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I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.
Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).
Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist (whether it's your own vendors, or whether you are a vendor to a target).
What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? Try to reduce dependence on cloud providers and vendors by building more in-house? How far would you have to go, since a colo or an ISP can drop you just as AWS can?
> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)?
For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).
It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.
Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a similar standard to Twitter then the only way for a business to figure out if it is in breach is by experiment, and AWS just showed it can pull the plug in days with apparently no warning.
> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back.
And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress. But, we don't have to blind ourselves to that prior context. Given it, and given the way a number of people received those comments and have been actively organizing for violence around the inauguration since then, it doesn't seem to be to be a close call.
Sure, I agree, but I thought that was kind of implicit in the phrase "straw that broke the camels back". This was the latest individual thing, sitting on a mountain of other things, that finally caused the dam to break.
Could you clarify you position here? I can read your comment a few ways:
1. The president did not incite violent insurrection.
2. None of the presidents actions meet the legal standard for incitement. Full Stop.
3. None of the presidents actions meet the commonly understood definition of incitement. Full Stop.
I think an argument could be made for 1. I’d struggle with 2 or 3. IANAL but let’s consider:
> So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
> So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Please stop. He went on for two months about how the election was stolen (with no evidence), talked about the 2nd amendment and "how it could solve this", and then sent proxies to talk about "taking it to Congress," not to mention literally thousands of other lies.
Enough with the gaslighting - this was entirely justified.
??? lightgreen was saying it wasn't incitement. nemosaltat, whom you replied to, was -arguing- with lightgreen. nemosaltat said that he was pretty sure it met the legal standard for incitement. Maybe he doesn't say it quite as strongly as you would like, but you can hardly call this "gaslighting".
Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.
In fact I don’t like the tone of your comment and I feel it might be setting some people off.
How about we keep the responsibility with the people actually physically doing the crime. People make their own decisions.
Your logic would dictate the person doing the crime takes no responsibility since they were incited into doing it.
> Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.
That's false. The standards for incitement according to the SCOTUS are defined in the Brandenburg Test and are _famously_ narrow. They include a subjective test of the speaker's intent, and an objective test.
- Subjective: Speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" (this means, was the speaker intending to produce imminent lawless action).
- Objective: Speech is "likely to incite or produce such action"
In an incitement case here, the objective test is absolutely easy. The crowd broken into the halls of the Capitol, violently disrupted a session of Congress, and killed a police officer. Any lawyer would have no problem arguing in court that the speech that morning was "likely" to incite imminent lawless action.
The harder test is the subjective test of the speaker's intent. Here, we need to show that Donald Trump intended to incite imminent lawless action. That's typically a very hard test, because we can't read minds. But we can use circumstantial† evidence to piece together enough of a picture to allow a jury to convict.
† circumstantial evidence is used all the time to determine intent for crimes in courtrooms all over the United States, and is completely valid evidence. Don't raise "but that's circumstantial!" as a defense, because circumstantial evidence is completely valid.
You didn't disprove anything I said. I said nothing about making a legal case in court and proving. Notice the word claim? Additionally, just because the law is in court doesn't mean it's good or not dangerous. You still NEED a subjective proof to determine guilt. This means the law is inherently flawed because it will be used in a biased way and risks being used to attack certain individuals.
I don't care even a little bit about how you feel of the "tone" of my comment. You're being extremely disingenuous, and using terms like "guilt" and "crime" which do not apply to the current situation. The current situation is: Twitter as a corporate entity believes that Trump's tweets directly led to the events at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election and directly incited violence. The vast majority of Americans agree, but Jack Dorsey's opinion is the only one that matters.
By your logic a mafia don who says "it'd be a lot better if [enemy boss] wasn't alive" resulting in an assassination didn't incite violence, and the responsibility should lie with the "people who did the crime" because people make their own decisions. This is a colossally stupid take.
Your post is full of straw man arguments and I'm not sure if you're being intentionally disingenuous, or just have a very poor understanding of political events in general and Twitter's ability to moderate their own platform. Come back if you want to have a real discussion.
Wooooosh the point of me saying that was that ANYONE can label your speech as incitement bud. Again, your tone sounds pretty violent to me and I think you need to be removed from this platform. See how stupid and ridiculous this logic is?
Twitter is being prodded by government officials and working in monopolistic collusion your silly claim about it being a private entity is completely moot. If this is the road you want the US to do down you reap what you sow.
No one acted violently after reading your comment, but people did act violently after reading Trump’s Twitter. If you have an example of someone’s Twitter being taken down for inciting violence were no violence occurred, let us know!
It happens all the time. Possibly a majority of all twitter bans over the last 5 years fit that description. Say racist thing like "Muslims should stay out of the USA" get banned by twitter for "inciting violence against a protected group".
In a way, all political advocacy consists of incitement of violence. Any law not ultimately backed up by the credible threat of violence is just a suggestion. If you don't pay your taxes for long enough, eventually federal agents with guns will come to take you to jail, and if you resist, they'll kill you.
That was the second of two tweets, that they are taking together. This was the other
"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!!!”
They explain the context and how these tweets are being interpreted.
"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!!!
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
I fail to see the issue with these tweets. He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem? Is it even something that the incoming President was requesting? And what is the issue with the other tweet?
This is a bizarre hill that Twitter chose to spend 10% of their market cap on. It seems like there must have been something else that they could have picked that would have made more sense.
- President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.
- The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.
- The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.
- The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.
- Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.
> He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem?
It's pretty significant as it hasn't happened since 1869.
> Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?
This is patently disingenuous. Twitter didn't jail the President for inciting violence. They said he wasn't allowed to Tweet anymore.
Could the publisher of Catcher in the Rye have decided to stop publishing it based on that? Yes, they could.
You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection that attacked Congress and then praised them saying: "we love you" and "you're special". As I said before, we don't have to be blind to the prior context. This reductionist thinking that we must take these two tweets entirely on their own and devoid of context isn't something I'm going to participate in.
> You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection
And we have a justice system to deal with insurrectionists and we have a democratic process with our elected representatives to remove leaders from office. This involves due process and respecting rights honed over 200 years of jurisprudence. It's not done in a corporate backroom by a couple executives with zero public accountability.
Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol? What's happening here is the digital equivalent. You're busy thanking them because you support what they did. Some of us are stepping back and asking the question: wait, who controls these soldiers and what checks and balances are there on their power to police us? It turns out Twitter owns them and the checks and balances are none. If that doesn't concern you then you're missing the big picture.
Propaganda doesn’t need to be explicit; it’s clear the intent of these messages, just like the veiled messaging in his incitement speech.
It’s clear that once something like a violent insurrection happens the companies previously giving a platform to the one who incited the insurrection are going to give a lot less leeway on anything he says.
Seems odd that this is seemingly hard to understand. If the violence didn’t happen, and he wrote those two tweets he’d still be on Twitter.
You can say anything is a coded message and claim it means whatever you want. The tweet that prompted the initial ban literally said "go home and be peaceful". That is supposed to be an incitement to violence?
Lots of violence happened during the protests this summer too. Should we assume that everyone tweeting about being peaceful then was also sending coded messages supporting the violence?
Are we really going to go with the logic that violence occurred, therefore anything tweeted prior to the violence was an incitement to the violence? And if it appeared to say the opposite of that, then it was actually a coded message that means whatever is politically convenient for us to have it mean?
You can keep claiming it’s one tweet if you like, but you know this is disingenuous. It’s 1 tweet + 4 years of destabilising lies + 1 incitement to insurrection
Propaganda over the ages has been studied very closely, there are known techniques. His incitement speech was a textbook example [1]. Why on earth would anyone give him the benefit of the doubt? He’s a wannabe tyrant.
How does your outburst relate to my comment? What obligation does twitter have to give anybody a voice? Especially a voice that has incited a violent insurrection. I don't see how Twitter are struggling to maintain user trust, except for those that believe violent insurrection is a good thing.
The outburst was a reaction to the question of why people would give him the benifit of the doubt. He was entrusted (non violently, but begrudgingly by some Americans) with the ability to command the United States' nuclear arsenal. Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it. I don't trust that Trump incited the violence, nor that it's a good idea to blame him and dismiss objection.
> Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it
So you're comparing the insurrection that happened last week, in a mature, functioning democracy to the overthrow of rule-from-afar by a king? Are you sure that a violent insurrection in America, today, could be a good thing? An insurrection is usually to replace the embedded status quo. What should democracy be replaced with that's better? Do you believe totalitarianism/fascism is really a better system? Because that appears to be Trump's preferred system of government.
> I don't trust that Trump incited the violence
He staged a rally called the "Save America March" with a speech loaded with violent imagery and threats to "weak republicans" with phrases like "We have someone in there who should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we're not going to stand for that" with repeated phrases like "fight like hell", giving the impression that there were similar marches around the country, etc. etc. all carefully crafted to make it seem like today was the day that, if the mob didn't do something about it, they would lose democracy itself. Making it appear that the election was still ongoing, putting it in the present tense, and that in 1 hour's time, it would all be over. He even laid out plans for what he would do in office going forward, like a State of the Union speech. It was all timed to finish 45 minutes before the electoral college votes were due to be counted.
