whether these practices infringe on someone's rights, one should take into account their protected classes: i.e. you're not allowed to discriminate against a person's skin color even if your religion says that you should.
Our society has also agreed that certain beliefs are reprehensible and deserve no place in society: both major political sides think that advocating for violence is unacceptable, and therefore both the Democrats and the (centrist) Republicans cannot claim that private companies who refuse to host a platform that allows calls for violence are unjustly discriminating — if the politicians want to be logically consistent. (This is what I meant by "When your political beliefs include inciting violence by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, then private companies have a right to kick you off.") This is a positive statement, not a normative statement.
Normatively, alt-right beliefs should not be given the same protections as religions because they infringe on other people's rights. For example, repeated, false allegations of voter fraud indirectly infringe on people's right to vote because they effect court cases that call for legitimate voters to be disenfranchised.
In your example it's probably slightly different because religion is a protected class, while political leanings aren't.
I think what's particularly interesting is you substitute "right wing" with "Jews" like you did, and you start to wonder if Amazon crossed the line. But then change "Jew" to "terrorist", and you think Amazon might be in the right. Clearly we can't protect ALL groups, that'd be silly.
Just pointing out that Parler was the #1 most downloaded app on the Android app store for some amount of time. (Around the #1 or #2 spot for a couple months? At least a few weeks.)
Yeah definitely, but Amazon can always say "Go host on GCP". Then Google Cloud can say "Go host on Azure". Then Microsoft says "Go host on Digital Ocean", and repeat until you run out of hosts.
Is it like a game of hot potato where the last hosting company has to host them? Because it seems there are alternatives to each individually, and it's only when they all say no that there are issues for Parler. And to me that feels like a Parler problem, not an AWS problem.
Giant corporations and the media, who used to encourage BLM and Antifa riots, are now openly using their power to humiliate and destroy their business competitors and political opposition. But who cares. Let's see what's new in Netflix.
The black cause is on a completely different moral plane than angry white people trying to keep trump in power.
To cut off service to someone is not destroying a business “competitor.” The fact that they were depending on your service indicates a type of cooperation not competition.
I agree, but every major decision takes into account societal forces. When I say “moral plane” I take into account broad societal forces. For example, broadly speaking in the USA the black cause for equal justice is broadly understood to be of much more importance and credence than the cause of the Aryan nation for white supremacy.
And to reinforce my second point, Twitter’s decision to ban or not ban someone is largely subjective (beyond the TOS) and they are sensitive to public pressures and the overall societal climate.
It’s not about my moral values but the aggregate moral values of society.
Serious question (not in the US), if "all" the content on Parler was inciting terrorism or what have you, why was it not simply subpoena'd by the relevant authority for user data? Isn't a site like this basically a honeypot for undesireables, and therefore a handy place for LE to round up all the people likely to commit violence? Or are there too many for LE, or is LE itself compromised and has members on the site?
My observation is just a single observation, but after all the hubbub I created a Parler account and I saw a more milquetoast Twitter. It honestly reminded me of a country club in that it was mostly an older people version of Twitter.
Putting myself in AWS’s shoes makes this choice seem obvious. If I imagine myself maintaining a server and I learn it’s being used for death threats and coup plannings, I would tell them to stop doing that or I’m shutting them down. And then if they didn’t do it I would immediately revoke their access. I don’t know about everyone else on this site but I wasn’t put on this planet to design and build tools for terrorists and extremists. I’ve been on Parler and it’s disgusting. The public doesn’t want it to be on AWS and AWS doesn’t want it on AWS. There’s no reason they should be forced to host it.
Parler had the option to police their users but put an unqualified volunteer moderation team in charge. As you can imagine this leads to suboptimal results where the most egregious content isn't removed.
I was on last night and saw a picture of Peloi's house with the address attached. These are dangerous people that are stalking our democratically elected leaders.
saw a picture of Peloi's house with the address attached.
It's sad how publishing the address of a politician has become akin to a threat.
When I was a journalist, all politicians had their addresses and phone numbers right in the phone book. We looked them up all the time. Voters were expected to be able to know exactly where their elected officials lived. It was also one way of verifying that they actually lived within their district.
But because basic knowledge has become weaponized and abused by nutjobs, the general public now feels this is a threat. How much society has changed in a very short time.
Well to be fair, if you had browsed Parler recently you would have seen Nancy Pelosi's address between numerous _actual_ death threats to sitting politicians.
The existence of someone's address in a phone book isn't a threat. There's not anything inherently devious about making that information public, but you can't just view that in isolation. 99.99999% of people have no use for that information. If you're publishing just that person's address without comment, you have infer the intent from the circumstances. Nobody on Parler is sharing her address to show that she's an honest politician actually living within her district. The implication of sharing just one person's home address with people who hate her is to encourage malfeasance at such location. I think this implication would have always existed.
Most forms of harassment includes actions and words that in isolation would mean nothing.
I had someone send me some very abusive and threatening emails, and among the images they sent, was a screenshot of a flight quote and a photo of my house from Google Maps.
> If I imagine myself maintaining a server and I learn it’s being used for death threats and coup plannings, I would tell them to stop doing that or I’m shutting them down.
Now imagine yourself maintaining streets, hotels or cars that might be used by thieves, rapists and murderers. Would it be your job to make sure they don't use your infrastructure? Would you want it to be?
This is troubling. I understand the 1st amendment argument, but isn't this more an anti-trust case? If a baker won't bake you a cake because you're gay there are dozens of other bakeries nearby that will, regardless of the merits or lackthereof of choosing not to bake a cake in that situation. If your service provider kicks you off their platform they've destroyed your entire business. I understand if they won't allow certain businesses to sign up, or if they give them a reasonable amount of time to transition to another provider, but revoking existing services with very little warning seems extreme.
This is actually a widespread and common business situation. I used to work for a company that made a specialized component, and a customer called us up one day and said: "We have to knock 1 cent off the cost of your component, or WalMart will drop our brand from all of their stores." More broadly, a lot of businesses are at the mercy of a single big customer or supplier. Texas Instruments could discontinue the chip that I use in my product, sending my side business into a tailspin. I had to buy a lifetime supply of another part when it was slated for obsolescence.
Components are a bit different in that they are marketed as "obsolete for new designs", etc. and anyone making a physical product knows to plan for the eventuality that a supplier will be unreliable or that a part will be discontinued. This situation is not analogous since access to AWS is ongoing.
Indeed, and I could have prepared myself for the situation in any number of ways, including monitoring my components status, designing around the dependency, and so forth. I think. Not all suppliers make it easy to discover the status of components.
Do you think that a sole source relationship carries an implied contract of continued service? Should that be a regulation? I don't think I'd like that.
As I understand it, AWS didn't force Parler to sole-source their computing infrastructure. And Parler claimed that they had prepared for such an eventuality.
I don't know if it would apply to the current situation with Parler, as my understanding is that they did agree to terms of service, and that the dispute with AWS over their content moderation didn't come up all of a sudden.
I think it is reasonable to discontinue service if you don't like a customer.[0] But what if AWS's utility provider said we aren't going to power your datacenters because we like Parler? That seems wrong to me. I think it's reasonable to allow companies to terminate service but they should give a reasonable time frame (e.g. 3-6 months) to migrate to a new platform.
[0]: Certainly I think this in cases where you have a personal relationship with the customer/client, e.g. as a lawyer. It is less clear in the case where the service provided requires no real customer interaction as in AWS, where the services are all provided transparently, with no knowledge of who the customer is. But I don't want to get hung up on this issue.
In this case Amazon would likely apply pressure to the utility company's regulator, if such discretion was allowed to the monopoly provider under their current arrangements.
That pressure would likely be successful.
But even if a datacenter is removed from one jurisdiction, Amazon is perfectly able to handle that loss immediately.
And if all the bakers in town refuse to bake you a cake, should you be able to force one to?
Seriously, when there are dozens of options and none of them want your business, shouldn't that give you pause?
If all the insurance agencies refuse to insure your ship because they think it will sink, wouldn't it be prudent to double check your blueprints/construction ?
It's not that none of the other options want their business (though I have no doubt that Google and probably Microsoft would also exclude them). It's that you can't just switch platforms within days, while you could go order another cake since there's almost no time commitment to requesting a cake.
That is a mistake of getting a very ad-hoc contract and then doing something that creates a lot of risk of negative consequences (i.e. supporting the overthrow of a democracy).
Honestly, this feels to me like just the best sort of stuff that private companies, and a world that relies on them does: Everyone likes but doesn't need those services. There's a lot of companies competing and the offering is great. If someone is such a pain in the butt that no one wants to do business with them, they have a hard time but still can if they want to go it alone and build it all themselves.
These are light "highlights how well it works" stories to me.
while that maybe true - it happens fairly often, usually with no warning at all. If anything, parler got preferential treatment by getting notice BEFORE getting terminated. Most just get "your account has been locked/terminated/etc" emails after the fact. There's bunches of horror stories on HN about it...
The same argument applies if you wanted to commission a cake celebrating the holocaust.
The distinction must be that anyone (any race, any sexual orientation, etc. etc.) should be able to buy anything "off the shelf" (e.g. a plain cake or wedding cake). But no one should be forced to write/design/create something which they don't want to.
My bakery should be allowed to refuse to bake a cake celebrating the holocaust.
In your opinion, should bakeries be allowed to refuse to make a custom wedding cake for the wedding of a gay couple? (e.g. Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission)
> The distinction must be that anyone (any race, any sexual orientation, etc. etc.) should be able to buy anything "off the shelf" (e.g. a plain cake or wedding cake). But no one should be forced to write/design/create something which they don't want to.
I agree with this distinction (no compelled creative labor), but note that this leaves stuff like file hosting, DNS services and data centers squarely on the "off the shelf" side. And you would still be forced to bake a cake for an out-and-loud Nazi. Just not decorate it with an artful "1488 blaze it".
But there are a dozen other bakeries in this situation. None of which will bake them a cake. No bakery is going to make anyone a cyanide cake and no reasonable person would expect them to be legally required to do so.
I doubt that is true. I'm sure some will take Parler's business. They just can't do it immediately because it's hard to switch from one platform to another.
Exactly, it's a 1st amendment issue because it's a monopoly (or mutual anti-competitive practices) issue. So you're entirely correct. If the big tech companies weren't engaging in anti-competitive practices, then the censoring would not be a big deal. But because there really is only one Facebook and little to no competition, and they're colluding in the same prejudice, then yes, it's a lack of freedom of speech.
I'm all for the "they're a private company, they should do what they want" argument, if they (Twitter and Facebook) weren't the only nationally agreed upon means of communication and socializing during a nationwide lock-down.
I wonder if big corporations that sign deals with AWS in the future will write this into their contracts? ("Amazon agrees that, if they want to terminate our service for any reason, they will give us 6 months' notice so we can replatform our site.")
They don't allow companies like Perler to signup. What Perler used AWS for is prohibited by the TOS and AUP that Perler agreed to. It just took a while for AWS to notice and enforce the legal agreement that Perler agreed to abide by. Perler lied right from the beginning (because they had no intention of abiding by their agreement) to get AWS to provide service they would never have provided had Perler been honest from the start.
Also the cake issue is different because discriminating based on sexual orientation was prohibited by the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. Colorado (the state I live in) has every right to pass laws to govern it's citizens. What happened to state's rights?
To me these are very clear: You either believe contracts and laws can be enforced, or you don't.
> Colorado lost the cake lawsuit. If anything that makes my claim stronger.
But not much (though not doing much to make it stronger is still not making it weaker), because it didn’t lose it on the kinds of grounds people on either side wanted the case decided on for a decisive win, but because based on the details of the proceedings in his case the Court found specific animus against Phillips’ religious views in the handling of the particular case by State officials.
Yes, that is true. Although as you hinted at, the Supreme Court didn't really want to rule on the issue that people were interested in (how to balance freedom of association with protected classes). They've punted on other similarly contentious issues as well (e.g. when NYC mooted a 2nd amendment case by changing its laws went the case when to the Supreme Court).
In this world, service providers should create TOS that are as complicated as possible so that practically every company is violating them. The terms can then be applied "as needed".
You're welcome to start your own ideologically compatible service provider. There are literally thousands of VPS hosts/cPanel farms/colo facilities/etc that they can do business out of that won't care (I know because I end up blocking a lot of them due to malicious traffic).
You're not owed AWS's product and it's not required to build this kind of infrastructure. Sure it makes it easier, maybe try being less repugnant?
They'll survive being dropped by Amazon. What they most likely won't survive is if CloudFlare wants nothing to do with them. They are done if CloudFlare drops them.
Parler is obviously a cesspit. However its a minor sideshow. Most of the sickness of the last four years has been spread on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Fox News. These however are much better connected so are still running today.
Does anyone else think it's suspicious that they built everything on AWS? I mean, if you know you're going to take heat for your content being less moderated, wouldn't you diversify your infrastructure? I wonder if someone wanted this to happen, in order to increase support for certain legislative action?
Why would they know they would take heat for their moderation policy? Are there any other examples? I can't think of any.
Edit: I mean examples where companies lose access to core services due to their moderation policy. I know twitter and facebook get shit for theirs all the time, but nothing substantive ever happens.
I think Gab [1] is a relevant example. They were dropped by their GoDaddy, Stripe, PayPal, etc. after the tree of life shooter posted their manifesto on the site. Another example would be Cloudflare dropping 8chan [2] after the El Paso shooter, Christchurch shooter, and Poway synagogue shooter used the site to post their manifestos. Cloudflare also dropped support for the neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer [3] although my impression is that the reason for termination was deeply related to people on the website claiming their continued business relationship signaled ideological sympathy on the part of Cloudflare [4 -- about halfway down]
I'm pretty mindblown that after seeing what happened to 4chan/8chan, they didn't forsee this day coming. My theory is that Parler _wanted_ this to happen, so they could raise a stink / file a court case. The founder is a major ideologue and this whole thing might be better for business than if AWS had left them alone.
One thing which concerns me a bit about this is that removing Parler removes a big chunk of evidence about how this was planned and who was involved.
- Is this archived?
- Does Law enforcement have access to that archive?
Seems like once it's abundantly clear there is zero profit left in this the owners will abandon any link to the data and let it all rot and vanish. This strikes me as a lost opportunity.