This was after Guiliani had called for "trial by combat".
If you haven't seen the full transcript of his speech, I would encourage you to dig it out. The incitement is absolutely plain as day. It's textbook propaganda and was designed to rile up the crowd to believe they, the "real Americans" (like Hitler's "real Germans"), could stop what he was decrying as a fraudulent election.
I get it that if you're a Trump fan or a Republican, you may be willing to give more of a benefit of the doubt. But to a non-partisan (I'm not American, but deeply concerned by what I can see from my part of the world) it's plain as day.
We're going to go with the logic - and evidence - that Trump has been doing this for years. Even before he was president he was threatening violence if he didn't win the nomination. [1]
So it is spectacularly, flagrantly, and most of all utterly unconvincing to suggest that he - I don't know - misspoke? Didn't mean it? Was widely and unfortunately misinterpreted by an angry crowd he just happened find himself in front of with kindness and good will to all men in his heart?
None of that is even remotely plausible.
Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc are perfectly justified in shutting him up, for the safety of all Americans, and very possibly the rest of the world.
Once we've dealt with this threat, we can come back and have a debate about media control in all of its forms. And when we do that we can include the trad media too, because they have a lot to answer for.
But for now there are more pressing problems. Whether or not Twitter did the right thing isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.
Sure, once we've won the War on Terror, you'll be able to get on a plane without taking your shoes off again and we'll shut down the NSA program to spy on everyone. Once we end the scourge of drugs, we'll restore your 4th amendment rights and end civil forfeiture. The people who take your away your rights to bolster their own political power have always been very conscientious about giving them back later.
Multi-decade concerns start out as immediate concerns. If you only care about freedom when it's easy and convenient to protect, you just plain don't care about freedom.
Loss of Twitter use isn’t loss of freedom. No laws have been changed. He’s just lost access to a private company’s services. It is not the same as any of the things you list
If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point. It's about our freedom to hear differing points of view and make up our own minds about them.
If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote. We only get to choose from a pre-approved list of options that all have to conform to whatever Twitter and Facebook deem is acceptable. Twitter and Facebook et al are unelected and accountable to no one. That's not democracy. That's a corporate dictatorship with sham elections.
> If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point
I really haven't. Trump is the only western leader to have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms. You can't claim this is the thin end of the wedge, this is a reaction [by those platforms] to the risks to western democracy in its entirety. They gave him four years of rope to hang himself with, it was only a direct attack on democracy itself that caused this action.
> If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote.
Trump has all the means of communication that any previous president has had. All he has to do is stand at a lectern and talk and it will be broadcast on national television.
Again, he wouldn't have lost the access that he had if he hadn't tried to directly attack the entire system of democracy itself. All the other lies he's told over the years were allowed to be seen.
> corporate dictatorship
That's a laughable leap, sorry. If he hadn't incited a violent insurrection, and if he wasn't a few days away from the end of his tenure then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Let me put this another way. Do you think everybody, no matter what harms they cause, deserve a voice on all platforms? Would you expect Twitter to host the voice of Hitler?
Ultimately, they are private companies, they have no obligation to balance, fairness, access. It seems the state forcing corporations to do their bidding would be far more of a slippery slope than the president, who has tried to actually destroy democratic process, being banned from a platform.
I don’t think you can really pick this part the way you are approaching it. There were many many other tweets that added up to this, and Twitter really didn’t decide that any particular tweet was a problem until people chose to be violent after reading them.
I'm aware of the wider context, and I didn't mean that in complete seriousness. I was just pointing out the extremely one-sided bias on display. We've had our cities burned down and dozens of people murdered in the name of leftist causes, and all we get is denial that the violence is even happening, or baseless claims that it's all committed by alt righters who somehow flourish in zones controlled by violent leftists. CHAZ de facto seceded from the Union, and Portland was borderline in that respect. While the riot in the Capitol was very serious and reprehensible, it was not even remotely a coup and the overall level of harm was low compared to the violent harm constantly caused by and celebrated by the left all last year. It's abundantly clear that violence is good and healthy as long as it's committed by the left, and it's okay to stamp out groups that find that abhorrent. The tech giants do not have the slightest problem with violence. They have a problem with their political opponents. This is a political power grab that is affecting thousands of people who have not committed any crime.
I'm all for prosecuting people and groups that have actually committed violence. In the court system, not by unaccountable decrees from the billionaire ruling class, and not with collateral damage involving thousands of innocent people.
I say this living in Seattle. Nobody burned down my city. Chaz was pretty interesting; I visited and talked to people there. It was not a threat to the Union. :)
The things you seem to think are abundantly clear are not clear to people who lived through the events you’re hearing about.
OK then add this to context, they had also just determined that pipe bombs had been located in 4 places (Capital area, RNC Headquarters , DNC Headquarters, and in a pickup truck bed). So if someone who was revered and you felt wrong enough to stage a potential coup or insurgence for wasn't going to be some place and still hadn't condemned your behavior, yet those who were permitted to do the wrong (in the mind of the insurgence) you were just given a green light and location. That is where it breaks down. He was also stating he was moving platforms, so then those who were prepared to perpetrate the violence would know where they could celebrate it with the person they felt had been wronged.
Now personally I took more umbrage with the fact that he hadn't been kicked off previously, I personally Don't think that the previous comments should have ever been allowed to be made on the platform since he should have been removed for TOS violations.
Also for those asking how this should impact businesses going forward, a smart company should have a mitigation plan in place for any similar issue. It would have been strange if this was the first occurrence, but just look back a few years for 8Chan. This isn't the first time, especially for an application that a bunch of the users had used since QAnon had gone there previously.
This thread started out talking about on what grounds a vendor like AWS might refuse service to a service like Parler, and what those who run companies might want to do to mitigate this risk.
You switched it to talking about on what grounds Twitter might refuse service to the President of a country or other powerful person. Which you got lots of takers to discuss that, but it seems like a very different discussion to me.
Wow, the contrived reasoning in that Twitter statement is beyond belief:
Trump: "I totally disagree with the outcome of the election [...] there will be an orderly transition [...] I will not be going to the Inauguration"
Twitter's interpretation: I don't think the election is legitimate, therefore I disavow my statement that the transition will be orderly, therefore you should commit violence. Also, since I won't be at the inauguration, you're free to do terrorism there without risk of harming me personally.
> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.
When President Trump published this tweet, he knew full well extremists are actively planning to attack the inauguration on January 20th.
There isn't a clear, objective bar in this kind of situation. Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos each decided for themselves if they were willing to stand by and allow Trump and Parler to continue along the path of inciting violence on January 20th.
The people voted to remove Donald Trump from office and he wouldn't and still does not accept it coupled with his calls to violent action. If he's willing to drag the entire country I can only imagine what he would try to do to a company that defied him, Trump is an abuser. While any of these companies could have taken action, I understand to some extent why they did not. It doesn't make it right, doesn't mean I condone their lack of response, but I can see why a company did not go heads up with this person and waited for the appropriate time to take action.
From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down and honestly any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Part of that plan should be projected scenarios about how low the bar will go....
Part of what is really dicey here too is that the result of getting this calculation wrong is basically annihilation for your service (unless you think you can operate without "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers"). The stakes are really high!
The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2.
You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses.
Or.
You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a Lame Duck status.
The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. Yes, you should absolutely be actively paying attention. No static rule will allow you, or me, or that guy over there to go back to not paying attention.
The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”.
Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t change anything, kicking so many reactionaries off of Twitter that they went off to make Gab didn’t help, and destroying Parler and kicking Trump off social media isn’t going to help.
How is silencing a group that feels oppressed going to help anything?
This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.
People need to stop hiding behind the first amendment and "but censorship" as a way of allowing democracy-threatening activity. Speech has ALWAYS had limitations. You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre. You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation. You cannot reveal classified information. You cannot imitate a police officer. Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial? Particularly when these are private corporations making the decisions, who are not duty-bound to enable free spech in the first place?
Yes, like handing the keys to public discourse over to a private corporation and then defending their right to censor it as they please.
>You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre.
Actually, you can. This is protected by Brandenberg as I understand it.
>You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation.
Sure, thats defamation. I agree that should be illegal.
>You cannot reveal classified information.
You can also sign an NDA!
>Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial?
Because without the freedom to "incite violent terrorism" we are essentially captive to the whims of the government.
To quote Thomas Jefferson. "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."[1]
The whole letter I take this quote from is worth a read.
>Actually, you can. This is protected by Brandenberg as I understand it.
Brandenberg says that the government can't restrict inflammatory speech unless it's "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". The case specifies three requirements for punishing speech: 'intent', 'immenent lawless action', and 'likely to incite'. Shouting 'fire' is discussed in the opinion as potentially prosecutable:
> The line between what is permissible and not subject to control and what may be made impermissible and subject to regulation is the line between ideas and overt acts.
> The example usually given by those who would punish speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theatre.
> This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 357 U. S. 536-537 (DOUGLAS, J., concurring). They are indeed inseparable, and a prosecution can be launched for the overt acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution. Certainly there is no constitutional line between advocacy of abstract ideas, as in Yates, and advocacy of political action, as in Scales. The quality of advocacy turns on the depth of the conviction, and government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.
P.S. the theater company can ban you for being a nuisance even if it's not illegal.
Riversflow, the reference to the replenishment of the "tree of liberty" is unhelpful. It's cliche and generates far more heat than light.
The real reason it can be dangerous to ban speech connected with "terrorism" is the quoted term is so poorly defined as to potentially be almost anything abrasive and unpopular. I haven't seen any cohesive explanation of how the occupation of the Capitol January 6 was terroristic in nature, and yet the event broadly is being criticized as such, exemplifying why high-stakes laws against ill-defined things could have a chilling effect far broader than just those things we all agree should not occur. Is the line when protesters are unlawfully in a location? Like the middle of a street? When they advocate for things that are not currently lawful, e.g., changes in law? When they are agitated, animated and frighten their neighbors?
That’s the standard illustration of the Schenk (which suppressed what is widely now recognized as core political speech) “clear and present danger” test, which probably comes to a different result under the Brandenberg “incites imminent lawless action” test which replaced it
They're not 'hiding behind it'. They believe that suppressing speech makes extremism worse in the long run.
Speech has limitations, but banning an entire social media network at the decision of tech oligarchs instead of the actual legal limits on speech is a precedent many see as escalation of the conflict. I do. This is a giant mistake that will breed resentment and do nothing but confirm to Trumpists that there is, in fact, a conspiracy against them.
> spew their hate of anyone who is not a white conservative?
This is extremely biased and ignorant. For one, there are plenty of non-white non-conservatives on the platform. Your statement here reveals much about your biases.
You are basically removing platform of communication is ok for people that hold opinions other than the mainstream politically-correct ones. This is exactly the sort of things authoritarian government such as China do.
>Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial?
When it takes pages to describe why something is inciting violence, and the result is huge numbers of people arguing it both was and wasn't inciting violence - including very, very intelligent people on both sides - then maybe it's not as cut and dry as you make it out to be. Or is everyone who disagrees with you either disingenuous or stupid?
But the thing is, have you actually read the stuff on Parker this is about? These people are actively inciting violence. Their leaders are encouraging violent assaults on democratic institutions. They really aren’t that different from what happened in Germany in the late 20s and 30s. Whether they also come to resemble Germany in the late 30s is irrelevant.
Err, so what?, the supreme court has a pretty strict definition per Brandenburg. And I agree with the court's opinion there,
> "These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone advocating for it, especially from behind a keyboard, actually expected storming the capital to happen, and it seems like it only happened as a result of law enforcement essentially giving it it's blessing. As pointed out by your sibling comment, calling a group of people who mostly milled around the capital "insurrectionists" is just fallacious, and tells you how loaded this whole thing is. I'm extremely concerned that this spectacle is going to be used to curtail our liberties the same way 9/11 was used to pass the Patriot act.
I feel like I'm in crazy town when I see so much being done to stop "inciting violence". Isn't it ultimately the responsibility of the public to not act on such incitements? When a group becomes sufficiently disenfranchised the most radical members transition from trying to make peaceful change to calling for revolution. If the disenfranchisement continues unabated more and more members of the group will be convinced of the need for action. This is fundamentally why the U.S. exists, and I think it is the right of the oppressed group to self-advocate and self-determine.
So in that sense I don't think that anyone can honestly say that calls for violence are never appropriate. Any revolution, even a velvet one, is going to have some fringe of people calling for violence or it will never come about. Should western media have shut down the Arab spring for the same reason? What about #freepalestine? There were plenty of calls for violence against Trump, and nobody seemed too concerned. Should Kathy Griffin have been blackballed?
If we define this group of people as predominantly non-college educated, non-hispanic white males, then we are talking about a group whose deaths of despair (suicide and drug overdose) rate has tripled in the last twenty years, a trend that has likely intensified significantly during the lockdown [1]. Now I could be wrong, but I don't think they are killing themselves because they aren't allowed to be racist, rather I think it's because non-college educated rural americans[2] are being and have been marginalized.[3]
Perhaps we should try and lift this group up instead of grinding them down and using them as a scape goat for problems primarily related to wealth inequality.
> When a group becomes sufficiently disenfranchised the most radical members transition from trying to make peaceful change to calling for revolution.
I'd agree that there is a sizeable proportion of the population that feels left behind. However, a large portion of the people present on Jan 6 were not the disenfranchised. There were a worrying number of CEOs, Active Military, Doctors, and Lawyers present.
> Perhaps we should try and lift this group up instead of
grinding them down and using them as a scape goat for problems primarily related to wealth inequality.
This is overwhelmingly what people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are trying to do. The rhetoric of both is based around trying to help working people by introducing social safety nets with the express purpose of giving people like them some room to breath financially. Have you seen how those policies have been received? Instead they elected an authoritarian millionaire who stoked division and xenophobia while cutting taxes for everyone but them.
They've been convinced that the reason they're struggling is the fault of illegal immigrants, the Chinese, feminism, and leftists. Propaganda that has carried over from the Cold War leads them to reject any policy that might actually help them as "communism". As a block they vote overwhelmingly for policies that only serve to enrich their bosses and the people producing the propaganda. They'll rant for hours about how awful Obamacare was going to be, but then happily tell you about how much they love the "ACA" that they're currently making use of.
We've reached a point where they're behaving more like a spouse who won't leave their abusive husband. The best thing is remove the source of that abuse for long enough that they might come to some degree of sense.
Here's the thing. If you've paid attention for more than fifteen minutes to feminists complaining about mistreatment, you'd know that one of the oldest tricks in the deflection playbook is to play the "agreeableness" card, asking people to calm down and be reasonable. At its best, it's a delaying tactic, playing for time while you continue to enjoy the fruits of inequality. I don't like it when it happens to women. I'm sure as hell not going to tolerate it being turned toward me.
When they say "literal nazis", they mean literal nazis, not figurative nazis.
I don't think the entire GOP it turning into Nazis. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say they believed it. However, I don't think every German, or even most Germans, in WWII were Nazis either. That didn't stop the Nazis from being in charge. It barely slowed them down.
In order to get his 49% of the votes, #45 had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, courting every non-liberal element of society. The GOP leadership has publicly recognized these groups and groups like them as members of Team GOP. They seated them at a table as if they deserve to be peers with the folks you claim to represent.
Let me ask you a serious question. Was it worth it to win that way? Really? What entitles anyone who says 'yes' or 'maybe' to be painted with a separate brush from the people who delivered the victory at "any cost"?
If getting you, or all of us really, looking in the mirror is going to be predicated on treating you with the respect you plan to earn once they've treated you as if you've earned it, then buddy, you're going to be disrespected for an awful long time. Read the warnings, take some umbrage. I certainly am.
So what do we do instead? Just continue down this path until 75% of Americans "feel oppressed" and that "BLM and Antifa and Democrats are Marxists and enemies of the people"? Yeah? 'cause that's not working out.
Or are you kind of thinking it is working out and it's your desired outcome?
The Right is excellent at projecting and playing "the victim" so I wouldn't be surprised.
>This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.
I would never refer to a conservative who recognizes the legitimate results of our free and fair elections as a Nazi! Now the question is, why in the flying MOTHERFUCK do I need that qualifier?
I am a conservative who doesn't think it was stolen. But I have to point out the double standard. For ~3 years democrats claimed trump only won 2016 because Putin helped him. And they claimed for months that Stacy Ambrams was the actual winner of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?
>You do realize that the current president is the ringleader of birtherism, right?
Hillary Clinton, in her 2008 presidential campaign brought the fringe conspiracy theory of 'birtherism' into the mainstream as a rhetorical weapon to discredit her rival, Barack Obama, at least in the eyes of enough potential voters to do some harm. Donald Trump did bring the matter up in his campaign, but quickly repudiated it and never mentioned it again. It does not look like a sustainable assertion that Trump is, or ever was the 'ringleader' of 'birtherism.'
>For ~3 years democrats claimed trump only won 2016 because Putin helped him.
Of which there was concrete proof of election meddling by Russia. Obviously we can't litigate what-ifs, but I'm not sure how the two can be separated.
>Stacey Abrams was the actual winner of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.
The guy she was running against was the secretary of state at the time and passed several laws that were very clearly meant to suppress voter turnout before an election that he was standing in.
>Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?
Yes, and for inciting violence and beating a police officer to death with a flag of the steps of the Capitol while saying the pledge of allegiance. Either work to make sure it never happens again or be inextricably linked to it.
This comment highlights how ridiculously politicized HN has become. Just an hour ago this post was downvoted, and somehow has been upvoted despite not adding anything to the discussion
>You know what's even more toxic? Literal Nazis and fascists, the ranks of which have been, if not growing, then clearly emboldened.
What does the word literal even mean at this point? What is fascism to you? What is Nazism to you?
>This group "feels oppressed" because they are not able to exert their will to oppress others.
How is this sentence even appearing on a thread about an app getting removed because they refused to force more stringent moderation onto their users?