This being HN I expected more commentary around how a company can/should build technology to survive such incidents, and not go down just because one of your providers either blocked you or themselves went down.
It is funny that a social media company seeking to escape from the big tech stranglehold would decide to host their platform using a big tech cloud provider.
I don't think a legal business can survive this kind of incident (becoming a pariah in the eyes of FAANG.) There isn't a point in being resilient against being dropped by one service if they all drop you in unison. If you try to take payments you will be dropped by all of the payment processors. If you try to run bare metal and are dropped by cloudflare you will be DDOS'd to death. If you go p2p you'll need to be able to ship native apps which will be dropped from the app stores or denied a certificate. Side-loading is already dead in iOS and things are moving that way for other major operating systems including desktop.
If you are an illegal business there are a multitude of ways of working around many of these issues (using fake identities with hosting companies and other services, making money via shady malware riddled ad services, money laundering, etc...)
Until recently I thought that p2p/crypto/etc was the solution but since you cannot do true p2p in the browser and must ship native code, at the end of the day you will still need the blessing of Apple/Google/Microsoft and agree to their TOS to exist. Of course this is perfect storm that happens rarely but it's still chilling to watch it unfold despite how contemptible the target is.
1,352 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadAnd also, what is the threshold for deciding which platform is on one side or another?
If that merely means that Parler allows posts that make people angry with a fair amount of violent rhetoric, well, that's all social media. In that case, the distinction is partisan, not principled.
Where can one find a definition of "sufficient" in this context?
If you're going to build something aimed entirely at "taking down/riling up the establishment" you need to make sure you're not entirely dependent on the establishment to keep your something online.
> Over the past several weeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence. [...] It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. [...] This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you.
(quoting from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p..., it's a ways down the page).
The email is lacking in specifics, though.
Assuming this is true, it's why I shed no tears for Parler and their circumstances.
However, things like "sufficient" and "urgency" need to be established in law, after which the rules are clear and all of these platforms can be held to account for the content they host and spread.
If it turns out that gives the current tech giants too much individual power, that’s a separate issue to deal with.
It's obvious there should have been more moderation. However, Parler is a 30 employee start up. Their efforts would fall sort of the ideal either way...
So based on this, Amazon made a business decision to deny service to Parler, due to the adverse publicity (and perhaps, potential legal liability) generated for them by hosting this content.
"parler is just not worth the aggravation" - they are likely to be a minuscule revenue source that requires constant monitoring to make sure we not facing any liability, as well as potentially pissing off our existing clients. Therefore, its in our best interests just not to bother with them.
Anyone that thinks corporations care one way or another about anything except their bottom lines, has a much higher view of corporations then I do.
I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. That's just capitalism. No master except the almighty dollar.
but if they were at least honest about it, maybe we could stop re-hashing this everyday...
Twitter doesn't seem to have any issue with this content
Do you think that is not as bad as what Trump has said?
And it can be argued that if the Israeli nation wasn’t a socialist theocracy, things would be much better there, just as we can say the same for Iran.
Now you and I both know the Ayatollah believes in a Jewish genocide, but this particular tweet isn’t proof or evidence of it.
If you can twist that into supporting the rioters and calling for violence at the inauguration, I don't see how you can't see calling for the destruction of Israel could cause people to be anti-Semitic.
If Trump tweeted that Mexico was cancerous tumor on America that has to be removed and eradicated, it is possible, and it will happen, do you think Twitter be cool with that? What if he had previously endorsed the genocide of all Mexican people? What if Americans had commonly been committing terrorist attacks against Mexicans?
My point was that OP didn’t have to mistate the literal tweet.
We judge threats not only on their intent, but on their success in executing that intent. On that measure, Parler is much more dangerous than Maduro, Putin, or the Ayatollah.
then call a brief description of an event that obviously happened a "conspiracy theory".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gideon_(2020)
So far, Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has. That's why they get taken more seriously.
As Twitter said, it's not just the content, but the context as well. When Iranian soldiers invade the US Capitol, I'm sure they'll face a Twitter ban as well.
The leadership in Iran, in contrast, has not gotten any closer to its goal of destroying Israel since the Revolution.
conservatives have watched themselves banned piecemeal from these platforms, they know exactly what’s coming.
the ones you’re worried about have already got private comms.
Also while ensuring those tools can never be used for "evil" is unreasonable, we should expect dominant players to do what they can or at least not do a lot worse than everyone else. Are you arguing Parler tried to moderate as much as others?
Meanwhile there are lots of private conservative/Republican groups on Facebook no one wants to talk about.
Silence is also violence. All of you lurkers will be purged as well.
EDIT: I misunderstood "purge" in this context. I disagree that silence on moderating content is "violence" just as I disagree that anything you disagree with is "violence." But I do not believe content will be "purged" unless it's part of a movement to unseat democracy or coordinate violent actions.
He's saying that when a person don't like something, the recent trend is to just label it as "inciting violence". He then adds onto that by saying the idea of "silence is violence" means that anyone who does not speak out against the disliked thing is inherently guilty of "inciting violence" as well, so lurkers and moderates are not safe from being labeled.
Again, I disagree with what he said. However, accusing his post of threatening violence against everyone with whom he disagrees does kind of support his point.
"Parler will not knowingly allow itself to be used as a tool for crime, civil torts, or other unlawful acts. We will remove reported member content that a reasonable and objective observer would believe constitutes or evidences such activity. We may also remove the accounts of members who use our platform in this way."
https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf (obviously inaccessible now).
We live in a capitalist free-market system. Amazon (or any entity) is free to choose with whom they do business (oh the irony!). They are dropping Parler because the the current political climate has manifest in such a way that they think it will cost them more financial and/or political capital than the alternative (recall there is a lot of antitrust sentiment out there right now).
Too bad so sad. Sorry not sorry. This is exactly the kind of "freedom" for which many of the above platform's users would advocate. Parler's PR team is missing the opportunity to applaud AWS for exercising their freedoms.
Unless, of course, they actually stand by what they've said. In which case we come right back to my original post.
Amazon doesn't really come off as the "good guy" by admitting they have weighed the current political climate against their profits. Especially given whose about to be in charge. They made a business decision and wrapped up in some good 'ol PR spin/legalese. It happens all the time. About everything. It's still their right to refuse service.
Or maybe food delivery truck drivers is a better analogy since that isn’t a utility...
Parler could still go out and build their own servers. The fact that this is a project driven by "free speech enthusiasts" and not actual engineers means they're probably going to have a real hard time getting the engineering stuff back in line.
Apple/Google refusing to sell your app is just that: a store refusing to sell a product.
Yes, and as someone on Twitter pointed out, as a customer also denied service, Rosa Parks could have gone out and started her own bus line (likely outside her financial range though).
The argument to "do it yourself" is silly. Europe sees it. The ACLU sees it. Why can't you?
For the record: I think these platforms should be responsible for what they host.
I was under the impression the First Amendment was about the government imposing laws that restricted religion or expression of the citizenry. Can you point to the part that says anything about how businesses (built off of public infrastructure) are to be run?
The only caveat to this is protected class. There are some movements to make political affiliation a protected class, but I personally think that’s the wrong path to go down since it’s not an “inherent” attribute of a person like race, age, sexual orientation, etc.
I don't have an answer to this, because I agree with you.
Maybe if you "arbitrarily" decide to stop doing business with someone, after you've already started, without a breech of any terms of service, you should be financially liable in some way? Contract law should cover that (I'm def no expert). Does it? Like, if Amazon decides to cut me off from hosting, and I haven't broken any laws, rules or ToS, they should have to pay for me to be up-and-running elsewhere. In other words, AWS can't boot someone without establishing wrong-doing.
It feels like this wouldn't require much more than tighter contracts, handing more power to the customer. I'm in favour of that.
Pretty much any large company with appropriate risk controls (not to mention the financial incentives) will negotiate and sign custom long-term deals with AWS’s extremely large sales staff.
https://www.ciodive.com/news/underlying-pinterests-technolog...
Still, we do have some laws compelling speech (tobacco warning labels) and association (restaurants can't refuse to serve Muslims). But there has to be a good justification. Warning labels express facts and prevent harm. Protected classes are all things considered "inherent" to a person (gender, religion, ethnicity). But there's a high bar for these kind of laws. And preventing people from choosing relationships based on politics is clearly against the First Amendment.
>built off of public infrastructure
This describes almost every business.
This isn't about refusing to do business with someone. The issue in my eyes is agreeing to do business with someone and then arbitrarily[1] deciding to not do business with someone, with no recourse to the customer because the provider is a massive conglomerate with unlimited resources.
AWS didn't refuse to do business with Parler, they did business with them for years. Then one day, based on ambiguous and discriminantly applied rules that may or may not apply to Parler's competitors on the same hosting platform, decided to not do business with them. I don't think that's right.
Look at Apple's letter to the Parler CEO regarding being pulled from the App Store: Apple says Parler is responsible for all the content on their site. And yet, Apple doesn't live by the same rules, in fact they actively lobby against them.
[1] Arbitrary because AWS, as far as I've seen, doesn't say "here are the rules you agreed to, here's where you broke them. Goodbye". There's a lot of ambiguity. Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
> Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
From the sound of it, Parler was not responding well to requests for moderation and didn't show signs of improvement. Twitter might be better at it. And, for contracts, it shouldn't matter if one party lets some parties slide but is a stickler for others. The contract was the terms on paper, not "These terms or the most lax behaviors for any parties agreeing to the same terms."
"I want things that I like to be available to me and I want people who deny it to me to be held criminally liable because I don't understand the case law".
I think people are misplacing their anger that big-tech has too much control over our world. This is fine to be upset about, but you can't say "they have too much control, therefor it's illegal for them to do the things they're doing". No, the laws you want haven't been written (or repealed).
There's also a ton of pie-in-the-sky dreaming that if we could just undo the "bad-part" of 230 then magically Twitter would have to host things because reasons which is a gross misunderstanding.
TL;dr- HN commenters tend to skew towards "Engineer" understanding and not "Lawyer" understand, and it's causing them friction with reality lately.
I mean the question of the era is what "rights" do we have online.
Do I have the "right" to have my site hosted by a private company, or is that a service? Do platforms have a "requirement" to act as neutrally as possible, or is it just better for business?
It's a good question, and I think we need to figure out where that line is.
Because I agree, AWS should be able to say they don't want this customer. At the same time, when we live in a world where everything is privatized (and monopolized) you very quickly run out of options. Host it yourself? What if all server companies refuse to sell to you, or the internet service providers refuse to provide you with connectivity? Do you need to lay your own fibre and fab your chips? Where do you get those supplies? It's tough.
In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong. For example, just look at The Pirate Bay, who have managed to stay online and operational despite years of attempts by powerful corporations and nation states to take it down.
I can agree that getting up and running is, probably, always possible. But that is no consolation if you're a business that can arbitrarily be shut down on a whim, perhaps without even being given a warning. The financial circumstances might make restarting or moving around untenable.
>In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong.
Yes, and if there's anything good to say about this mess, it's that this particular kind of service is likely to grow.
I agree, and don't feel upset about their particular circumstances.
However, as others have noted, Twitter (moving to AWS) has vastly more controversial content. What are the guidelines as far as what content is tolerable and/or needs to been moderated, and at what rate of "urgency", for them versus Parler? These things aren't spelled out. How can a small business comply?
Until two days ago, being booted from your hosting provider for ideological disagreement was also quite the hypothetical.
Including against similarly far-right sites, e.g. Stormfront, Gab, 8kun/8chan, etc. All of which are still operational, after changing hosting providers.
(obligatory disclaimer that I don't use 8chan, and that from the outside it seems like an horrible place)
A thing that was legal when it happened.
If you don't like the laws, you get the laws changed. There are all sorts of legal, but icky things that exist in the world (bakers being allowed to discriminate based on sexual identity, jobs being allowed to fire you for political affiliation, etc)
I used to work for a company that didn't make 300K a quarter and we managed our own boxes. Yes our scale and problem domain was about an order of magnitude smaller, but it wasn't trivially small (optimization was still a relevant problem for us). What did people do 15 years ago before all of these could platforms did all the work for you? Do that. It's really not that hard!
The analogy above is ridiculous. The problem isn't that Rosa Parks couldn't start her own bus line (though at the time this was probably not feasible for more reasons than just money). The problem is that she was denied service because of her race. You cannot change your race by "doing it yourself".
If SpaceX denies me the opportunity to fly their shuttle do I have to build my own spacecraft to get to space? Yes... I do. I'm sure we could come up with all sorts of other fun examples!
The logic is that "your own boxes" is just another layer in the stack of places private companies can deny doing business with you. Did you manufacture those boxes yourself, from the silicon up? If you didn't, you better hope you don't get blacklisted by parts suppliers.
>You cannot change your race by "doing it yourself".
The analogy is: if she didn't like being denied because of her race, she should have started her own busline.
Of course, we have laws in place that say you can't deny someone service based on race. That's great, and solves that problem.
So tell me what law Parler broke? Has it been proven in court? Or did a private company decide that on their own? Why should they have that power?
I mean, I'm not naive; I understand what Parler is/was trying to do, and it's gross. But the process shouldn't be arbitrary, at the whims of liability protected pseudo-monopolies.
> The analogy is: if she didn't like being denied because of her race, she should have started her own busline.
Right. The above is not summarizing the reason why our society has a problem with the events that occurred. The problem is why Rose Parks was denied service. It has nothing to do with her ability to start her own bus line. Does that make sense? Again, the analogy is completely missing the point.
> So tell me what law Parler broke?
I have no idea nor the inclination to investigate. They don't need to break a law for another business to cut ties. This happens all. the. time. Your problem seems to be a case of "this instance is different than the rest". If you have a problem with antitrust behavior, argue that. You aren't going anywhere with this line of logic.
Nobody is moving goalposts. The point is that there's always another layer of service providers that can cancel you, some of which are monopolists. If you think that's fine, or "just business", good for you. I do not.
>What is your point?
People shouldn't be able to put you out of business because they have more power and don't like you.
>Does that make sense? Again, the analogy is completely missing the point.
You're overthinking things. For the third time: "If you don't like it, build your own competitor" -- oft-repeated-- is a ridiculous statement in most cases. No one is going to build their own App Store, Play Store, Facebook..or yes, bus line.
I'm glad you can poke holes in an off-hand analogy though. It was never intended to be a literal 1-1 translation, with Parler filling the role of Rosa Parks.
>They don't need to break a law for another business to cut ties.
This is news. Thanks.
(edited to remove much sarcasm)
That is fundamental axiom of free-market capitalism. How do you think it is supposed to work? I'm trying to imagine a system where competition doesn't exist... oh wait. It's called "Communism".
> People shouldn't be able to put you out of business because they have more power and don't like you.
You must be young. "I have a bridge to sell you". In 15 years you'll better-understand how the world works and your idealism now will feel rather foolish in retrospect. I'll leave it at that.
> some of which are monopolists
I think this is actually what you are meaning to argue against. Just poorly. There is nothing wrong with a company deciding that the profit they derive from selling me widgets eclipses the losses they realize elsewhere, and to therefore end the relationship. This literally happens constantly. I could give you an example last month where we had to end a relationship with a client because they are a competitor to a bigger (more profitable) client who didn't like us serving both. It happens. I promise.
What it seems like you are actually railing against is anti-competitive behavior which is protected against in antitrust law. Monopolies are not against the law so long as they don't engage in certain market-making behaviors[0]. That is, behaviors that make "building your own competitor" impossible (i.e. undermining the fundamental axiom of FMC). This isn't a case of anti-competitive behavior. This is the market deciding that the financial/political cost of associating their business with an entity is greater than the profits they gain. It's business. Parler, in this moment, simply doesn't have a sustainable business model. The best thing they could do is to turn the narrative, lean in, and applaud AWS for exercising its freedom. But they are young too...
And for what it's worth I wasn't "poking holes" in your analogy. I was tearing it down entirely. It doesn't hold at all - even a little bit. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the very foundations on which the civil rights movement was based, and some respects, liberal democracy altogether.
[0] Amazon is currently in court fighting the government in this respect. So is Facebook.
I haven't seen amazon claim that Parler broke the law. They have a TOS policy that forbids the hosting of illegal content.
> Has it been proven in court?
If a AWS customer is hosting child porn, does AWS take it down as soon as they're aware of the content, or do they wait for a court ruling?
> Or did a private company decide that on their own? Why should they have that power?
It's not power. You have a responsibility to exercise your judgement, and avoid participating in criminal acts. If you knowingly participate and profit until there's a trial in court, then you're an accessory. Section 230 has some exemptions -- you aren't protected if you maintain illegal content.
What happened on 1/6 was an armed crowd breached the capitol building. A plain reading indicates that this is an act of war, and AWS has enough legal problems without opening themselves to charges of aiding an enemy of the state in an act of treason.
This isn't "power" it's a matter of legal responsibility.
If Amazon is saying Parler hosted "illegal content" then they are saying they broke the law. How can it be any other way?
>If a AWS customer is hosting child porn, does AWS take it down as soon as they're aware of the content, or do they wait for a court ruling?
Child porn is illegal, hate speech (and in lots of places, "incitement") is not. In fact, in many jurisdictions the latter are protected speech. There is no moral equivalence here. Society's rules are clear on child porn. They are less clear on what constitutes incitement. That should be evident if you're following these events.
>It's not power.
"ALCU Counsel Warns of Unchecked Power of Twitter, Facebook After Trump Suspension"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/aclu-counsel-warns-o...
Because I'm not clear on the specific exemptions for section 230. I can't say one way or another whether Parler itself broke the law.
> That's kind of the point here. Society's rules are clear on child porn. They are less clear on what constitutes incitement. That should be evident if you're following these events.
Did people openly plan an armed attack on the capitol building? Yes.
Did people follow through on aforementioned plans? Yes. Violence was incited. Having read quite a few relevant posts on Parler, I'm reasonably sure that their users broke the law.
There is a lot of gray area between voicing frustration and incitement, but this is not one of those cases.
Isn't "imminent lawless action" the limit of free speech? it seems clear after January 6th that a part of what was promoted on Parler was both imminent and lawless.
Assuming the people planning on Parler were some of the same people who stormed the Capitol then yes, absolutely. With the benefit of hindsight, this was incitement, potentially criminal.
Now the tricky part: from Parler's perspective, content that at one minute is "free speech" is suddenly illegal, or at the very least ToS breaking, in a matter of hours. Were they given a reasonable amount of time to remove the content (and what good would that even do, after the fact)? Did Amazon make Parler a political target, and arbitrarily apply a rule to them that they did not apply to other customers (Twitter)? Likely, imho. Does any of it even matter if "businesses can do what they want"?
Curious to know what the process other than market forces should be. Government? Paaah.. they can't even protect kids in schools being shot, control the pandemic or even distribute vaccine in any competent manner. (lots of other examples also come to mind!)
If the president calls for the boycott of Goodyear [0], isn't it also fair for Goodyear to not sell to any of Trumps companies? (Too lazy to look at other boycott tweets)
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/20/finance-2...
1.3B page views per month, with I think 23 servers. Building a mostly (I guess?) view only site is different than something like twitter, but it's doable.
[0] https://stackexchange.com/performance
Parler had 24 hours to migrate from AWS.
Or let me put it like this: What is the appropriate number of machines and amount of time? And why?
If you want to draw a line, support it please!
Parler had no idea AWS would just yank them from service at 24 hours notice - I don't think there is any precedent for this from an AWS perspective. So this is the challenge they had if they wanted to move to physical infra after being given notice - 500 servers in 24 hours.
(As a side note, setting up physical infra at the scale of growth Parler was having wouldn't have been practically possible - they had a giant and rapid spike across the last month or so. It also wouldn't have been financially wise, considering they probably don't have the capital and the traffic spike was probably a temporary surge. Plus if you buy physical infra and then your apps get removed by the other cloud providers, that changes your traffic profile again... Parler really had both their hands tied behind their backs to fight this thing).
I certainly wouldn't choose to continue serving a client if I thought doing so was costing me money.
As an aside, I actually would continue serving a client if I had sold them a service, they were paying for it at the agreed price and keeping on top of invoices, and if me reneging would cause them to go out of business. And then if I had to end it, I would give them as much notice as I could practically provide (particularly if they were willing to profitably pay during the notice period).
I wouldn’t personally do business with you if I thought you would instantly back out of an agreement that you had already profited on with almost zero notice. AWS is no charity here, Parler were paying them for servers.
Are you trying to say it's unfair? I just don't see it that way. If Amazon violated the terms of their agreement then fine, let it be litigated. But if Parler can't get back up quick enough in the mean time that's on them. That's how business works. I know. I conduct it. It's not personal.
And oligopolies pose antitrust issues.
Antitrust is more concerned with anti-competitive behaviors: pricing-fixing, group boycotts[0], buying a competitor with the express purpose of removing competition, etc. Amazon and Parler are not in the same market - they are not competing for anything. Antitrust is not going to be a fruitful legal avenue.
If Amazon were somehow influencing Parler's ability to "do it themselves" (e.g. preventing a seller from providing them with boxes), then yes, there may be some legal standing.
[0] Look this one up. It's not what you are thinking.
Which means the analogy is boring.
There's probably a good discussion to be had about how to regulate services like AWS though. The dynamics are probably different, with power companies not quite having the same potential for wanting to disassociate from noxious customers.
Right, but afaik the reason water/power/etc are made public utilities is because they are natural monopolies:
> Public utilities, the companies that have traditionally provided water and electrical service across much of the United States, are leading examples of natural monopoly. It would make little sense to argue that a local water company should be broken up into several competing companies, each with its own separate set of pipes and water supplies. Installing four or five identical sets of pipes under a city, one for each water company, so that each household could choose its own water provider, would be terribly costly. The same argument applies to the idea of having many competing companies for delivering electricity to homes, each with its own set of wires. Before the advent of wireless phones, the argument also applied to the idea of many different phone companies, each with its own set of phone wires running through the neighborhood.
https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/11-3-reg...
This same is harder to say for AWS. The physical wires? Yes, but your hosting provider? It's not as clear cut.
Private companies are free to refuse service to anyone; unless there is specific legislation to the contrary.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
It's a quick read, it's not long, and it's actually reasonably clear what it does and does not do.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Your thesis is flawed. You can't define "good faith" in any real way. You either have to accept that sites will be moderated and some number of people will disagree with the moderation, or you have to swing HARD in the opposite direction and decide all sites are now publishers and responsible for all content on their sites including user created content.
That standard doesn't exist and isn't objective. No, even that really clever one you're about to come up with. It's not real. It's all subjective. The entire US legal system is a "Common-law" legal system, meaning it's all subjective. Objective is for mathematics, not the law.
*edited for typo
If you believe that there is a massive conspiracy that resulted in widespread election fraud, flipping the election results, and that the massive conspiracy is going to ruin everyone's lives in the future, you'll find it objectively truthful to make sure everyone posts as much information about the election being stolen as possible up to and including taking up arms and fighting for your freedom, and there's no way to reasonably interpret that content as harmful to the greater good.
If you believe there was no conspiracy resulting in widespread election fraud, but there is a massive disinformation campaign stemming from a demagogue that now has enough followers willing to take up arms and attempt to overthrow the government, you will find it objectively truthful that posting information about the election being stolen will contribute to inciting those followers and is a grave threat to our model of democracy.
Content is, by its nature, open to interpretation, and often written with persuasive language. If you're persuaded, your beliefs and actions will tend one way, and if you're not, they'll tend another way. The same content can only be evaluated in a subjective manner.
This is fairly clearly an antitrust case, which has nothing to do with S230. Behavior of the digital giants is very similar to the behavior of railroad oligopolies of the 19th century which actually led to antitrust legislation.
It would be different if, say, CenturyLink were blocking content across their transit infrastructure. That would be more like your railroad analogy.
There is a longish recent staff report on the Web of the Congress regarding behavior of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook (almost 500 pages) [0]. I actually read most of it. These platforms have already engaged in a lot of stuff that is anti-competitive. And the latest purge of Parler is, among other effects, also a suppression of a potential competitor.
Of course, the tech giants say that they weren't officially motivated by a desire to suppress a competitor, but they acted against potentially competing firms so many times already that one should be wary about their explanations.
[0] https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...
It seems more like poor planning on their part: over-reliance on specific services of a single provider, and no disaster recovery plan for if this is made unavailable. Particularly considering the business they're in - publishing controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites. They would have been wise to have a backup plan for hosting.
On the other hand, if you were also passing reference to the app store duopoly (as the report mentions this), I agree with you on that. At least on Android a banned app can be fairly easily side-loaded; iOS users are entirely subject to Apple's whims on what their device is permitted to run.
If Amazon acted alone, I do not think that there would be an antitrust case. But given that Amazon acted together with the app store duopoly, in what appears to be a coordinated action with the same goal, I think the antitrust case applies. If two very dominant players make a pact with a third not-so-dominant player to squeeze somebody a bit more, it only makes their anti-competitive behavior harsher.
BTW, I believe that Parler really could have prepared better. It is obvious that they did not have a good plan B.
Mikhail Gorbachev used to say "Trust, but verify." I would like to see some verification in this case.
It's a special form of doublethink where aesthetics and actions can go into completely opposite directions. Many republican campaigns have made great use of this, particularly to appeal to rural america.
If they should have cut people off earlier and didn't, or haven't gone far enough, section 230 says they have no liability to moderate, unless specific other liabilities apply.
If they cut people off that you don't think is appropriate, section 230 says they have no liability from moderation that they've taken, other than implicit liability of violating constitutional rights (which would need new case law to establish, if it's 1st ammendment speech)
They see things in a more absolutist free speech lens, meaning any content that is legal should be allowed. And they don't see platforms as being responsible for moderation. They view centralized moderation as inherently biased and illegitimate. If they can't or wont allow legal speech, then they think 230 should be repealed and these sites should cease to exist.
They are reacting to takedowns from social media sites, SaaS providers, IaaS providers, and financial services because they view these sites as an oligopoly acting in unison to bar them from the basic infrastructure of modern life. Imagine if typewriter companies ganged up to stop selling to right leaning newspapers and authors. Or, imagine if telegraph companies said they wouldn't transmit messages for Abraham Lincon.
On 230, they see social media sites as a monopoly due to network effects. Also/alternatively they talk about a bait-and-switch, where the social media sites held themselves out as public squares when they were small. But once they were big, they started enforcing their views.
Generally, I think people are failing to put themselves in a Trump supporter's shoes. Imagine you genuinely believed that the election was stolen. The court cases were almost all dismissed on standing and laches. From their perspective, no one will substantively address their videos, affidavits, statistical anomalies, etc.
And when they protest, people call them violent insurrectionists, despite all year BLM doing very similar things (again from their perspective).
It is the policy of the United States- (1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media; (2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation; (3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services; ...
Up until now, a Laissez-faire regulatory approach seemed to achieve these goals, but it's hardly fair to call what exists at this point a "vibrant and competitive free market" which "maximizes user control over what information is receives by individuals". Especially if a cartel of tech platforms can completely stamp out individuals' ability to listen to the speech of people they want access to. Regulation is needed now.
And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes" and social media do not mix. It's much easier to turn a community toxic than it is to keep it healthy, and healthy communities (of any sort) need moderation. Certain people have turned this fact on its head and want you to believe that "completely free speech" and "healthy communities" are compatible because they want to overrun healthy channels with their garbage.
Why won't AWS, Google, and Apple collectively ban them? Their open calls for violence were far more consequential and severe and serious than anything on Parler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strateg...
The Bush administration officials who sold those lies to the public were zionist jews who had written this policy paper just 5 years before Bush appointed them into the government.
Actually, looking up the numbers right now, the total civilian death rate is perhaps 1 million at most, more likely somewhere in the 100,000s. Iraq Body Count gives ~200k civilian deaths; estimation from the number of internally-displaced peoples (basically figuring that displaced-to-dead ration is between 5:1 and 10:1) suggests a number more like ~700k civilian deaths. Extrapolating excess death counts suggest that the latter number is more accurate.
Perhaps if you consider the fallout of the Iraq War (rise of ISIS, Syrian Civil War, etc.) you get more but the point is the same
The faulty NYT reporting gave the government a certain level of cover to allow them to do what they already planned to do. Parler was a forum for participants to discuss and actively plan sedition. And there's already violence threatened in the days around inauguration so it stands to reason it could have served the same role again.
Can we stop with the "whataboutism" already?
So I guess they were involved, but the journalists in the organization in the time did not have the power or the information to swim against the currents of what was happening. Even if they had shut down their paper, we would have gone to war with Iraq.