> An image of Packer inside the Capitol, whose sweatshirt bore the name of the Nazi concentration camp where about 1.1 million people were killed during World War II, has evoked shock and disbelief on social media. The bottom of his shirt stated, "Work brings freedom," which is the rough translation of the phrase "Arbeit macht frei" that was on the concentration camp's gates.[1]
Apparently the back read "Staff"[2]. While maybe not "literal" Nazis themselves, the people there seem perfectly happy to associate with and receive the support of literal Nazis.
Not to mention, in recent years there's been a rise in adoption of Nazi symbology: 88, Nazi salute, swastikas obviously, plus co-opting of Norse runes and symbols they perceive as associated with the Aryan race.
But it's not just Nazis that are the problem. They're clearly in the minority. There's growing interest in garden variety fascism. Some of the hallmarks of that are nationalism, militarism, submission to authority, anti-intellectualism, fomenting fear of "the other" and outsiders. Umberto Eco has a list [1] that encapsulates and explains these. And, I'm sorry, but a lot of these describe the trajectory of the current Republican Party, especially under Trump's rule. (note: I think the GOP has largely abandoned what we would call "conservatism". Even though many of those left in the party might self-identify as conservative, they have veered into fascist ideology, they just won't admit it)
What are we supposed to make of people carrying the Confederate flag, as well? The Confederate States of America fought a civil war to preserve the enslavement of Black people (as specifically mentioned in most of the state constitutions of the CSA states)- what message are they trying to send by bringing that flag to the capitol building?
Parler's app was the number one download on the app store & play store after Trump was kicked off Twitter.
Then apple and google decided that Parler was not going to be a platform Trump could use, so they kicked the app off.
Then amazon decided that Parler had no place on their computing resources.
Those 2 tweets were interpreted as they were, to suit the political leanings of those tech companies and their political allies. And a legitimate competitor was destroyed into the bargain. This is not reasonable and it is antithetical to the freedoms on which your great nation was founded.
If you, dear HN reader, can't see the threat to your freedom in this then you are blind.
The US democracy may be under stress, so to speak, but it does seem to be working. The democrats will have their man in the white house. Trump will leave.
Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??
> Forcing a private corporation to provide a platform for someone else is also a form of tyrrany.
I appreciate that. I am not sure where I stand on this anymore. I agree that they are private corporations with rights. But they are also unprecedented in history in terms of scale, wealth and power. And they just silenced a president and shutdown a competitor. Those are some implications that need to be considered carefully.
The President is perfectly capable of getting a message out without the use of twitter. There's even a room in his house specifically for giving press briefings. To pretend that this is "silencing" him is ridiculous.
> But they are also unprecedented in history in terms of scale, wealth and power. And they just silenced a president and shutdown a competitor. Those are some implications that need to be considered carefully.
Then break them up, they absolutely deserve to be, I just don't think this particular situation is an example of why they should be broken up.
I would like to point out that Parler claimed to be using AWS as a regular hosting provider, so this isn't an area where the market is anywhere near as consolidated, there are thousands of other hosting providers out there who probably don't want to deal with them either.
> The President is perfectly capable of getting a message out without the use of twitter. There's even a room in his house specifically for giving press briefings. To pretend that this is "silencing" him is ridiculous.
Debating, especially on the internet, requires a little generosity when interpreting your opponent's words. Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit. I know that the President wasn't literally silenced. Jeff Bezos didn't send goons to the whitehouse to gag and bag him.
We both know that firing off a tweet to millions instantly is a lot easier than calling a press conference.
Here's a thing every activist knows, from the most benign to the most toxic (by anyone's estimation):
If you wait for the government to provide you every good thing in life, it'll never come.
Governments like to look around at what people are already doing in several locales or regions and either stop them or give it to everybody. The courts get involved and decide whether that's allowed. If the Federal government doesn't like what the courts say, they can use more strongly worded laws so the courts have to agree. We make the last bit difficult so that we don't do it frivolously. It cuts down on overreach, but it also means bad actors tend to get to play a bit longer at the expense of everybody else.
If individuals or corporations are the last word in reasonable political discourse, we will have failed. Not so spectacularly as if we never do anything until Congress says so, but failed nonetheless.
To be clear, I'm not saying this should be the end of this. But someone has to get the wheels of government rolling, and this is fairly typical, if not ideal.
>Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??
This reminds me of far-leftists refusing to admit that Islamist terrorism should be counted as terrorism, because, after all, what was killing a few people in an LGBT nightclub going to accomplish for ISIS?
My problem is with the description of that action as a "coup". I'm not defending those people. I'm not informed well enough to do that. But a coup? I don't think so.
Coups generally rely on military support, or some sort of established basis for taking and holding political power. This was not a coup. Or it was the shittest one ever.
If you consider that their aim was to overturn an election by force, then yes, it was a coup attempt. I think they were counting on the military and law enforcement rank-and-file (which overwhelmingly support Trump) to join them.
Clearly, vendors should be made to continue doing business with (some appropriately chosen set of?) clients, because that would be different than post-1933 intrawar Germany...how?
By 'result of doing nothing' I mean vendors turning a blind eye to their clients, instead of dumping them on the side of the road without even the courtesy of slowing the car down first.
I would have thought that was pretty clear from context.
>You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long
"People" is a general term, "offense" is a relative term. What you may consider an offense, I might consider a complement. Additionally, what you consider an offense today, you might not do so tomorrow. There is no such thing as a static set of provisions that can handle all cases of immorality across all of time and satisfy all people.
>The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance
The price of freedom is nothing, the price of consequence is eternal vigilance. The only reason you would need to be alerted if someone commits an offense you deem immoral, is so that they can be punished for the offense. You can't reverse an act that someone committed, but sure if you have constant oversight of their actions you can definitely punish them as you see fit. Law is synonymous with punishment, but it is punishment that applies universally to all parties, as opposed to the Terms of Service applied by modern corporations, which (by design) can be applied to whomever and can be ignored for whomever the corporation feels like. Hence why it's a slippery slope.
> The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.
There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.
I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..."
I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than Twitter in all ways; it was more like a news website. I have seen more provocative comments on other forums.
I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC. Part of this is due to the comments being easier to read on Twitter than Parler. I assume bad behavior on Parler was deep in the comments, but the website didn't make those easy to read.
I thought the Parler takedown seemed random. They were used as a scapegoat. If you were a normal user, you used it to hear a different viewpoint but you still lurked on Twitter some because there was no real discussion happening on Parler.
> I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC.
I am very curious for an example of an AOC tweet that you considered a violent statement.
I am thinking you must have a very different definition of "violent statement" than I do, and I'm curious to learn more about it by example. Because I read a lot of AOC, and have never seen anything I would remotely consider a violent statement. But you may consider things differently, what exactly "violence" means, let alone in a statement, is to some extent not entirely set in stone, I agree.
Can you provide an example (or three) of a violent statement from AOC you have personally witnessed, as you say?
She is a real person, it seems only fair to provide an example when making such an accusation.
I can't speak for OP, but #guillotines is a perennially popular hashtag among the Chapo-sphere on Twitter. And those Tweets, let alone the user, are almost never removed.
We might have a different definition of violence; I find it to be a spectrum with multiple levels.
I consider cancel culture a form of violence. There was a tweet from AOC suggesting making a list of all those who worked under Trump; I presume she wants to cancel them. This was dangerous since she was a Congresswoman. There was also a tweet where she voiced support for the riots this summer.
To be fair to AOC, she is not the worst I have seen.
Also, to be fair to Twitter, I bet there is a ton of right side violent speech I just personally haven't seen much of it.
I have personally witnessed violent speech on the postmodern side on Twitter because I'm more tuned into people calling for censorship. It's a topic I'm following.
I think the main reason I didn't see it on Parler was because the comment section is hard to read.
Can you provide the specific tweets so we know what you're talking about?
But yes, if you consider "making a list" to be violence, I guess we do have different understandings. I hope you apply this understanding in all directions, to your political compatriots too, telling them they are being violent (presumably in an undesirable way) when they do things like make lists? Or wait, you just presume that she was going to do something? Yeah, I"m curious to see the tweet. It sounds like a lot of presuming...
But cause if AOC isn't the worst you have seen... why did you use her as an example? Like, everyone is always using AOC as an example, when to me she's like one of the smartest and kindest politicians I know, from her utterances. Regardless of what you think of "cancel culture", she's not even a very good example of it, she's not the paragon of cancel culture, that's not really what she does at all. I think it's very unfair to AOC.
And yet, everyone wants to use her as an example. (Including by 'presuming' extra things she hasn't actually done!) Why? If you recognize she's not actually a great example of what bothers you, why did you mention her name as the only specific name example you mentioned?
It's easy to find the AOC list tweet our riot tweet if you google it; I'm currently taking a break from twitter.
AOC was the first that came to mind. Regarding her list, I believe at the time twitter users were citing a law saying what she was recommending was getting close to being illegal. They called it citizen intimidation, yet with more formal wording.
AOC wasn't the best example. The best examples were people saying it was good Rand Paul had been injured by his neighbor and the professor saying Mike Adams suicide was good.
I hadn't seen the AOC tweet you linked. It does appear uniting at first, yet when I looked closer I saw a familiar persuasion trick. It seems like she's applying the argument that anyone who has certain beliefs is a white supremist.
One of the most divisive things these days is labeling all people with conservative beliefs racist. It seems racist has become a catch-all term for anything postmodernists disagree with.