On the other hand, Parler has purposefully created a space for people to plan violence against the state, and refused requests to be more careful about moderating.
And that is why truth by consensus is not a good way for a reporter to report compared to actually investigating somethng beforehand.
But all humans are self-serving hypocrites, it is in our nature.
It can be true that both:
- The NYT deserves a lot of blame for the lead up to the iraq war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War)
- Newspapers generally do a really good job of fact checking the articles they print
But further, even just acting in good faith can be a defense against libel. It's only when you knowingly publish a false statement that you get in legal hot water.
This is why Fox news and the like have been doing 180s on voter fraud lies. It's not because they have the best interest of the public at heart, it's because they are trying mitigate liability.
Have you forgotten 3 years of the MSN saying Trump's presidency was illegitament because he stole the election by coluding with the Russians?
The issues regarding Russian interference were not centered on collusion, but on ... well, interference (which some believe went so far as to include actual collusion).
Mueller's report and the Senate report did find conclusively that the Russians did interfere, and did so with the goal of getting Trump elected. Mueller said that they did not find evidence of active collaboration between the campaign and the Russians ... here's the current Wikipedia summary:
>did not find sufficient evidence that the campaign "coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities". Investigators ultimately had an incomplete picture of what happened due to communications that were encrypted, deleted, or not saved and due to testimony that was false, incomplete, or declined. However, the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion" but was welcomed by the Trump campaign as it expected to benefit from such efforts
Again, I recall essentially nobody in any position of power (certainly not elected Senators) saying the Trump's election was illegitimate. People did say that his election was aided by Russian interference (Mueller and the Senate investigation state this clearly), and that it was/is unfortunate to have a president elected without winning the popular vote.
I saw what I assumed were bots posting a lot of garbage links to 'articles' like "Obama compound raided!" and "8 Democrats switch to Republican Party" (that actually happened in Feb 2020, but the link was to an undated rerun and the link was posted.. 2 days ago?).
The links were to such trustworthy sites as 'firstusanews.us' (made up, but all variants like that), and they all would throw "update your flash player!" malware popups.
Next to each of these links on Parler were view counts - 207, 412, 897, etc - of people who'd clicked the link to view the article.
I could not reply to the link with a comment like "this has malware" because... my account was not verified. Only 'badged/verified' accounts can comment on 'links'. AND... the only way to get 'badged' is to use the mobile app and take a picture of govt ID (driver license, passport, etc). This becomes incredibly lopsided "free speech" biased against moderating/critical voices.
It was literally a field day for bots to post malware garbage and have thousands of victims per day, and no ability for people to warn others.
On one 'article' I followed there were comments from people saying "I don't understand how Parler works" in the comments on the linked article. Indeed...
"We're in! We're in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!"
https://www.businessinsider.com/derrick-evans-capitol-siege-...
The "wrong kind of association" for creating a social media account?
Perhaps another question to ask would be, "How fair is it that others are pigeonholed to platforms like this and undoubtedly get the "wrong kind of association"?
Are we reducing certain thoughts, beliefs and, dare I say, questions indiscriminately down to "crimethink"?
Beyond that, if a platform is known for encouraging behaviour that you and your peers disapprove of. It might make sense for you to avoid registering there in case your peers get the wrong impression of you should the information leak. While not exactly social media, you only need to look at the fallout from Ashley Madison for why you might not want to sign up somewhere because of "the wrong kind of association".
Why social media would be the only forum exempt from this line of thinking I can't imagine.
I guess I was approaching that question from a different angle where "wrong kind of association" was from the perspective of Big Brother. So I probably made an incorrect assumption about what the parent comment intended.
I agree with you that there probably is an element of this in the parent comment. Linking your "Cell phone at a protest" to you is probably going to be at the behest of the government.
What the implications of social media and "big tech" are in our society is definitely a conversation worth having. It's just a shame that it's often only brought up in order to distract or deflect attention from bad behaviour. The conversation would be much more productive if it happened at a time when people weren't so inflamed by the issue of the day.
How sad is it that our free society has turned into this? So much for tolerance.
Some people have argued, based on this, that Parler was set up by the NSA to get data on people.
Hoovering up data from social media is certainly the sort of thing the NSA would do.
Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?
Of course they already have all government IDs. But tying it to a username helps correlate data across other services, and additionally if the user checks from mobile phone or other device, tying it to recent IPs could also be useful. OPSec could prevent some of that, but how many users are doing that?
Just a thought. Not an endorsement.
To me, the more realistic (and scary!) explanation is this thing is just one huge identity theft machine.
It's a interesting thought to entertain but Parler is most likely not this.
> Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?
The best way to get a bunch of white supremacists and insurrectionists to robustly, undeniably identify themselves might be to ask them to upload their ID. :P
The best method for target acquisition, sure. If someone is so perturbed by their reality being rejected by the mainstream that they're willing to sign up for an alternative to maintain their worldview, then running that alternative would be a fantastic way to identify people at risk of radicalization, domestic terror risks, etc.
And if we're being clear, the USIC has run companies with this explicit mission in the past. In fact, running a company to provide one service at face level while providing a different service to the IC underneath is the mode that yielded some of the biggest intelligence wins in Western history. See Crypto AG.
That said, no reason to run it themselves; they're well aware that someone else will end up running it for them, and with security nowhere near front-of-mind for any startup, they can just pick up the key from underneath the doormat and take the farm.
No, but it’d be a really good way to get behavioral data on people and use a government ID to tie that data to real identities rather than pseudonyms.
I'm not saying it's likely, but certainly possible.
Actually why the flying fuck would someone think it is a good idea to plan an insurrection on this site in the first place?? It's like opposite day opsec
Turkey and Russia are good examples of how this attack works. It relies on a large number of people, possibly even a majority, to overthrow the republic with a populist government with no rules the leader can't change or selectively enforce. The leader shuts down one threat to himself at a time, making his control permanent.
IMO the military is obligated to arrest Trump for treason, which was the turkish backstop, and after a few rounds Turkey finally missed the last time. So once it is used, you have to patch your system to drop privileges from the Presidents office for the next round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
One example would be cambridge analytica...
<puts on tinfoil hat> Maybe the entire site is just an FBI honeypot for right-wing extremists? (It's obviously not an NSA honeypot, because they could afford to self-host.)
[1] https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327253991936454663
If they were so concerned with "freedom" why would they have the following in their terms of use?
“Parler may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason.”
Twitter doesn't have a leg to stand on when Iranian leadership has tweets literally calling for the genocide of Israel, or the CCP has tweets using ethnic slurs against Uigher peoples. Yet why is it that lack of censorship is fine and "healthy"?
One of the things I do, generally, when there's a call to ban something is to actually go and check it out whether it's a site, a book or a movie. And Parler is overwhelmingly just conservative twitter - and just like actual twitter, it has some nasty and gross content. Yet nobody is suggesting we take twitter offline despite their repeated failures to police their own content.
So far, Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has. That's why they get taken more seriously. Neither Twitter, nor Apple, nor Amazon want to be responsible for the rise of a fascist regime in the US.
Too often, you can't see the rise of authoritarianism until its too late. This time, we saw it in time. I commend these companies for taking a stand, despite the obvious backlash they'll suffer as a result.
We're indeed seeing the rise of authoritarianism...I think you're confused as to who the authoritarians are.
If you consider the silencing of organized threats to overthrow the US government by neo-Nazis and Confederates to be acts against "conservative voices," this tells us a lot about what "conservatism" means now.
Almost all private companies are authoritarian. Examples of non-authoritarian companies might include co-ops.
It's really hard to argue that conservative voices are completely silenced when the have the largest network news television station in the country. Take a look at the New York Times best seller list sometime and look at how many conservative authors make the list.
Yes, you can't spread fake bullshit on Twitter anymore about how the election was stolen but even that would've been ok until 5 people died trying to overthrow the capital.
Actions have consequences, and unfortunately for conservatives those consequences are a purge from social media as big business seeks to distance itself from radical right-wing politics.
Democracy won here, sorry.
"You're the only one who's confused. BLM is both a sentiment and a real political organization. The sentiment is overwhelmingly popular whereas the actual political movement is not."
Yeah, that's not confusing at all. Kind of like "Hey, 'Defund the Police' doesn't mean defund the police" Maybe the organizers should hire (better) PR firms.
You're trying to conflate the detailed political views of an organization with people who tend to agree that Black people need to be treated like human beings by police officers.
I also agree, 'Defund the Police' is a shit term for Police Reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Black_Lives
Demanding that people all be treated equally by law enforcement isn’t far left, I thought that was important to state that.
The USA isn't really a democracy. For it to be democratic it would have to use more democratic voting systems than FPTP and the electoral college.
It's an oligarchy, but by the ruling class, which includes the big tech companies.
> Neither Twitter, nor Apple, nor Amazon want to be responsible for the rise of a fascist regime in the US.
Unless it's one where they are in charge.
It's self-evidently impossible for Trump and the red tribe to overthrow the US system of government, they simply don't have control of enough of the levers of power.
It would be a lot easier for Biden/Harris and the blue tribe to do so, as they control a lot more of the levers of power (e.g. academia, journalism, big tech).
We have the closest thing to a democracy that any country has. I'm not going to split hairs about what a "real" democracy is. The fact is, our democracy is good enough that we, the people, (barely) stopped a fascist leader from maintaining power for the indefinite future, despite his very sincere desire to hold on to that power.
Then it becomes martial law time, with Trump retaining power.
How close is that?
I mean after you beat numerous police officers and murder one.
One person killing a cop doesn't mean the whole group was going to use violence.
And they weren’t stopping their co-“protestors” from beating cops, there were more assaulted.
And we know who planted the bombs, they already arrested multiple individuals who were armed, had pipe bombs or Molotov cocktails and who were photographed at the building.
I agree that people who attacked cops and watched it happen were willing to do violence. They should be in jail. They appear to be a minority of the rioters. That is all I was trying to say.
There was a van that had some molotov cocktails and bombs. These appear to belong to the rioters. I am talking about the bombs placed at the capital and at the RNC headquarters. Just because someone has a bomb doesn't mean they planted bombs nearby. I don't like assuming things like that.
What in the hell do you think would have happened if they had caught up to any member of Congress? Seriously. Even if you foolishly assume the most charitable and peaceful of intentions, the size of the mob and physical violence on display going through the halls of the Capitol should make it painfully obvious that any Democratic member of Congress they happened upon would have ended up seriously injured. The mob beat a cop to death.
There's simply no way a rational person could come to the conclusion that the mob wouldn't have injured or killed Congresspeople. If you can't see the mob's intent you're either being willfully obtuse or disastrously ignorant. There's not a charitable middle ground as these people documented themselves during the riot and months leading up to it.
Do you believe that BLM rioters who chanted at politicians and cops and had various weapons intended to murder them? BLM rioters broke through barricades and smashed windows as well. Some BLM rioters killed multiple cops as well.
If I saw a BLM riot break into a building with politicians I would hold the same view I hold with these people. They may do violence, but we don't know for sure.
When people broke into the Wisconsin capital years ago over act 10 I didn't assume they were going to murder people.
I don't like to assume entire groups are going to do violence. When some individuals do violence in a group I don't assume the entire group wants to do violence.
Your overall point is reasonable, but this is a reach there are many countries now that are at least as democratic as the US by any reasonable definition, and some pretty supportable arguments that some of them are meaningfully more democratic.
It's not that interesting to argue about I think though, because the differences are pretty small, and there is a huge gulf between all of the democratic countries and the non-democratic ones.
Is there any historical precedent for such a weakly armed group of people[1] overthrowing a heavily armed government?
Seems like hyperbole suggest they almost succeeded in overthrowing the most heavily armed government in the world.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706437
But its naive to think the most heavily armed and powerful government in the world was nearly overthrown by a mob of people armed with fire extinguishers, zip ties, pepper spray, and little to no guns.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706437
No they didn't. Ransacking a building isn't overthrowing a government.
> We have the closest thing to a democracy that any country has.
Ha ha ha -- good joke, I could do with a laugh
> I'm not going to split hairs about what a "real" democracy is.
It's one where the government does what the people want.
> we, the people, (barely) stopped a fascist leader
Trump isn't a fascist. To be a fascist he would have to be more intelligent and have more coherent beliefs.
> despite his very sincere desire to hold on to that power
Nor does Trump want power. He wants attention -- narcissistic supply.
Trump's actually to lazy to exercise power (as well as being too stupid); that's why he refuses to read memos more than a page long.
Those people dressed like Huck Finn Braveheart had as much chance of overthrowing the US government as memelords did kidnapping an alien and bringing intergalactic peace.
This feels like 9/11 all over again. You got the worst legislation in US history as a result of 9/11. (the Patriotic Act)
What's going to be the Patriotic Act for the internet now everyone is convinced we are being attacked? We know they want to get rid of Section 230. How bad is the law going to be that replaces it?
We are, literally, being attacked by fascists, anarchists, and neo-Nazis.
As I said, it's hard to see these things until it's too late. What happened on Wednesday was nearly the end. If you still don't see it, you're wearing blinders.
Like I'm saying powerful people want to convince America we are being attacked. The best way to do that is to make it look like a real threat. They basically left the front door open, where BLM protesters got tear gas immediately. Do you disagree that the response to the two groups of protesters was a little uneven?
The only difference in our opinions is that I think the response was on purpose. Huck Finn Braveheart is not a criminal mastermind. The number of protesters were miniscule compared to the BLM protesters. If the secret service and police actually wanted to stop them it would have been very easy.
We don't need to crack down on the mob, but we do need to address the situation which led to it's rise.
The electoral college is an outdated piece of government 'software' that has been repeatedly exploited in recent years. Through 2016, there were 58 presidential elections. In 5 of these, the popular vote didn't match the electoral vote. About 8.6% historically.
But for the last couple of decades, excluding this last election which is apparently still being argued, that percentage has been 40% instead of the 6.8% historically.
If Trump's re-election argument fails, that life number will likely drop to 33.3% in my recent subjective experience compared to 8.5% historically, or rise to 50% in recent experience compared to 10.2% historically.
Either way, these numbers mean something's wrong. "That's just a statistical variation you see in any set of data when giving it enough numbers" is not likely with 58 and 59 datapoints. Particularly with the inclusion of other data.