Calling someone racist means you don't listen to them and you can cause them to lose their reputation even if the claims don't have merit. The parody account Titania McGrath helps outline how the definition of racism has changed.
A clearer more accurate statement than the parent statement would be:
I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years. Postmodern leaders, such as AOC, have encouraged low levels of violence using the Twitter platform.
This definition of violence is meant to describe violence as a spectrum which includes the destruction of property and destruction of job prospects of conservative individuals.
As far as I know, AOC has NOT tweeted the worst levels of violence. I apologize for using AOC as the primary example. If I could edit the parent statement I would because she is NOT the best example. It is also possible there is a less inflammatory word to describe cancel culture and property destruction than violence; I don't want to mix two things up.
"The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the “polite language” policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore."
It's about scale. A disagreement that should stay between a small group of people and often could be solved by mediation, a conversation, or community service ends up being a national event.
An individual who has a specialized skillset loses the ability to be economically viable. They might not be able to get another job in the field.
Often, they are being used as a scapegoat.
If you make it impossible for a person to get a job in his or her field because you disagree with what they say, that's a form of violence. If you're going to economically eliminate someone in a scaled way, make sure it's worth it; it should be a last resort. This is really about scale.
I'd appreciate it if you could avoid the term "leftist" in future - this may be a cultural thing, but here in the UK, it's almost always used as a derogatory slur. I get the impression that's also true in NA, but forgive me if that isn't the case.
Can you provide an example of a violent statement posted on Twitter by AOC?
Not to mention that "leftist" is necessarily relative to some other position. In the UK (not to mention continental Europe!), "left" means something rather different than in the US...
I won't use leftist again. My anger at censorship is coming out. The proper academic term is postmodernist; at least that's what the Cynical Theories book by Primose mentioned.
I told my husband I would stop looking at Twitter since it upsets me so I'm handcuffed to find specific proof there. But, I was primarily referring to the list tweet where AOC mentioned gathering republicans who worked for Trump. There have been other similar sentiments expressed by her to punish people over time; she has an activist side which can get aggressive for a Congresswoman.
To be fair AOC isn't the worse I've seen as far as Twitter threats. The worst I've seen is the guy who acted like the controversial professional Mike Adams's suicide was good who is currently a North Carolina professor. Also, there were tweets against Rand Paul which were violent after he got attacked by a neighbor. There have also been tweets for years mostly by random accounts threatening Trump; Gab has organized all the data.
I appreciate the reply. Here in the UK I look on with a mixture of sorrow and fear. Events happening across the pond right now are some of the scariest I've witnessed in my life, but I'm acutely aware of similar issues here if not, mercifully, anything like the same kind of tension. I just want deescalation. I want calm heads and kind hearts to prevail. We need to listen to ourselves less and each other more. Stay safe, America — every last one of you.
Before I started reading AOC's tweets, the right's view of her had seeped into my brain. I didn't know why, but I had a slightly negative view of her.
Once I actually read her views expressed in her tweets I was shocked how reasonable she was. In 100's of tweets I've never seen her say anything that I thought was even remotely radical.
Did you link to a different tweet than you intended? You appear to be arguing that it’s “violence” for a public figure not to be able to disappear past public statements which they now regret. Her position that they should take responsibility for what they said is something most children learn pretty young.
"Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future"
Yes, show me where in those words you find violence. I see someone wanted to hold the enablers of DJT accountable.
> I see someone wanted to hold the enablers of DJT accountable.
So around 40% of the American population. The left loves to talk about the right-wingers doing dog-whistles, this is one from the left. Your commentary also come across as naive or disingenuous when in those days AOC just one of several left-wing politicians and personalities calling for the creation of undesirable lists (again that 40%) to ,when the time comes, get them to pay for enabling Trump. All these within the highly violent BLM protests context.
" I believe injustice is a threat to the safety of all people. Because once you have a group that is marginalized and marginalized and marginalized … once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot." AOC,2020
"When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe."
BTW show me a tweet from Trump calling for violence, seeing how stringent are your standards and how adamant you are that only the right calls for violence you must have examples a plenty.
But I am wasting my time here.You know it and I know it. You have your mind made up.
A half-assed google search wont do. Give me a tweet. These are dark times when I find myself defending Donald Trump against the sycophants of powerful tech barons,consciously willingly to abandon basic democratic ideas like free speech, surrendering them to private entities whose interests are totally misaligned with the public, especially the poor. All of this, "to own the right". The US is fucked beyond repair.
To extend on that... the entire premise of parler was that everyone was censoring them too much(for similar calls for violence) so they needed a platform that was immune from that. well when your entire premise is flawed from the start it's not a stretch to see that they would be targeted from that like stormfront.
You don't get to the level parler got purely because the few extreme users felt censored.
You saw a minority of users taking free speech too far.
This wasn't Amazon, Google's or Twitter's place to act. This was a job for the police and the FBI and really the fact they intervened at all is just so fucking American.
Sounds like reasonable open internet regulation, like the type that "The Left" has been fighting to get for decades, would have really been something useful for Republicans to not oppose simply because of its popularity among the left.
Instead, we are left with mega corporations being the arbiters of their own platforms, Just like those supporting deregulation wanted.
the stuff they were posting on parler was probably illegal[0][1] and parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric. (though they did moderate anything that didn't align with their groupthink)
i know the dead comment below won't see this and likely doesn't care but for posterity they were absent in their moderation for many weeks and were knowledgeable of it from the get go: https://twitter.com/cambrian_era/status/1349371372384841730
> It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.
The financial backers of Facebook supported the company a lot through its enabling of the Rohingya genocide. But, then again, the Rohingya are not white, nor Christian, and they don't live in a country that can be a potential source of expats (like the UK or Australia, nice, good countries), only of immigrants.
There are lots of horrible things on Parler from what I’ve seen (I don’t have an account, I’ve just seen screen shots). The most egregious example was the post from Trump attorney Lin Wood calling for Pence to be executed by firing squad. It was up for days, and only taken down when this all blew up.
Twitter, though, at least has moderators, and makes an effort to remove threatening content from its service. The speed and efficacy of Twitter's abuse team is a topic for debate, but they have (and enforce) policy.
Parler famously had no such policy, that's why it was so attractive to the insurrectionists. The CEO, even after January 6th, went on record that he didn't feel it was Parler's responsibility to moderate user-generated content at all. Whatever last-minute olive branch they tried extending to AWS regarding a potential future volunteer moderator system obviously wasn't sufficient for Amazon.
Twitter and Facebook took how many years and millions of dollars to scale up a moderation strategy? I guarantee they weren't worrying about moderation at Parler's scale.
Twitter didn't take him down for a week, but they took that post down faster (I think). I regularly report twitter posts that are similar to that - violence mostly. It often takes two or three days, but they do get them taken down.
and i think a key point about this particular example is that Lin Wood is a very visible public figure. This wasn't a single crazy comment buried in a long thread that a moderator could have missed. If there was any good-faith effort by Parler to moderate content, it would have caught the Lin Wood rant.
I can see how you would take it that way, but honestly people have been saying a lot worse on the internet for a long time now.
I believe he's saying that we should have military tribunals to try and execute traitors, but of course those words were implied, not explicitly said.
I agree it's inflammatory for sure, but after all the crap I've seen on the internet, this is hardly a post to justify removing the entire platform this was posted on.
And after the tribunals are setup and operational and people are getting executed - would it be enough then? Or not quite yet still? What's your "this is enough, guys" point? Do you have one?
We got mighty close this time, didn't we? Do we need to get "closer"? Should Nancy Pelosi have had to be captured by some "patriot" with zip-ties and an AR-15?
No, you misunderstand. I don't want a mob to hold a tribunal. I want a real military tribunal that follows all procedures, exposes their crimes and then punishes them.
The masses long for justice while the elite and elite-wannabes try to convince themselves that the system isn't completely broken.
> I want a real military tribunal that follows all procedures, exposes their crimes and then punishes them.
Exposes which crimes exactly? Don't tribunals normally take place after you've got a good idea of what the crimes are?
> The masses long for justice while the elite and elite-wannabes try to convince themselves that the system isn't completely broken.
The multi-millionaire son of a multi-millionaire, truly the only person that knows the hardships put upon everyday americans. It's such a shame our hero was hoodwinked by all those nasty corrupt people who just happened to run his campaign, legal team and otherwise generally surround him...
You have opinions. I have opinions. It's easy to jump to conclusions.
We should have trials to get to the truth instead of smearing people for having money and being successful. If we assume the worst about people because they were born into a wealthy family where does that leave us?
You don't believe the swamp could be that corrupt. I do. Is it ok for me to hold that opinion? Is it ok for me to speak it, or will I be silenced for wrong think?
You're still being cryptic about this. I'll ask you again what the basis of these trials should be? who and what should we be investigating?
I'm aware of a few trials that have already happened, my favourites:
Paul Manafort, former campaign chairman of the Trump campaign sentenced to 7.5 years in prison[1]. Collusion with suspected Russian operatives, lying about that collusion. Sentenced separately in Virginia for ~4 years for bank fraud, tax fraud, and hiding foreign accounts[2].
Michael Cohen, former personal attorney to Donald Trump sentenced to 3 years in prison. "charges involving campaign finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress"[3].
A fun list of the rest of the swamp dwellers that have been charged or convicted[4].
> If we assume the worst about people because they were born into a wealthy family where does that leave us?
We aren't assuming the worst about people born into a wealthy family. We're asserting that they cannot relate to those born into a lower or middle class family.
> You don't believe the swamp could be that corrupt. I do. Is it ok for me to hold that opinion? Is it ok for me to speak it, or will I be silenced for wrong think?
You're intentionally ignoring the fact that the man who told you there was a swamp is entirely surrounded by people found guilty of some form of fraud or corruption...
> We're asserting that they cannot relate to those born into a lower or middle class family.
That's a big leap to make. I'm sure we have much different narratives we find to be true, but Trump is basically filling stadiums wherever he goes. Maybe he relates to the lower and middle classes better than you are giving him credit for.
> You're intentionally ignoring the fact that the man who told you there was a swamp
To be fair, you have no idea how I came to believe there is a swamp. I thought that long before Trump became president for a variety of reasons.
I'm not going to get into the details of what I believe. There's just too much to cover. I'm not claiming that I could persuade you that I am right. We are on the sidelines in all this. We are in the middle of an information war, and probably have been our entire lives.
> From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.
If you do a sufficiently poor job, you might as well not even be trying at all. Especially if you court the content as a growth strategy.
Everyone's free to manage their risks however they please, but I personally have no less confidence in AWS than I had before this event. I have updated my understanding of their decision heuristic as it applies to kicking people off their service. But the probability of me or any company I'd manage running afoul of it is far less than the chance of getting struck by lightning.
> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ...
Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.
Are we just assuming this userbase doesn't also have twitter, facebook, signal, etc accounts? I recall a lot of live streaming and tweets during the riots.
Exactly. I already had that factored into my prior for whether my business was going to get cancelled by Amazon. I’d actually expect to fade a court for knowingly facilitating the shit on Parler.
If your users use your service for illegal or fraudulent activities, you have no way of stopping them, and your service is on AWS, then you risk being shut-down.
That hasn't changed today. That was true as of September 16th, 2016 (and probably before then as well)
I think things are pretty clear cut, if you want to start a service to obviously harbor fascist user-driven content, then yes, prepare to be cut off from the mainstream vendors. DailyStormer and Parler are explicitly those types of services.
It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.
> It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.
This is definitely a straw-man, but at the same time, if your website hosts user-supplied content and you don't have a rock-solid strategy for moderating it, then yeah you probably should be worried. (Though the spammers will probably take down your site long before AWS...)
I disagree, you don't need a "rock-solid strategy for moderating" "user-supplied content", you just need a user base that is by and large not inciting violence, particularly against government officials.
If I run some hobbyist forum where say 1 in 1000 users is posting hate speech or calling for violence, as long as I have less-than-rock-solid moderation that can clean up some of their posts and ban the worst offenders based on user reports, I wouldn't be too worried. It's also in my interest to keep the community healthy.
Now, if 20% or 50% of my users are posting hate speech and calling for violence, yeah I would be worried, but I would be less worried about moderation, and more worried about why my hobby attracts extremists. Might call for some self reflection.
It sounds like you have done your risk analysis and settled on an balance of risk and moderation effort that is acceptable to you. That sounds fair to me.
> Now, if 20% or 50% of my users are posting hate speech and calling for violence, yeah I would be worried, but I would be less worried about moderation, and more worried about why my hobby attracts extremists. Might call for some self reflection.
LOL! I think this is actually the right take! Definitely also applies to your social network...
Maybe it doesn't attract extremists. Maybe extremists just happened to randomly pick your site as the latest site to use for communication.
Just theorizing here, but assume that instead of hosting their own content, web sites with comments are hijacked to host extremists propaganda/plans/violent event, with a pointer to the next web site to use (not IF) but when the current one gets shut down.
The only way to avoid this is to moderate the comments before they are allowed to be displayed. And I'm betting there are a thousand+ web sites that are run by amateurs where this is the last thing on their minds.
Hopefully the fact that scaling and searching would be impossible makes this a non-issue.
Sure but AWS isn’t run by robots (yet!). It’s run by people who understand context and intent. I also very seriously doubt that Parler was turned off without any notice. If a company was getting abused like that, I think AWS would try to help them.
However, based on what is described here (https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-abo...) `there are policies against “fighting words” and “threats of harm”. This includes “a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group”.`
Based on recent examples of Parlor posts it seems like the Parlor moderators were not adequately enforcing this policy.
Twitter literally allows dictators to use their service so your point is moot. There’s a massive double standard being applied. Additionally, the term fascist is used for essentially anything people dislike anymore so forgive if your subjective take or big tech’s take on fascism doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.
The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down...
I fail to see how this is a movement of the bar.
Based on these two examples, the bar seems to be that a site gets canceled if a site is used to promote violence, there is a riot, violence happens, and people return to the site to celebrate and promote future violence. That was the bar in both 2017 and 2021. Doesn't seem to have moved.
Given the fact that the attack on the Capitol was a direct attack on the US government, if anything the bar has been RAISED.
Parlor did not have a real, honest, effort at moderation.
It was done poorly, and seems to have been just a fig leaf to say they were doing it. Objectively it was not working. Way way way worse than anything on FB or Twitter.
It seems likely that this is true. But couldn't you get to the same end-result by having good intentions but a bad moderation system? (e.g. I want to keep Nazi content off my service so I subject all posts to a review by 5 other users. That might work until you get a bunch of Nazis that suddenly sign up up-vote each other's content).
Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.
To clarify, I believe that if you don't think you can adequately moderate your service, then you should absolutely not be running it. If your venders do not think you are doing a good enough job moderating your service, then they should not be forced to do business with you.
All I am trying to say is that it is important to realize that how you moderate your service may very well be judged by your venders and you could have a bad time if they find it lacking....
> Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.
If you're planning on starting a service built around user generated content, you should have an answer for how you plan on moderating content.
If you don't have a plan for how to address illegal uses of your service (fraud, child pornography, etc), then you run the risk of being shut down. This isn't even a question of "is it or isn't it incitement".
If you want to run on a hosting platform that exists as a business unit anywhere in the United States, if you don't have a plan for moderating at least the most harmful illegal content, you are at risk of being shut down. FOSTA and SESTA make clear that the the service providers and hosting platforms bear some legal liability for this content, and they will shut you down if you don't moderate your platform.
Right I am not disagreeing with this at all. I am just trying to say that "infective moderation combined with apparent indifference" seems less extreme than DailyStormer-style intentional promotion of violent content.
There is still a long ways to go from "infective moderation combined with apparent indifference" to "effective moderation" or even to "infective moderation that we are attempting to fix". But somewhere between "apparent indifference" and "attempting to fix" is a nasty grey area that you don't want to be caught in.
You should be able to identify that a nazi takeover is happening and change your moderation systems accordingly. Any product person who is claiming to own the product should have eagle eyes on how their product is working or not working.
I would bet that any legal standard would involve phrases like "good faith attempt" and "standard of practice". (If you find a circle of Nazis up-voting each other, you'll have to think up a new moderation scheme.)
FaceBook and Twitter are decent examples---their moderation systems are pretty hit-or-miss, assuming good faith.
> The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.
There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. They also share that same objective as their founding motivation.
As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'realistic' as I like to be, saying "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.
> So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform
No. Not at all.
We're software engineers, right? Make the machines do the heavy lifting.
Create a simple keyword based alerting mechanism for known inflammatory language in the languages that you support. There are resources to help you make this easier in multiple languages, i.e. https://hatespeechdata.com/
Add a moderation system for your users to flag abusive content.
Until you grow to a huge size, or unless your platform is courting violence promoting content, there should be a relatively small amount of content you need to manually review and remove.
I seriously doubt that Twitter has no system that internally flags potentially abusive or violent tweets using machine automated classifiers. This stuff is table stakes nowadays for any major service that accepts user generated data.
I'm not convinced Parler is meaningfully different from the DailyStormer in this regard. In fact, I would say DailyStormer is plausibly less capable of promoting violence and terrorism than Parler is, and this shows in current events. In terms of effectiveness and threat level, Parler is clearly greater.
> Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer.
I was just trying to emphasize that I was using the term in the more loose colloquial sense and not trying to exactly describe the particular actions of the vendors.
> Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown?
Wow, seriously I am not sure how you could have managed to get this from my comment. Please do not put words into my mouth.
> Why would you even bring that site up tbh?
It is a broadly known example of a website that was dropped by pretty much all major online services (including even CloudFlare). What happened to Daily Stormer generated some interesting discussion around online service provides denying services (see the CloudFlare blogpost on why it terminated Daily Stormer: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/).
As the 'bar' goes 'lower' the reason for other vendors to refuse your money becomes less clear. It is quite clear the Parlor is not someone you want on the books.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.
Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that there was even the slightest, faintest, remotest chance of the dude in the viking outfit overthrowing the US government?
It was a violent protest that got way out of hand, absolutely. There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though. It's like someone dropped a cigarette butt on the ground and people are leaping on the opportunity to call it attempted arson.