If you check the history logs, you'll see a technological explosion the last couple of decades that coincides with these electoral results that suggest exploitation of the system. Technology allowing fine grained microtargeting is only getting better, and it's being used to exploit the electoral system.
This time with disinformation campaigns and fine grained behavioral tracking and analysis (eg, Cambridge Analytica).
"Yes, we say we're a democracy but technically we're a republic so that means everything is fine and we don't need the numbers to always match up with the voting majority." I mean, I guess. Sure. Until we decide to push exploitation further, beyond the boundaries of the game we've set up.
This time it looks like the actors in the system missed the margin of exploitability within the game and went searching for new exploits. Instead of acknowledging the loss, they spammed every court they could find with useless lawsuits.
Like a malware bot checking every port to try to fingerprint services and check for vulnerable versions. And they turned the disinformation dial up to 11, inciting their base to keep their political machine operational since it's got a 4 year reboot cycle and it'd take time for their port scanning to finish.
This tactic led to a mob rioting. And it's unfortunate, but the mob were ultimately a system mechanic that got out of control. They were the tools or were 'acted upon' in a systems thinking perspective, rather than actors in the system. The actors were wielding them as a tool, and like any tool, irresponsible handling resulted in injury.
When I read other comments expounding on how close we came to a coup, I can't help but roll my eyes as memories of being stuck in Egypt at the beginning of 2011 surface again. It's tough to not go on a rant about the order of magnitude of violence, uncertainty, fear, etc. between what happened with the violent nuts at the capital and a coup.
Not to say that the safety and/or lives of some political leaders weren't at risk, but once you've huddled in a dark apartment while a true overthrow is in play, you'll have no problem distinguishing between the two.
Then there's the whole topic of Boebert and her obsession with carrying a gun around Congress in the days leading up to the event then tweeting their locations live during the incident. It looks like telegraphing in hindsight; like she knew what was going down.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/08/congress-democrats-...
> House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) mentioned that looters had found their way to his unmarked, third floor office and stole his iPad. He questioned how they could locate that office but not his clearly marked ceremonial office in Statuary Hall.
Bizarrely, the FBI even concluded Scalise's shooting wasn't politically motivated because the assailant was a wife-beater whose wife had got fed up with him and left him, and everyone in the press went along with it - even though if we applied this principle to domestic terrorists in general, the US probably wouldn't have anyone who counted as a domestic terrorist.
Apple and Amazon absolutely have the legal right to not do business with anyone, for any reason; and they have the ethical obligation to not do business with anyone openly proposing violence.
Your right though -- you often can't see the rise of authoritarianism until its too late. Sometimes it comes from the place you least expect.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/twitter-takes-do...
> The NYT lied to the American public to whip them up into supporting the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent).
> Why won't AWS, Google, and Apple collectively ban them? Their open calls for violence were far more consequential and severe and serious than anything on Parler
The question is a good one. In the hope of avoiding a similar fate, I'll state the original implicit question explicitly: Where on earth does the authority come from, which authorizes Amazon, ostensibly a private corporation, to arbitrate ANYTHING to do with public speech? Beyond just, say, their raw power and the inability of anyone to stop them.
It's truly shocking to me that so many people are celebrating this. Not just, "Yeah, it's an overreach but these are weird times," or something like this, but just totally, brain-shut-down, unwilling to think through future implications, etc. This sets a precedent for the very, very small number owners of core tech infrastructure--not just media platforms, but physical server infrastructure!--to decide what we all get to see, and ultimately what's right and wrong (right: endless war, wrong: right-wing insurrection, however inept).
Even if you think it was a necessary move (I don't, but surely reasonable people will), if we want to be adults about politics, we have to grapple with it and take these kinds of questions very seriously, not just heap censorship on top of censorship, avoiding the question.
Now, in practice, it might be more accurate to call these markets oligopolies (certainly cloud infrastructure is more this), but this still leaves a few companies with dramatic power over important parts of society.
And monopoly is a problem for the government to solve; these companies aren't 'evil' (any more than most others at least, except in virtue of their size), and the lasting solution is not to try and shame them or call them out here or claim victimhood (as the right has done) - though exercising voice can work as a short term tactic sometimes.
Is this, legally, a free speech issue on its own? No, and I support Amazon’s right to “nope” out of anything they want.
But in the current context of the rush to also prevent open Trump support in other areas like payment processing, and the way the media is hellbent on trying to inextricably link Trump support with terrorism, it should be apparent that there’s a larger effort in play here, that feels highly politically motivated.
What bothers me at this point isn’t whether Amazon has the legal right to do this (they do).
What bothers me somewhat is that there is a clear chilling effect that is intended across the board for a huge portion of the country.
What bothers me even more, is that so many intelligent, well intentioned people are practically giddy about it.
We don’t all have to agree politically in any capacity, but I would at least hope we would have enough empathy to judge this in the context in which any reasonable person would see this on the other side, and be willing to advocate, at the very least, that we do this carefully and with respect for our fellow neighbors. Instead, I see absolute celebration about what can very fairly be seen (whether rightly or wrongly) as an attempt to ostracize millions of Americans.
It literally makes the problem that the people supporting this are CLAIMING they are trying to solve worse. I think it works wonderfully for the problem they are ACTUALLY solving, which is to cement an image of normal members of the political opposition as radicals on the verge of terrorism.
I spoke to my brother last night.
In an utterly predictable fashion, the Parler shutdown has made him worse. It turns out that when multiple global corporations collude to halt the communications of people who think they are being persecuted by a colluding body of global corporations, it makes their movement stronger. Who would have thought?
In the past, I would be able to help talk people through their conspiracy theories to come to a logical conclusion that what they were hearing was too big, too harmful, or otherwise incapable of accomplishing anything to actually be true.
That approach is becoming harder the bigger this becomes.
So given that, the only reasonable conclusion I can come up with this that this is essentially an enemy force living in our country - thousands of terrorists and perhaps millions of terrorist sympathizers. Our only goal at this point is to deny them aid, support, and the tools to organize effectively.
Like it or not, we have entered into an era of asymmetric warfare with what amounts to a terroristic cult in the United States.
This is exactly part of the problem: The hyper-dramatic reaction to a mob of political extremists that forcibly took over a public government building that occurred when the mob was right-wing, and when the building was the DC Capitol, that didn't at all occur when entire neighborhoods, court houses, police precincts, and Federal Courthouses had the exact same occurrence, with a minimal reaction from the press.
My brother isn't mentally ill, anymore than the people dressed in black shooting green lasers in the eyes of Federal officers guarding the Federal Courthouse in Portland are mentally ill. If anyone had bothered to focus on the dangerous radicalization when it was people who they happen to agree with politically, maybe we'd be a bit further ahead on countering it. Instead, we waited until it was people on the other side of the spectrum to notice how dangerous the echo chambers have become, and will label these people members of a cult, without acknowledging the absolute nut jobs on our own side. I was in Portland over the summer, and the crowds around the courthouse were mirror images of the crowds around the capitol. The amount of derangement on display was equivalent. Instead of MAGA gear, it was all black bloc gear, but that's about the only difference.
You are clearly a part of this sectarian viewpoint, because I'm sure you're going to tell me numerous reasons why ONLY these people are terrorists, and not the people who occupied several city blocks of Seattle with assault rifles for months over the summer (with no permission from the residents). I view them all as lunatic, dangerous terrorists, whether they have a MAGA hat or BLM shirt on, provided they are engaging in destruction of property or violence.
To me, it boils down to something simple? There are apparently two groups of people who will lie to you about whether it’s raining outside right now. One group just tried to overthrow the government, so I’m obviously hoping they lose. But that doesn’t make me thrilled about the other group using this as an opportunity to press their advantage and further dominate media outlets.
A great point. I have yet to hear any response at all to this problem from the pro-censorship camp, much less a convincing one.
Every attempt to solve the problem creates more problems.
Trump's opposition is going to be giddy about Trump's downfall and Parler's removal, the same way Trump's supporters were giddy when Trump won. It is not reasonable to expect the mass of political partisans on Facebook and Twitter to adhere to a code of civility.
If your principles are altered by the behavior of strangers on Twitter, they aren't really principles, right?
Sure. But seeing how many of these “giddy” people are blue checkmarks at real news organizations makes folks antsy about conservative news outlets (including mainstream ones) coming under attack as a response to the the Capitol Hill riot.
Trump has moved himself outside of the system of American democracy and to this day refuses to acknowledge a democratic election result[1]. So yes, actively supporting him at this point is supporting an end to American democracy, pretty objectively. Linking the overthrow of the democratic order with terrorism, just after a mob entered the capitol and successfully interrupted the democratic order for multiple hours, doesn't feel a huge leap.
Being conservative isn't linked with terrorism. Being libertarian isn't linked with terrorism. Supporting somebody who rejects democracy is linked with terrorism. It's seems pretty clear cut to me.
[1] He said that a new administration will enter office but never that it does so rightfully based on a legitimate election.
No. "Rejecting democracy," a position held by myriad political currents, each of which probably means something different by the term, is basically a run-of-the-mill ideological position. (It's not one that I hold personally, in case anyone is thinking about downvoting for "extremism.")
You know what's linked with terrorism?
Terrorist acts. That is: sporadic acts of intense, spectacular violence and devastation designed to rock and destabilize some existing political order. Usually but not always from "below" (sometimes it's literally from above, like from a B-52).
I'm concerned pretty deeply, but very, very far from being terrorized by the pathetic spectacle at the Capitol. One reason for that is I don't take the extremely hyperbolic US press as literally as so many seem to.
Terrorism is subjective relative to the system in power. And I said "linked to" not "is". Having the opinion isn't terrorism. But giving money or vocal support to people who then invite others to or themselves try to violently overthrow a form of government is - from the subjective perspective of people in the current system - closely linked to terrorism. If they had succeeded in installing Trump as the continued leader in a post-democratic US, it wouldn't have been terrorism. Because they would've been judged under the new system of government. But they didn't succeed so far. So from the perspective of a post-Trump democratic government, it was terrorism. Terrorism doesn't mean every single person is scared afterwards, so your personal feelings towards it aren't the defining factor.
These corporations are societally expected to uphold a cultural respect for free speech and the rights granted in the First Amendment, but there is no legal basis to compel them to allow speech or activity they do not approve of.
Extrajudicial behavior such as terrorizing a legislature is harmful to these corporations’ profitable predictability. Operators would be in violation of their fiduciary duties to allow such a direct threat to their bottom line to continue, let alone grow.
In other words, money cares more about itself than anyone’s feelings.
I agree. Those are the facts, for sure.
> money cares more about itself than anyone’s feelings.
No argument.
> terrorizing a legislature is harmful to these corporations’ profitable predictability
Strongly agree. This explains AWS's economic motivation. It's not that they just care so much about democracy and rule of law, though a liberal (read: Democrat loyal) employee culture there is probably also a source of pressure pushing them toward the move. In this case the stars align: liberal employees want it, and they can have it because it aligns perfectly with AWS's economic incentives.
I think where we part ways is in thinking this is good for society. My problem with it is not that it violates any laws, but that it amounts to an incredible concentration of power in the realm of cultural production.
The first amendment does not prevent businesses from terminating a relationship.
edit: my opinions are my views and dont represent anyone elses
based (presumably, but I'm not a constitutional scholar) on the 14th amendment's section 3:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Websites like 4chan, 8kun, Stormfront, etc have been pushed out of mainstream hosting providers since forever. This isn't new. What is new is venture funded hate sites. This is big money trying to make a buck on selling ads to the most radical. Literally anyone who's watched the rise and fall of these free speech zones on the internet knew that relying on infrastructure provided by companies like Amazon was beyond stupid.
You can put whatever you want on the Internet, there's lots of hosting companies around the world that are willing to help. Just don't cry when big American business wants nothing to do you with.
This is precisely my point! Who gets to decide what's reasonable discourse?
I personally don't think the whole rank and file of establishment press jumping over each other to get in line behind the US state and starting two truly godawful wars is reasonable.
If I was in charge of distributing news to people in the early 2000s, I'd have simply disallowed all of it and made sure people only heard opinions about how the USA is the world's leading terror state. How would you like it if I did that? Luckily, you'll never have to find out because I don't have the power Amazon et al now have.
> Just don't cry when big American business wants nothing to do you with.
This is a deflection. I hate these idiots. Most reasonable people do. They're dangerous (not as dangerous as the US military, but I still wouldn't cross them). My objection is to the structural/cultural development of a tiny handful of companies amassing for themselves a huge cultural and epistemological power. They're increasingly able to shape reality in ways 20th century culture industry couldn't even dream of.
Cheer it on at your own risk!
If it escalates to violence it's not reasonable, that's it. It gets muddy around state sponsored violence but the assumption is that we already have controls around that. I think that's a reasonable line to draw. If I go on Twitter and make specific threats to other users I believe that Twitter is within reason to prevent me from using their platform.
> I hate these idiots. Most reasonable people do. They're dangerous (not as dangerous as the US military, but I still wouldn't cross them). My objection is to the structural/cultural development of a tiny handful of companies amassing for themselves a huge cultural and epistemological power. They're increasingly able to shape reality in ways 20th century culture industry couldn't even dream of.
I agree with most of what you're saying. We as a society have handed over what I believe to be the vast majority of our day to day communication to a handful of companies that have no motive in mind other than profit. Social media has been shaping our society for the worse in way less overt ways for the last 15 years by driving eyeballs to controversial posts/topics to keep up engagement.
I'm not pretending to have the answers, what I'm trying to point out is the phenomenon of big companies avoiding hosting questionable content is not new. What is new is the ubiquity of social media in our lives and politics.
I think we're better without it personally.
I know you think "facilitating a violent mob" applies more to Parler than the New York Times piece...but I'm going to disagree. Parler was anything but 'reasonable', but The New York Times (or individuals thereof) creating propaganda to lead a nation to war...can be described as facilitating a violent mob.
Where would the authority come from to force Amazon to support a message board they believe is for the purpose of inciting and organizing violent insurrection?
Why shouldn’t Amazon be able to make judgements about who it’s safe to do business with? Why should Parler’s decisions about who to do business with override Amazon’s?
Suppose Amazon did something Parler didn’t like, and as a result Parler decided to move to a different provider... should Parler be forced to stay with Amazon after all?