What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death?
No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.
> There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though.
That doesn't really matter, does it? Isn't it like criminal conspiracy where all that really matters is for at least two people to plan a crime? AFAIK it doesn't matter if the plan is bad, there just needs to be a plan.
The mob of people who stormed the Capitol building beat a police officer to death. If the mob had reached the rooms with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, I think they would have been assaulted, too, killing them by accident or deliberately. That would have triggered a Constitutional crisis which could have given Trump grounds to keep power.
Was this a well thought out plan? No. But would it have been enough to derail the process of formally choosing the next President? Quite possibly.
Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that Trump and his supporters were not trying to keep him in power when he had clearly lost the election?
That was their clear goal. It has been for months, and Trump himself has been saying as much in no uncertain terms. They were looking to intimidate, possible kidnap or kill, members of congress and the Vice President in order to prevent the results of the election from being confirmed.
It's easy to get political fatigue in the current climate, I understand the knee-jerk impulse to assume "hey, you're probably overreacting about this political issue". But some things really are a big deal. Like overturning an election.
This is indeed why it is called the "slippery slope fallacy".
It's a fallacy because the implication of a "slippery slope" is that once the merits of this specific idea are evaluated, then all subsequent ideas following will be implemented immediately without a separate debate and discussion of the merits of those ideas.
Pursuant to the current issue: if you're not planning on running a "somewhat moderated" platform where you'll host content calling for violence against the current government representatives, resulting in an actual attempt at a coup...then you've nothing to worry about.
I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it.
I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life that accompanies an uprising, with the explicit goal of installing a new government.
Is this claim misinformation? Should it be censored?
Failing to succeed at your coup doesn't mean that wasn't what you were attempting to do.
Being stupid about it has never been a criminal defense. "Attempted murder" is still a felony (and you know, the crowd actually murdered a capitol police officer).
They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government.
You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.
If so, that would be a crime and those people should have been arrested. So what? I love the conservative view that if any liberal anywhere did anything bad, then it’s a get out of jail card for them to also do that bad thing. No dude. A crime is a crime.
That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself.
Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts?
Did the owner/company make a call to violence?
Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different)
It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust.
No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship.
This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition.
This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.
If clients or customers bring bad publicity to a company they can refuse them service. They can in fact refuse service for any reason that isn't discriminatory in many jurisdictions.
Censorship has nothing to do with this. Any person can host a website from home, pay for a dedicated line, build their own datacenter, find a colo, host on a decentralised network, etc.
Amazon is under no obligation to provide service to Parler. They are not censored by Amazon refusing them as customers.
It's also not relevant to antitrust, literally at all.
A far more dangerous precedent would be compelling companies to provide service to hate groups and terrorists.
Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming.
> We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself
Why though? On some level in seems impossible to make a distinction "from the outside," and I'm not sure it should matter that a decision was made by a person (probably following an Excel spreadsheet) or software.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
I don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair?
What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced?
Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections are fair and enforce action?
I think the problem is either you are a neutral platform, or you hold too much power.
The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.
This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.
The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.
This isn't just another political issue. The most existential issue facing the state is the integrity of the Constitution.
> The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.
So if the Russian government and Russian courts decide their election was fair and just, should Amazon shut down any websites which counter that viewpoint?
Because that's the precedent we are presumably setting.
> The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.
Yep, same in Russia for questioning election. You get sent to gulag. Or in China - what do you mean you are talking about Taiwan being it's own independent country in a group chat?
> This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.
Most of the coordination actually happened on Facebook, not Parler. None of those arrested so far had a Parler account.
We're setting the precedent that supporting White Supremacist insurrection against the United States will get punished the same way each time.
Russia doesn't have democracy, and Amazon isn't a Russian company, so I hardly understand your analogy.
Why would you compare what Russia does to political prisoners with the military's discipline in the United States?
This may be news to you, but military service members are subject to an independent justice system with different protections, different laws, and different penalties.
You're arguing that US corporations should be restricted from taking action to suppress insurrection on the basis of having your head in the sand. The US should be in a state of emergency now, and it's obvious to me that it's solely because a white supremacist has replaced the civilian leadership of our government with those complicit in this act.
You're free to ignore what has happened, or believe in an alternate reality. Some of us would be guilty of violating our oaths were we to do the same.
Despite being headquartered in USA, aws is a global company and these questions about the future is common sense. Not everything is about American politics, people around the world are used to violence happening on your soil, it's just another news.
It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room.
To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story.
If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AWS and says shut them down, what do they do?
Now suddenly they're the arbitrators of what is true in the world.
I don't want to get too hypothetical here, because I think this time it was pretty black and white.
100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation.
Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech?
And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)
Except Amazon aren’t determining what is true for the world, they’re determining it for themselves based on their assessment of the evidence and control only their own actions? This is true of everyone. To impute a stupid decision-making algorithm to AWS and then point out that it’s stupid does not a great argument against AWS’ actual process make.
Except these companies are defining truth in the world.
You said individuals make their own assessment based on the “evidence” - the problem here is that these companies serve up the “evidence”, so if these companies decide to only show you the “correct” evidence then that’s where they begin to define “truth”.
For an example, see Google Maps and Crimea in Ukraine vs Russia.
They certainly have a lot of sway, there—“history is written by the victors”, etc—but that we are having this discussion in the first place seems proof positive that said sway doesn’t prevent people from holding informed, contrary opinions.
> who decides if the democratic election was fair?
The several states, of which all 50 had certified their votes well in advance of January 6th. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the votes being counted were even cast in public.
Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?
There were claims that Russians hacked the election, voting machine issues, voter fraud and suppression. Democratic leaders objected to the legitimacy of the election results. There were even protestors who interrupted the electoral vote counting [1].
Did the big tech companies miss a chance to censor those peddling theories of an unfair election in 2016? Or do we have a moving definition of what constitutes a fair election and is allowable for questioning depending on which side won?
> Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?
Yes, of course. I wasn't happy about it, but I was aghast that so many people voted for a con man, not convinced that it couldn't possibly be true that more people (in the right places, at least) wanted him than the second-worst political candidate I've ever seen run for President.
Also, by the time the certification comes around, the actual voters, all 538 of them, have publicly voted, so not only did I think the election was fair, but by then I knew it was 100% legal.
IMO big tech doesn't really do much censoring until pushed into a corner, now or in the past; they're more about the money than the politics. The Russians (along with a few other players, no doubt) absolutely fuck with our elections, but they do it the old fashioned way -- by spreading propaganda on social media and convincing American citizens to believe in conspiracy theories, and turn against their fellow citizens, etc.
FWIW, no Democrats stormed the Capitol in 2017. The losing candidate conceded, and relatively quickly at that. After losing by a lower margin than Trump in 2020, while beating him by millions of votes nationwide.
There isn't really a good way to spin it. Trump supporters storming the Capitol is bad, but it's actually a fairly distant second place to what the sitting President is doing.
The platform being used for organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups. If the screenshots are correct of what I have seen then AWS had no choice. They would have been liable if something really bad happened and was made aware of this before it happened. Parler has no monitoring of this activity and that is why everyone shut them down once it was exposed.
Note that in the past AWS has been more than open to hosting platforms organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups, to the point of issuing a lawsuit after a competitor was chosen to host the platform. [1]
>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.
There is a big difference between “controversial” and a place where people are actively planning criminal activity. It’s not close. No bank, for example, could continue serving a known crime org. They themselves would be charged if they did that.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.
I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3].
To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct.
Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.
I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.
Probably, which might have something to do with the fact that there's no genuine belief that Biden is going to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to administrational incompetence, or going to spend his entire term attempting to subvert democracy. On the other hand, it turns out the people who said those things about Trump in 2016 have been proven 100% correct.
The purpose of faithless electors isn't to stop the appointment of arbitrary candidates based on personal preference, it's to stop the appointment of people who are completely unfit for the position. It absolutely makes sense that it would only be justifiable to exercise that option on certain individuals. An individual who blatantly and repeatedly lies about election results and encourages their supporters to commit voter fraud in an attempt to retain power seems like the exact type of person you might want to stop from having that power in the first place.
That's a good point, but I think it actually services to show just how bad this situation was. It's not a stretch to say that faithless electors are a "feature" of the electoral college. One of the stated reasons behind choosing electors rather than voting directly is that the electors could exercise their own discretion in the choice. I agree that it's unscrupulous to attempt to coax electors like that, but it's at least within the bounds of the framework of presidential elections.
This was a crowd of thousands of people, many armed, attempting to interfere with the actual process of counting the votes of those electors. More than a couple members of the crowd had zip ties, which can only be reasonably explained as hostage taking paraphernalia. A literal gallows was erected, and members of the crowd were chanting for violence against Pence and Pelosi (the next two after Trump in the order of succession). A couple IEDs were found on the premise. A police officer was beaten to death. If security hadn't managed to evacuate congress and the VP before the crowd got to them, it seems likely that there would have been deaths among them.
Treating those two things as equivalent is absurd.
To be fair they wanted to do that because they saw Trump as a would-be dictator unwilling to leave power peacefully and deadest on using the government to punish his enemies and line his own pockets. They did THAT to avoid THIS. Being right about the reasons why you are doing things is actually important.