But if you look at this situation and don't see problems that are expanding beyond the ability of laissez faire contracts to account for (I'll be specific: it's the concentrated accumulation of communicative and cultural capital to a tiny number of minimally publicly accountable, opaque, private, exceedingly deep-pocketed firms), you're burying your head in the sand.
> to have some disgusting content on it.
You can't state that as fact. The platform itself was not inherently about spreading objectionable material. It was about being more free than Twitter.
> And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes"
> and social media do not mix.
As with all free speech, it had legal limits, such as threats of violence. We can argue about how effective the moderation system was in Parler, but I know for a fact that they repeatedly removed material that broke the law.
No man, it wasn't. They are just lying to you. Try to be more credulous.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
[0] mentioned in the article: "I wish they[sic] were interoperable implementations of a protocol, rather than individual silos, but..."
Also the Parler system is that you essentially are sandboxed for a short period of time when you first join - if you get tonnes of negative responses you get removed. So the fact they got removed in the first 24 hours makes sense.
So: No man, it wasn't. They are just lying to you. Try to be more credulous.
Observe: That's generally the point when political speech crosses the line from 'soap box' to 'bullet box.' [1] Trump and his friends crossed that line on January 6th. #eattherich, Chapo Trap House, etc, has yet to do so.
You're drawing false equivalences.
[1] Despite having lost its case at both the ballot box, and the jury box. [2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
> Capitol Riots and the posts were still there. If they had
> any moderation it was not at all effective even for the
> most obviously unacceptable content.
That's clearly a failing of the moderation system. I imagine they were very overwhelmed that day, as all social media platforms probably were (including Twitter and Facebook from what I saw).
One problem Parler specifically are up against is that they were already unofficially blacklisted in multiple places that would allow them to raise the funding to hire moderators, due to cancel culture and the fear of it. They already couldn't get advertising, investments, etc. Now the situation is even worse, and when it reappears, it will likely have even less resources for content moderation.
The only way out for them will be to distribute the problem of content moderation as some other platforms have apparently done (I am told Minds do this). Of course you have to rely on randomly selecting a fair jury in order for it to work - something that won't happen now.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgBuXYAAB4y2?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgB3XIAcffGC?format=jpg&name=...
https://i.redd.it/q2151lxlfpa61.jpg
These were not taken down
There's no doubt the material is objectionable, but it was only up for a short time and got very little reach, even getting negative reactions within their own circles. And bare in mind, these aren't exactly random examples either - this is supposed to represent the very worst - and it's just some random people with little reach who get negative reactions from their own followers.
Meanwhile over on Twitter you've got people sharing a picture of Trump's severed head, you've got "Hang Mike Pence" trending as a hash tag, you have people celebrating the death of the lady who got shot in the capital, etc.
Perhaps a little context?
I don't see how upvotes or views are relevant.
>There's no doubt the material is objectionable, but it was only up for a short time and got very little reach, even getting negative reactions within their own circles. And bare in mind, these aren't exactly random examples either - this is supposed to represent the very worst - and it's just some random people with little reach who get negative reactions from their own followers.
It's only supposed to represent the 15 seconds of work I performed in going through the dump of parler data. There's plenty more if you're interested. Again, whether or not it reached a lot of people is hardly relevant.
>Meanwhile over on Twitter you've got people sharing a picture of Trump's severed head, you've got "Hang Mike Pence" trending as a hash tag, you have people celebrating the death of the lady who got shot in the capital, etc.
And that shouldn't be allowed either. What's your point?
Of course it's relevant. If your hate message is received by nobody - who is the victim? You're just shouting into the ether. The larger your reach, the more moderation becomes important.
> And that shouldn't be allowed either. What's your point?
Because Twitter isn't been wiped from the internet for breaking the exact same ToS. It's clearly selective enforcement.
My understanding is that Apple wanted some form of auto-moderation. Parler's self regulation by user votes is a joke and leads to the opposite of free speech. They wanted a plan and a conversation, Parler refused. So, bye bye.
Apparently everyone has abandoned them, including their own lawyers. They could have fixed this, but they decided not to, and are now crying foul.
So spare us all the "No hate and violence on our platform" BS. Either you go after all hate and violence or you are just a hypocrite.
To the best of my knowledge, YouTube tries hard to do this. And Twitter has been trying to do a better job at this. And Facebook hasn't been particularly good about doing this at all. If I am completely wrong about this, someone should set the record straight.
Perhaps their position is evolving. I'd be curious to revisit the evolution of this problem 365 days from now and take another checkpoint.
The fact that a platform didn’t do the right thing before, doesn’t mean it can’t do it now.
What, you came out of the womb with perfect understanding of right from wrong?
But... horses, barn, door
Stop trying to convince these people of hypocrisy. They aren’t listening to critics and they lack the ability to see the world outside of the tight frame they were provided. We are all like this most of the time but I find that the moral panics have created situations where online communication is not possible along political lines.
Focus on you, not them. People who build ideas from self-reflection are less volatile and not as susceptible to moral panic than those who define themselves by politics.
If all people tried as hard to understand each other as they do framing their political opponents as evil, we wouldn’t be in this place. Interesting times.
Get help.
This whole deplatforming thing will have vast unintended consequences. It will hit people like you, because these movements always eat there own.
Sure about that?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgBxXcAAuTkC?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgBuXYAAB4y2?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgB3XIAcffGC?format=jpg&name=...
https://i.redd.it/q2151lxlfpa61.jpg
Where did the parent comment mention the government? They referenced the concept of free speech. That is not the same thing as the first amendment which is what you are referring to.
Of course it does! That’s like saying ethics don’t apply to corporations.
If you meant the first amendment you would be correct but free speech is a long standing liberal ideal and is absolutely not the same thing nor is it what is being discussed in this context.
> Of course it does!
Well, it does in that free speech is exactly the liberty of owners of non-government resources to choose how to control their use in expressing, relaying, and amplifying speech.
But “free speech” doesn’t provide any entitlement for any other party against the interests of the owners of non-government resources.
What I learned the hard way (as hard as having light PSTD) in the course of 3 years is that just doesn't work. You only need a handful of motivated people who won't stop at anything to push their agenda and narrative to create an extremely toxic environment which only favors the best liars and the most unprincipled people.
It's really a cultivation effort - otherwise your "idea garden" will be overrun with weeds and pests.
And that's before considering the insane uphill battle any social media platform has to fight to become as popular as the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc - assuming the presence of "disgusting content" does not limit its ability to ever scale that much to begin with.
Btw, I'm using the phrase "disgusting content" to quote the OP because I can't think of a more appropriate phrase, not to indicate sarcasm or cast doubt on the nature of the content. I've never been to Parler, but I trust that there was some pretty awful things being said there.
You see something you don't like, don't click on it.
You see someone you don't like, just block or mute them.
Almost every platform lets you choose the level, of lack thereof, of discourse you want to have with people with whom you disagree.
There are many other possible attackers who won't be coordinating themselves on social networks in the open.
Capitol et al. should have robust enough security to keep most threats out, because some threats just won't be easily predictable in advance.
If I orchestrate a criminal conspiracy to rob Fort Knox, it is still a criminal conspiracy when it eventually fails.
And it should have.
I disagree with this. My experience with Parler was very limited, but from a quick glance, I was not able to find any call for violence. I'm sure it exists, but the sense I got is that the vast majority of content and accounts are simply posting conservative content. Do you have evidence that "disgusting content" (whatever that means) is its "reason for existing"? That seems like a self-serving editorial conclusion rather than something borne out by hard evidence.
We do need to think about the precedents we are setting with respect to free speech. It’s possible that action might be needed in the short term to moderate these channels. But we must also consider the longer term in a world that is rapidly evolving.
I’m less concerned about specific, currently existing platforms like Parler, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These “social media” platforms are mere trinkets and could go away and society would carry on. In moderating or completely dissolving them we lose little.
I am more concerned about the nature of communication when the channels of communication are centrally controlled and/or controlled by private entities. We have no idea how digital communications will evolve or how important they could become.
Our lives are increasingly become digital… Imagine a world 50 or 100 or X years from now when people never leave their homes (except perhaps through VR?) and nearly all human interaction is via digital means. There’s a good chance those digital means will be run by private entities. So if we want to preserve the liberties we have today we need to think about how those would be protected in the future, and that means being careful about what precedent we set today.
Are we really willing to have all of our communication moderated or potentially terminated in a such a future?
It’s true that we might need to take action in the present, but let’s not forget that we are simultaneously shaping our futures.
The doom may be inevitable. who knows? I don't mean to be a defeatist. But I would say if a single private entity (or alliance) did control all digital communication, any actions they took could be invisible to anyone that opposed them, assuming they had sufficiently advanced machine learning capable of preventing subversive communication. You would need alternative options for communication, digital or otherwise to have any hope of overcoming such a hypothetical scenario.
My hope would be that we continue to have utilities such as phone lines, that internet would ultimately end up treated as a utility in the same sense as phone lines (especially if it completely replaces them, which is largely is doing), radio (just as ham radio operators believe in the importance of maintaining their systems), etc.
And my other hope would be that we continue to legislate and enforce against monopolies, not just on capitalistic entities but especially on privately run communication channels.
I don't know if that's true. I downloaded the app a few months ago to check it out. I followed some of the same folks I followed on Twitter (I guess you'd call them center-right?) and it was basically civil discourse about politics.
I didn't see anything "disgusting" and I didn't work hard to avoid it. Granted I didn't spent a ton of time in the app and didn't explore deeply, but the claim that it was just filled to the gills with something terrible doesn't ring true to me.
Unless the definition of disgusting is "someone who may not have voted for Biden" - but I don't share that definition and I don't think most sane people do.
Our right to say and read what we want cannot be determined by the lowest common denominator of what is 'acceptable'. That is how you arrive at an authoritarian monoculture, fast.
The only correct response to disgusting speech is good speech used to tear it down. Both sides here, (I am not a part of either) have dug in so deep that they essentially live in two different realities or dimensions. When perception and the interpretation of the world differs so much between two groups there eventually becomes a point where they cannot coexist. This is where we are headed if we don't start trying to find common ground instead of the current environment of complete, unquestioned intolerance of the other.
Self examination is what the world needs right now.
Trump's own daughter and grandsons are Jewish.
"black, hispanic":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc
"anti-lgbt":
Trump himself attended several gay marriages in public way before running for president, late 90s/early 00s. None of the examples Amazon or Twitter gave were anti-LGBT. Trump got 72 million votes. Statistically, there is 7 million LGBT atleast who voted for him.
Anyone use google to search for information used to do bad things?
This is all incredibly focused, when the big players most certainly are rife with their own sins.
Is that why "Hang Mike Pence" was allowed to trend with 14K tweets, and later that same day "Hang Pence" with 55K?[1]
I'd wager every penny I own that almost none of those people were banned or sanctioned in any way.
[1]: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1347791913806532609
You're really cutting out a ton of context here to fit a narrative. Parler was the source of the posts and parler would not moderate it.
Twitter's actions aren't even self-consistent here. If these tweets were all innocuous, then why remove the trend? If they were primarily discussions of other people's activity, rather than explicit calls for violence, then there was no good reason to do this.
Also, there's nothing "moving goal posts" about asking people to at least try to substantiate what they post. The person I responded to didn't even bother posting a link.
"Hang Mike Pence", as has been noted many times, was trending because people were discussing the videos showing Trump rioters chanting that.
People were not banned for using that phrase for the same reason you and I are not going to be banned/flagged for using it here: we aren't calling for violence and murder.
edit: previously called this a bad-faith argument, but that's not fair.
A big problem on social networks (including right here on HN) is that it's very easy for people to behave disingenuously and ask questions to which they already know the answer.It's a very effective wayt o either spread misinformation or steal the time of people who are concerned about misinformation, because it's much cheaper to repeat a BS allegation than it is to debunk it.
Another problem (more peculiar but not unique to HN) is that calling out such behavior is often regarded as uncivil. To my mind disingenuity is far more uncivil; I prefer a rude truth to a polite lie.
Examples of disingenuity include people asking naive-seeming questions to which those same people have already received detailed answers in the past, or repeating factual assertions that they made previously and which were shown and acknowledged to be false. It's not so common on HN but sadly very common on big social media sites or on news commenting platforms like disqus.
Is "The only remedy until the removal of the Zionist regime is firm, armed resistance." not a call to violence?
If Trump had posted the same Tweet do you think Twitter would have removed it?
Source is Kara Swisher's interview with John Matze.
https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-vid...
I'd be interested in seeing the hate ratio between 70TB of that site's posts versus an equivalent volume of Twitter traffic.
We know the extremes, but the extremes aren’t the problem.
“Basketball is stupid” - hate speech targeting a minority demographic, thereby racist.
I wish the above was hyperbole, but there’s a non-zero group size of people in nearby college communities that would agree.
Twitter regularly bans people for anything that smells of violence, even when the "threat" is one person joking with their friend.
Can you quote the specific threat issued, anonymized as appropriate?
This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.
If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers won't be associated with it and thus hosts can't or won't afford to host it, that's on the author.
I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication.
I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm not even allowed outside to go and talk to friends - people are getting fined and arrested for just sitting on a park bench because of the latest lockdown. All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. If they lock me out, I'm totally screwed. What is free speech if I can't talk to anyone? Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying?
So one could argue, that actually if we want free speech in the 21st century, and want to honour the intent of what it means to have free speech, there does need to be some protection here.
The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said - and I think the legislators would have been horrified!
Possibly, although... you're paying for your phone service. You're not paying for parler, facebook, twitter, etc.
But you have to keep in mind the other side of that - the protections around freedom of speech were put in place at a time when it was inconceivable that a majority of people in the country had the ability to be seen and heard _by the majority of other people in the country_. In near real-time, anytime. And that they could do so in a way that meant often they did not have to accept any consequence for the wider-ranging effects of their words.
Separately I also have to wonder if the knowledge acquired as a result of that would have affected their framing. In particular the advances in psychology and group psychology, and in understanding how it's possible to use this instant mass communication to manipulate even people who are on guard against manipulation.
Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps?
Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses?
Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square.
So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.
Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.
That's completely absurd. Tens of thousands of people are silenced by corporations every day for speech that is considered offensive by one metric or another, but is by no means illegal. An associate of mine was permanently banned for, "deadnaming" someone else. Certainly very offensive according certain standards but hardly something that you wouldn't be allowed to say in the public park.
You can reasonably argue about the right of private corporations to choose to do business with who they want, but you cannot reasonably argue that people are only being silenced for explicitly illegal behavior that would also be illegal offline.
That's completely unrelated to the issue at hand - whether or not you'd be able to ramble insanely or make personal attacks in a public park (you would).
Then there are the "you"s that are posting on individual platforms that get to choose their own standards of conduct. AWS stopped business with a platform that would not be allowed in the public square.
An individual that got banned for dead naming can just start another account anonymously, as far as I know.
Right. Even the Post Office is not required to deliver pipe bombs.
The issue is that right now, that's not the standard. Amazon /hasn't/ taken down sites in the name of political censorship, but it /could/. The implications of that are important, and they're why I find it hard to be satisfied with justifications like "Amazon is a private company, they can do what they want".
Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.
So my question is, why the F are we even talking about Amazon? Because it's just a BS distraction from the elephant in the room.
It's time to stop engaging with sophistry and fight back the fascists that are trying to take away all our freedoms. And this big fear of big tech is exactly the type of distraction that lets fascism flourish enough to gain a stronghold.
Politically motivated refusal of service by Amazon or other Silicon Valley firms is at least an order of magnitude more likely than any coup by the US military, much less a Trumpist one.
Meanwhile, this political shutdown is pure theory, a straw man floated to distract us from the violence that seethes on the platforms used to organize a fascist overthrow of the government.
But even if we take your probability assessment, the damage times the probability places a violent military coup as a HUGE problem compared to Amazon stopping business with someone.
I didn't predict an attack on the Capitol, but it didn't really surprise me, either.
I speak as a conservative who is aggressively anti-Trump but believes many of his voters would not condone what happened at the Capitol.
https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/
YouGov speculates in their presentation of the data they gathered that perhaps more Republicans approved because they saw the actions as basically peaceful:
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
That belief strikes me as crazy, but if they genuinely didn't think there was violence going on, hard to read it as being okay with violence.
Or are we still on that "words are violence" thing? I can't keep up.
From that perspective this looks like a conversation about ease of access rather than free speech. Amazon's the only way to build something on Amazon, but nothing's stopping me from creating something myself.
I don't see being able to buy eyeballs on the cheap as a fundamental right. If you care enough, build it. If others care, they'll come.
The point is we can never know how far outside of what is "good" we currently circle. It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action. It is right that a state that believes itself true defends itself. It is all part of the process, all of it. Who the hell are you to know with certainty that you, specifically you, have the the eagle eyed vision to discern right from wrong? To somehow miraculously step outside of the tiny little context in which you live and know with 100% certainty that you are right.
You are the product of your surroundings, a container for thoughts passing through, a ghost in the machine. Don't be so God damned arrogant. You cannot know truth, you cannot know right. The world is unfolding as it should.
The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance, where we must stop some speech in order to make room for as many as possible. Fascists hate this, because fascists are the ones who demand total and perfect freedom to act and speak as the wish, up to the point of being allowed to perform violence on those whose speech they don't like. Which is why the fascists were chanting "Hang Pence" as they stormed the capitol.
Don't you dare try to accuse me of being arrogant for judging fascists, and don't you dare accuse me of trying to be the ultimate arbiter of good and evil. I can name fascists as unacceptable to society without being an ultimate arbiter.
We are in dangerous waters in the US, and all our words mean something right now. Will we fall for the lies of the fascists who say "let us violate all social norms with our speech, and we promise we woke take over with violence than force you to follow our norms with violence," or will we stand up to them and enable as open a society as we can?
How "logical" is it to say that because I have some values, they are indistinguishable from justifying slavery?
This sort of "there is no truth or good or bad" is exactly the sort of reasoning that's used to brainwash people into supporting anything and everything. Because once there's nothing true, there's nothing false.
If somebody is feeding you this line of reasoning, or some group, or some forum, I would recommend trying to reconnect with mainstream human thought and value of human life for a bit, and see if the nihilism still seems logical. Try to read a mainstream history of the Nuremberg trials, for example. Or read a book about the Reconstruction and the oppression that happened even after slavery was abolished.
It never ceases to surprise me that people wave around the Paradox of Tolerance as if were an immutable law of physics rather than merely one philosopher's opinion among many.
It seems that if you can't deal with what was stated and have to fabricate positions in order to argue against, that you are not posting in good faith.
[0] Sorry for the jargon but there isn't a better term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
This is a complete misrepresentation of what was written, as if you were talking about somebody else's comment. It is bad faith to misrepresent the position of others, not a cliche.
OP made no claims to know that “good” is other than
> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.
Struggling to see a world that would consider incitements to violence as a “good” thing. I mean sure it’s possible, but so far away from our reality as to be entirely pointless as a basis for argument.
> nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon.
What does Nazi Germany have to do with any of this? That was a government suppressing a minority population and invading Europe. Your not suggesting that AWS is about to attempt the same thing?
> It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action
Glad we agree that people at AWS who have a strong belief to drop Parler are allowed to act on those beliefs.
> The world is unfolding as it should.
Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?
I'm annoyed with the histrionics. Making arguments from places of moral outrage. Of extreme emotion. Each looking at the other with righteous indignation. Unable to see that what they feel is what the other side is feeling. What is needed at a time like this is for people to step outside of themselves. To understand that they do not know everything, that there is more than one way to think and to live. To be humble. When their amygdala screams that the other is dangerous, that the other is alien and dark and inhuman... To breathe, to understand their own weaknesses and move forward from a place of humility.
That's some Grade A corporate apologetics there. How can you assert this? Who decides what is going to get you "shut down in the public square"?
I am not sure how any of this is apologizing for corporations instead of any other aspect of our system though...
Edit: For the lawsuit aspect of shutting down speech, check out this very topical lawsuit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/11/cybersecu...
Even if this particular suit fails, I hope that it demonstrates that there are entire bodies of law set up to silence some forms of speech.
These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort.
Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing).
Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled.
If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather.
If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process.
Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me.
You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash.
And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance.
“ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”
Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?
It's like walking into the mall or public place, and saying, "You have to broadcast this message to everyone because 'freedom of speech'"".
In fact it's better to assume that private companies have such ability anywhere in the world. Signal fosters more access to defy censorship precisely because it realizes that. Making the software open source is how you allow people who need such tools to have them available.
And honestly... you've got the airwaves. It's called radio. Shortwave, can reach halfway around the world.
Again, the entitlement to these services astounds me. The internet didn't exist 40 years ago.... and now somehow the ability to assault people with misinformation, provide unfettered access for propaganda from state actors, permit the dissemination of hate speech is being called a right??
It makes no sense, and is completely devoid of historical perspective.
If Apple and Google allowed alternative app stores in their ecosystem, then there would be no problem with them kicking off any apps for any reason under the sun.
The argument is more nuanced for AWS as there are viable private competitors. However, it is stunning that they would cancel their contract with a customer by giving them only 24 hours notice. It's making me seriously consider why I would trust AWS as a partner.
I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication.
Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault?
> All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies.
Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.
That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value.
> The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said
It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach.
I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.
This isn’t a future dystopia - this all already happens on Facebook. And that’s why this involves a level of control over being a neutral communication channel.
> Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.
Yes be thankful to mega corp. mega corp good. Mega corp has our interests at its heart.
Free speech is a moral principle/ideal that exists independently of the US Constitution.
The First Amendment guarantees a certain form of free speech in the United States.
Private-sector censorship / restriction of speech is not in violation of the First Amendment. However, it may still amount to a restriction on free speech.
I don't want to join the argument about whether that's good or bad, but I think it's a huge mistake to simply say "It's consistent with the 1st amendment, therefore it's OK." If we're going to let private corporations use their market power to police individual speech, we need to have a real debate about what that means.
Let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and asks him nicely to squish certain people, and MZ complies. Is that a First Amendment issue or not?
Or, let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and offers him some concrete support (in an anti-trust case or taxation matters) for squishing certain people, and MZ takes up the offer. Is that a First Amendment issue or not?
The trouble with both scenarios is that they are certainly possible and hard to prove or disprove. That is one of the reasons why concentration of power in a few hands (even private ones) may translate into bad politics.
The general people that end up on that app are hardcore trending extremist and you're not going to find intelligent debate on the role of private companies and the government. It's probably closer to propaganda than it is a true social media site.
The reason Parler was banned is because all these corporations are very aware they are under the anti-trust microscope. This was a favor to the new party in power in hopes of getting something back.
Other social media services do not actively shape the debate through intense political moderation. There's no "Post tsar" the validates the political health of things that people host.
Meanwhile on Parler...
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136
It's literally, a far right wing propaganda machine and any other interpretation of this is misinformed.
Seems that Parler has taken a very different approach. Attaching political goals and ideology to the business model of a social network.
Pretty good write up here: https://www.wired.com/story/parler-app-free-speech-influence...
What a pathetic excuse. It's not like Amazon was hosting parler for free.
In this case, it looks like they also don't want to host your death threats.
There was no line to begin with. Nothing was crossed. This isn't anything new.
Political ideology is not protected, regardless of how important you perceive basic accommodations like shelter, food, or communication are.
This feels to me like a situation of "fine for anyone to do, problematic for everyone to do". With political ideology not a protected class in many states, anyone is free to refuse service to an outspoken Democratic voter, but if a whole town did that it would be unthinkable. The specious answer of "just make your own business" wouldn't be practical in that scenario (are you going to start your own grocery, gas station, etc?).
To be clear, I'm not trying to make a defense of Parler; my understanding having never signed up is that it was an unmoderated cesspool.I am, however, trying to point out that the end result of individuals making totally reasonable and rational decisions within their rights can produce outcomes that most people would view as wrong.
Now consider that this exact scenario is currently affecting 23.5 million people in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
When everyone avoids those areas, though, bam: food desert.
I honestly don't know the right balance to strike here. On the one hand, I fervently believe that businesses shouldn't be forced to act against their interests. On the other hand, though, the sum of these individual actions produces an unacceptable outcome.
I'm sure there's some balance of regulation, incentives, and public-private partnerships that would strike a good balance here, but both the extreme solutions (Groceries can locate wherever they want vs. groceries have to establish branches in food deserts) seem to be totally unsatisfactory, at least in my mind.
Point is, the government has, multiple times, recognized the power of "big media" to suppress political speech, and acted to regulate that power.
Adding political affiliation to the list of protected classes probably makes sense. It seems odd that it's not on the list, doesn't it?
The bans we're seeing here are very clearly political. Parler is not breaking laws. It seems obvious that if Parler was being used by BLM to organize violent riots they would not get banned.
As usual, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Anyone simplifying this whole thing into good vs bad is behaving like a member of a tribal mob.
One thing that is certain is that private companies should not be the ones deciding these major cultural issues. The Supreme Court should resolve these issues.
> First Amendment
These things are different. First Amendment protections restrict the US government from censoring protected speech. Free speech is a broader concept that covers any restrictions upon speech, including restrictions that are legal in the US.
It seems that the right to free speech must be balanced against the harms that speech can cause, but I am tired of this meme that just because they're a private company, AWS et al should be able to block whatever they like. These tech companies have more power and knowledge than many governments of the previous century. We should be cautious advocating for a totally hands-off policy on how they use that power.
Apparently Amazon sent them 98 examples of posts directly inciting violence, Parler replied with a proposal to manually moderate such posts with volunteers, and most of the posts Amazon gave as examples were still up (including some urging for systematic assassination or blowing up AWS data centers.)
However reading the exact complaint made me change my mind; they specifically provided them with content which they found to be inciting violence, and Parler took no action on them. If they actually wanted to remove them, at the bare minimum they could have at least removed the ones directly sent to them from their hosting provider. They also have no plan to moderate content themselves. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc all have report buttons which then trigger an employee to review the reported content, and Parler needed to at least say they had plans to do the same.
this isn't a 1A issue. incitement to violence is not protected by 1A - that's been settled by the Supreme Court. that's why I have no sympathy for Parler's plight. also note that they're not protected by section 230 - these posts are a criminal offense, akin to not removing child porn.
And I don't think there is a legal obligation to censor other people's illegal speech.
And if it was, the buzzfeed article is presumably illegal too for hosting the same speech?
The real problem is that is seems like the hate speech/Qanon wing of the right side of the political spectrum has the loudest voice and it's ruining it for actual conservatives.
Parler's response was a casual finger back to Amazon, and the response was a swift boot.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1348688644173934593
[2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1348699888209461249
People really have no idea what the "left" even is anymore do they?
I was once down voted here for mentioning that the NYTimes is not an extreme left wing publication. The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left.
It's amazing to me that the media (not just Fox-news and co) has constructed this bizarre bogey-man of the left as some control hungry liberals. Those people certainly exist, but they aren't, by anyone who is engage in leftist politics and theory, remotely left.
Believe it or not people on the left have been critical of the growing role that corporations have in setting public policy for decades. Sure, centrist liberals my be cheering, but nobody on the left wants to see corporations be the unchecked regulators of society.
However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy.
The entire fact that the will of the people has no direct power over corporate action is exactly why the left doesn't like the perpetual growth of corporate power and of its deregulation.
The unfortunate conclusion of all this confusion for me is that this is clearly not political in the slightest. Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.
I think its because the ideal vision of people who like minimal regulation is that they don't really think of mega-rich monoliths that have a direct impact on how an entire country chooses to consume its information. At least for me, I was one one of the annoying "but they're a private business" people until my optics shifted from viewing the issue as someone with an entrepreneurial mindset to someone who sees power concentrating and now being flexed by a small collection of mega-rich monolithic advertising companies that also happen to be collected in the same geopolitical region and possibly have an ideological bias.
In other words I reconsidered my principles in light of new information--my posting history here even shows this evolution. FAATG's decisions about how to handle what happened at the Capitol have actually scared the hell out of me, even more so than if the protesters/rioters/insurrectionists had actually succeeded in doing any of the wild shit people keep saying they intended to do. Those companies collectively own the most effective ways to communicate with others as well as almost complete control on the supply chain to create new competitors. I don't want to live in a world where that power exists in the hands of anyone, especially one that is willing to take political action and whose executives and employees vote and donate for one party.
> Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.
In the same post you lament people not knowing what the "left" is, you dismiss the right entirely as being comprised of nothing but valueless curmudgeons. This isn't meant to be a personal attack, I just want to point out the bias here in a fairly lazy jab at at least half the US since I've seen it a lot here the last few days. The right (and conservatives) do actually have a more coherent ideological standpoints than you assert, and I suggest digging into what they're saying. It'll be important now more than ever as we in Big Tech figure out how to deal with the massive class of people we've just alienated.
I wouldn't say these are in conflict. The biggest reason I oppose political movement in SV corporations is because I believe they'd become even more censorious than they are now. Today's corporations are evil to make money and protect their brand, but I don't want tomorrow's corporations to be evil for a political ideology.
This is a very different characterization than what most people would offer.
The New York Times is a staunchly left publication, and the past few years have seen the few centrist people at the company driven out (e.g. Bari Weiss). It is definitely not "reviled by anyone on the left", it's by far one of the most widely read publications among liberals.
I say this as a lifelong Democrat and liberal. This seems like one of those statements that only olds true when one draws the line between the left and right such that the overwhelming majority (easily >90%) are categorized on the right.
> People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people.
Can you elaborate on what this is referring to? If you're talking about Coinbase, the company was asking employees to check their activism - of any political leaning - at the door. Not that people should be driven out. In fact, a big part of why this was well received is because often times activism in the company leads to employees trying to drive each other out.
Companies bowing to play nice with the state is troubling regardless of your politics.
A ruthlessly self-interested left would benefit tremendously from the successful assassination of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. It would be a galvanizing event that would ultimately turn most of the country against the Republican party. It would likely clear the way for younger, left-leaning Democratic leaders (AOC, Cori Bush), and it would eliminate a major contender for the 2024 presidential race. Biden would enter power with the same level of political capital as George W. Bush after 9/11.
In a state that protects speech, one shouldn’t stand by when default-web-megacorp does the censorship dirty work on our behalf.
Or maybe we do. If this is a once in a generation aberration then it can slide. Time will tell.
That, itself, is propaganda.
Here's the elephant in the room:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Quote:
Popper's paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
To my eye, that has been happened since 2016 and DJT took office.
However, democracy itself is actually an exceedingly fragile system, more so than many people realize. We have lived in a golden age for democracy for centuries now, but that actually only represents a tiny blip on the time scale of human existence, which naturally tends towards tyranny.
What we need to protect above anything else is the democratic systems and institutions that make free speech even possible at all. And sometimes that means placing restrictions on forms of speech that seek to destroy the very foundations on top of which free speech protections is built upon.
Without those limits on free speech, it'd be a very realistic possibility for those who are in fact against free speech to co-opt it to gain enough power to then turn around and abolish it. I think we'd all agree that would be the worst possible outcome, considering all the progress humanity has made on this front.
I think Uber should refuse service to those added to the no fly list.
Some of them aren't taking it so well: https://mobile.twitter.com/rayredacted/status/13483886011182...
It shouldn't be that way if media companies weren't coordinating behind the scenes to ban stuff together. But given that it's happening, it's better to have more freedom.
The economy and civility that allow billions of different people to cooperate is a fragile thing. So we need to explain the warring sides that they need to go throw their stones in another place, e.g. try to use courts and legislation if they want to ban each other, or have different laws in different states.
The situation is remarkably similar to the situation with religion in 1600s England, when people were trying to blend it with state, and only after long wars did they understand that not allowing someone into shop based on religion is not acceptable.
The power always changes hands, and people who were passing laws calling random things "terrorism" end up on the other side of their laws. I guess for now you can have fun watching how Patriot Act championed buy republicans gets used against themselves. Sadly with full control over all branches, democrats will continue eroding freedoms and laws restraining the government, which eventually will be used against them too.
> I guess for now you can have fun watching how Patriot Act championed buy republicans gets used against themselves
The government didn't get involved here. This is two companies deciding not to do business with each other
> Sadly with full control over all branches, democrats will continue eroding freedoms and laws restraining the government, which eventually will be used against them too.
The government didn't ban or restrain parler
Parler agreed to AWS' TOS. You don't have to go to court.
And as far as I can tell, none of the politicians who initiate and perpetuate war are de-platformed.
--8<--
In May 1996 Madeleine Albright, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq,
LS: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
To which Ambassador Albright responded,
MA: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
--8<--
https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/170-s...
Madeleine Albright is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/madeleine
Depending on your morality and politics there are countless other examples. Perhaps hypocrisy is the more correct word?
It is also true that AWS and all network providers exist within a societal context where the speech and actions of the participants can result in consequences. Where the line is drawn and why is a never ending tension. Very, very rarely is the extreme moral position universally true IMHO -- there is possibly content you would like kicked of AWS, and there will be poeple who can defend anything in the name of free speech. Good luck with the SAAS, and may your customers not be scoundrels!
When deciding whether to choose to host your services with AWS you can answer a simple question: are you planning on violating their terms of service? If the answer is yes, do not use AWS.
Any action by a corporation not directed by the board/shareholders is “employee driven", since everyone from the C-Suite down is an employee.
That's not inconsistent with it being based on terms of service violations, who do you think identifies those?
This isn't some new threat. This is literally the way things have always been.
I do not know if there would be a possibility to scale it for a real social network tho.
I remember when most posts that posited any “fact” were cited with references, and often any lack of sources was responded with a request for supporting documentation.
HN is slowly becoming a brainier alt-Reddit with every snide quip or uncited statement of opinion masquerading as fact.
Yes. The funny thing is that it happened to people who foam at the mouth about the rights of private businesses to do what they want and decry government intervention.
Surely if they're voting for the same people, some of them must share the same beliefs. Unless you're saying all Parler users are completely distinct from all non-Parler conservatives?
Picture instead private businesses who all refuse to do business with Jews. Anyone who does business with them are subject to reprisal and boycott by their vendors, friends, and neighbors. The Jews themselves of course are fired from their jobs if anyone finds out they're a Jew. In practice the Jews cannot do business and must live a marginalized existence or hide who they are. So it's not enough to say "well it's a private business they can do what they want" when you would not consider this valid in other contexts.
And of course all this is ignoring the question of whether any of this is likely to be successful in the end or if it will further justify reprisals and enrage anyone subject to this mob justice. Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.
This is a false equivalency.
Race, religion, etc. are protected classes. It's impossible for people to change their race, and our society has agreed that we shouldn't force people to change their religion.
Political beliefs are not protected classes. When your political beliefs include inciting violence by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, then private companies have a right to kick you off.
> Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.
In my opinion, the far right is already too far gone — they are already conspiracy theorists. Any contradictory information will be used as evidence to show that the conspiracy is much wider and bigger than one could have imagined — adding to the weight of the theory. There is no reasoning with them unless someone they truly believe (read: Trump) dismisses the theory convincingly.
This is a common error in reasoning by the way: looking to the way current law happens to be and inferring from that what the right thing to do is. For example, it is not against the first amendment for Amazon to ban Republicans. This does not mean it would be a good thing for Amazon to ban Republicans. Similarly I'm sure, if you tried, you could come up with all kinds of unjust laws that punish things that should not be punished (I certainly can think of many).
I would start by exploring the differences between what it means to hold a religious belief vs a political one. Maybe start by comparing how each of the above has changed, or the associations thereof with their respective ideals over, say, the last 1000 years. Maybe then proceed to identify from where a religious belief manifests vs a political belief. Finally, you could look towards the kinds of answers of which each respective belief offers explanatory power (i.e. What kinds of questions does religion answer vs politics?). We could probably even take this a step further and look at the history of each as well no? Political leanings have existed at least as long as religious beliefs. At one time these were likely the same! So what is it about the history of politics and religion that has lead us to the the kinds of separation we have reached today?
I have confidence you can come up with many kinds of differences. Good luck!
I understand this, and the understanding is implicit in the way I phrased: "our society has agreed that we shouldn't force people to change their religion." It's also worth noting that "religion" here usually refers to practices and beliefs that don't infringe on other people's rights. To evaluate whether these practices infringe on someone's rights, one should take into account their protected classes: i.e. you're not allowed to discriminate against a person's skin color even if your religion says that you should.
Our society has also agreed that certain beliefs are reprehensible and deserve no place in society: both major political sides think that advocating for violence is unacceptable, and therefore both the Democrats and the (centrist) Republicans cannot claim that private companies who refuse to host a platform that allows calls for violence are unjustly discriminating — if the politicians want to be logically consistent. (This is what I meant by "When your political beliefs include inciting violence by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, then private companies have a right to kick you off.") This is a positive statement, not a normative statement.
Normatively, alt-right beliefs should not be given the same protections as religions because they infringe on other people's rights. For example, repeated, false allegations of voter fraud indirectly infringe on people's right to vote because they effect court cases that call for legitimate voters to be disenfranchised.
In your example it's probably slightly different because religion is a protected class, while political leanings aren't.
I think what's particularly interesting is you substitute "right wing" with "Jews" like you did, and you start to wonder if Amazon crossed the line. But then change "Jew" to "terrorist", and you think Amazon might be in the right. Clearly we can't protect ALL groups, that'd be silly.
Is it like a game of hot potato where the last hosting company has to host them? Because it seems there are alternatives to each individually, and it's only when they all say no that there are issues for Parler. And to me that feels like a Parler problem, not an AWS problem.
To cut off service to someone is not destroying a business “competitor.” The fact that they were depending on your service indicates a type of cooperation not competition.
And to reinforce my second point, Twitter’s decision to ban or not ban someone is largely subjective (beyond the TOS) and they are sensitive to public pressures and the overall societal climate.
It’s not about my moral values but the aggregate moral values of society.
They better nullify their very lucrative business relationship with US intelligence services post haste then.
> There’s no reason they should be forced to host it.
"Forced." Poor AWS. They didn't even consent to this!
I was on last night and saw a picture of Peloi's house with the address attached. These are dangerous people that are stalking our democratically elected leaders.
It's sad how publishing the address of a politician has become akin to a threat.
When I was a journalist, all politicians had their addresses and phone numbers right in the phone book. We looked them up all the time. Voters were expected to be able to know exactly where their elected officials lived. It was also one way of verifying that they actually lived within their district.
But because basic knowledge has become weaponized and abused by nutjobs, the general public now feels this is a threat. How much society has changed in a very short time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485245
I had someone send me some very abusive and threatening emails, and among the images they sent, was a screenshot of a flight quote and a photo of my house from Google Maps.
Devils advocate here, but this does for the most part work for Reddit.
Now imagine yourself maintaining streets, hotels or cars that might be used by thieves, rapists and murderers. Would it be your job to make sure they don't use your infrastructure? Would you want it to be?
Do you think that a sole source relationship carries an implied contract of continued service? Should that be a regulation? I don't think I'd like that.
As I understand it, AWS didn't force Parler to sole-source their computing infrastructure. And Parler claimed that they had prepared for such an eventuality.
I don't know if it would apply to the current situation with Parler, as my understanding is that they did agree to terms of service, and that the dispute with AWS over their content moderation didn't come up all of a sudden.
[0]: Certainly I think this in cases where you have a personal relationship with the customer/client, e.g. as a lawyer. It is less clear in the case where the service provided requires no real customer interaction as in AWS, where the services are all provided transparently, with no knowledge of who the customer is. But I don't want to get hung up on this issue.
That pressure would likely be successful.
But even if a datacenter is removed from one jurisdiction, Amazon is perfectly able to handle that loss immediately.
Seriously, when there are dozens of options and none of them want your business, shouldn't that give you pause?
If all the insurance agencies refuse to insure your ship because they think it will sink, wouldn't it be prudent to double check your blueprints/construction ?
Honestly, this feels to me like just the best sort of stuff that private companies, and a world that relies on them does: Everyone likes but doesn't need those services. There's a lot of companies competing and the offering is great. If someone is such a pain in the butt that no one wants to do business with them, they have a hard time but still can if they want to go it alone and build it all themselves.
These are light "highlights how well it works" stories to me.
Do you have evidence that Parler was involved in the storming of the Capitol building? Glenn Greenwald says it was not involved.
> Everyone likes but doesn't need those services
Well the employees of the company sure need them if they want to pay their mortgages, buy food, etc.
Yes.
edit: Well, they could also close all of their bakeries. I'm willing to allow them that option.
The distinction must be that anyone (any race, any sexual orientation, etc. etc.) should be able to buy anything "off the shelf" (e.g. a plain cake or wedding cake). But no one should be forced to write/design/create something which they don't want to.
My bakery should be allowed to refuse to bake a cake celebrating the holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
I agree with this distinction (no compelled creative labor), but note that this leaves stuff like file hosting, DNS services and data centers squarely on the "off the shelf" side. And you would still be forced to bake a cake for an out-and-loud Nazi. Just not decorate it with an artful "1488 blaze it".
I'm all for the "they're a private company, they should do what they want" argument, if they (Twitter and Facebook) weren't the only nationally agreed upon means of communication and socializing during a nationwide lock-down.
Also the cake issue is different because discriminating based on sexual orientation was prohibited by the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. Colorado (the state I live in) has every right to pass laws to govern it's citizens. What happened to state's rights?
To me these are very clear: You either believe contracts and laws can be enforced, or you don't.
But not much (though not doing much to make it stronger is still not making it weaker), because it didn’t lose it on the kinds of grounds people on either side wanted the case decided on for a decisive win, but because based on the details of the proceedings in his case the Court found specific animus against Phillips’ religious views in the handling of the particular case by State officials.
You're not owed AWS's product and it's not required to build this kind of infrastructure. Sure it makes it easier, maybe try being less repugnant?
Edit: I mean examples where companies lose access to core services due to their moderation policy. I know twitter and facebook get shit for theirs all the time, but nothing substantive ever happens.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/far-right-social-network-g...
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/
[3]https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
[4] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/
- Is this archived?
- Does Law enforcement have access to that archive?
Seems like once it's abundantly clear there is zero profit left in this the owners will abandon any link to the data and let it all rot and vanish. This strikes me as a lost opportunity.
If you are an illegal business there are a multitude of ways of working around many of these issues (using fake identities with hosting companies and other services, making money via shady malware riddled ad services, money laundering, etc...)
Until recently I thought that p2p/crypto/etc was the solution but since you cannot do true p2p in the browser and must ship native code, at the end of the day you will still need the blessing of Apple/Google/Microsoft and agree to their TOS to exist. Of course this is perfect storm that happens rarely but it's still chilling to watch it unfold despite how contemptible the target is.