But that isn't the standard that was used. It seems to be something more akin to 'don't not moderate content that encourages...'. Except it isn't quite clear what moderation is considered good enough, as one can look at other sites which hosted and continue to host similar content. Sure, they haven't taken the stance they won't moderate, but they haven't done enough to moderate the content to remove it.
Or is it that stance? Perhaps that was the defining standard, that they took a stance instead of passively allowing it to remain like other sites do (until called out, at which point they'll react based on the size of the call out).
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
This is key advice that a lot of founders seem to forget. Capturing a capital is an extremely bold and risky action, which shouldn't be attempted by anyone with fewer than 4 or 5 high-production cities of their own (some of which ideally also having an Encampment district to support training siege units faster). I encourage new players to focus on obtaining a scientific or cultural victory instead, as these are more straightforward for beginners.
>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.
Ouch, that's going to hurt. USA government is a pretty big customer. Or do we not care about democratic elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, etc.?
"... something that is more genuinely a popular social issue ..."
We shouldn't let minority rights or freedoms be ignored just because they aren't popular. If this is an important issue to that other person, then they should bring it up for discussion.
Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc.
This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.
I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated.
Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegitimate government.
Thank you for saying this. Personally I'm fine with there being rules against things like websites for how to make a pipe bomb or as you mentioned, overthrow the government
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
Ohhhh. You hear that? Overturning a fair democratic election. Where was the same argument when the whole Russia narrative played out - including intelligence agencies trying to "wire" the sitting president and sending agents to his national security advisor's residence to frame him? And trying to plot 25th amendment. And the whole 3years subsequent to that trying to find "collusion".
Also there is no evidence the founders of Parler were actively trying to sabotage the election and install illegitimate president. Some rouge users decided to co-ordinate through apps like Parler and FB. Same applies for FB.
If we want to continue down a path of honest discussion, at no point did people who firmly believed Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia devolve into storming a government building.
And, the Russia topic by and large never called into question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, attempting to disenfranchise voters. The Russia narrative followed a path of legal investigation into questionable situations. Trump did not get impeached for the outcomes of the Mueller report. Dems did not force their way into political buildings. They (at least the mainstream ones) never called for violence.
So, it seems that the left, in the end, did believe it was a fair election in terms of ballot numbers, and never suggested that the democratic election be overturned.
The last part of your statement says something entirely different than the first part. I don't think anyone is claiming that Dems haven't worked hard to undermine Trump during his time in office. Just like I don't think anyone claimed Republicans weren't working to undermine Obama when they took control of the Senate. That's politics, good or bad. But that does not correlate to a belief that a fair election should be overturned.
My wife and I run a side Business Saas product. She is listed as COO on her social media profile for the company.
She is also in a bunch of groups about gardening in our local area.
During the height of BLM protests and CHOP/CHAZ, someone made a post that was very off-topic for the group, basically saying we should all support what was happening in the CHOP and all the violence against cops was justified due to racial injustice.
My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group.
Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content).
One person took it a step further and went on her profile to see where she worked. They then messaged our company's social media profile to tell our company that my wife was a racist, and she should be fired or reprimanded because she had made racist comments in a FB group (she had not, and the person provided no screenshots/proof either).
Unfortunately for that person, they did not realize they were talking to my wife's husband (me) who promptly banned them from our page and blocked their profile from my/my wife's profiles so they could no longer bother us.
However, this type of new "online activism" is rampant nowadays. Small companies often have little choice but to comply or be publicly shamed/bullied, including doxxing or going after individual employees, as in our story.
I disapprove of this type of behavior. This is mob justice in a different form. It is the court of public opinion rather than an actual court of law where someone would get a chance to defend themselves. It is wrong and our society needs to grow up past this childish phase it's going through where every angry person riled up by this or that party's rhetoric feels like they have the right to attempt to destroy another person's livelihood for the sake of pushing "their truth" or "justice". That's not what Justice is.
Bullying from internet trolls is real and spans political boundaries. It goes into even things like sports fandom and video game culture. This is a fundamentally different issue than what we're seeing with Parler.
I don't think it's anything new. People used to call political activists' house to make death threats. It's a recurring theme in Selma, the movie about Dr. King.
I never had to deal with this as a community moderator, but these sort of virtue spirals can destroy communities if they're not nipped in the bud.
> My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group.
> Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content).
Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?
Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?
Why is it privilege to avoid discussing politics in a gardening group? I'll grant that "take no position" can be a privileged position in some contexts, but a gardening group discussion seems pretty clearly not one of those contexts.
I mean to tie it to a more concrete example: Take the incident with the white lady and the black guy who was bird watching in New York. I'm pretty sure he'd love nothing more than to be able enjoy his pretty chill hobby of bird watching without it becoming racial or political or what have you. But the fact of the matter is that's not his choice.
So yea, being able to say you don't take a position in politics can definitely be a privilege.
Edit: Not to say I think people should really be hounding this lady anyways but just want to explain the point about privilege there.
The black guy was the one who attempted to lure her dog away from her to teach her a lesson by "doing something she's not going to like" to her dog(which certainly sounds like a threat).
He admitted to carrying dog treats with him to do just that. And then he posted the video online, attracting even more attention to what would normally just be a "crazy people are crazy" experience that you get in NY when you confront strangers for bad behavior.
I've been accused by a crazy person on the subway of being a rapist, but that doesn't mean that I'm oppressed for being a male of a certain color. It was just a crazy person doing crazy things.
Sure, and she said "I’m calling the cops … I’m gonna tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life." So literally weaponizing racism. I ain't saying the guy is a saint here but clearly the fact that that's the threat she would make kinda says something about our society here.
Yes, I agree the woman was out of line. But her behavior may be explained as her just describing the man in a manner she's seen on TV shows(the perp is 6', stocky, wearing flannel), because she also said something along the lines of "I'm going to tell them it is a black man in a dark shirt and a baseball cap" or something like that. Keep in mind this lady was a vocal supporter of BLM before this incident happened. And the man had already said, basically, "Put your dog on the leash or I'm going to do something you aren't going to like", which really does sound like a threat.
It's possible she decided on the spot to weaponize the mans race against him, or it's also possible she was scared out of her mind that this stranger was accosting her for a minor thing she does all the time (or, she's just off her rocker).
Anyways, my point wasn't about the lady's behavior which was clearly wrong regardless of her reasons, it was more about how the guy in that situation created a situation and then publicized it. I can't really feel sorry for the burdens put upon him, since he went out of his way to make what happened a news story, instead of, again, just chalking it up to crazy people behaving crazy (or racist, which is just another flavor of crazy). Like I've said, I've been stereotyped in NYC because of both my race and gender, but I didn't go out of my way to make a news story about it. I didn't even let it affect my day. Everyone has choices about where they spend their mental energy. Getting into a scuffle in central park because someone has their calm dog off leash near them is not where I would choose to spend mine.
>It's possible she decided on the spot to weaponize the mans race against him
I mean, that's the point I'm trying to make. The fact that she could weaponize his race is a problem to being with.
>Keep in mind this lady was a vocal supporter of BLM before this incident happened.
And mind you, I don't actually think she's some kind of virulent or bad person. It's more about recognizing some of the injustices we unfortunately live with.
> But her behavior may be explained as her just describing the man in a manner she's seen on TV shows
And you know, you're right she could be. But that just speaks to how pervasive a lot of these kinds of structures are.
But...did she weaponize his race? She called the cops and described him. The cops showed up. Both people had already left at that point. It didn't seem that Cooper was in much fear of his race being weaponized against him. It did become a talking point after the fact though.
> But that just speaks to how pervasive a lot of these kinds of structures are.
Cop dramas are popular even in largely monoracial societies that have high respect for their police, and the same tropes exist there(regarding describing suspects in certain terminology).
> But...did she weaponize his race? She called the cops and described him.
Would she have told a white man that she was going to "call the cops and tell them a white man was threatening her"?. The prevailing opinion of the situation seems to be that she wouldn't have. IIRC this was also steeped in the context of a number of other videos where people had been explicitly mentioning a black person's race for "help" in contrived/unthreatening situations that they had often started.
But that's not what she said - or rather not the whole quote. An equivalent would be like "a white man in a red t shirt and jeans", which sounds much more like a description than a weaponization of someone's race.
The context this video was steeped in has nothing to do with whether this lady decided to weaponize his race or not. They were completely unrelated events, with unrelated people, that we're not even sure the lady knew about.
It is unreasonable to expect every individual to shoulder every "other" groups genuine or perceived injustices. It just is.
This new flavor of the month which attempts to make silence on an issue a state of complicity and therefore ... a sin is something that I find deeply manipulative.
The best mitigation strategy here is to engage your vendors with private contracts instead of depending on generic terms of service (ToS) alone.
Every company I've worked with has negotiated separate agreements with providers to reduce risk. Including contracts with both AWS and Azure.
If your business gets to a certain size and you are still on the generic ToS and paying by credit card you have a big risk on your hands. You could be terminated at any point.
With a private contract you can negotiate things like a termination notice. You can put in place a grace period before things are shut off. You can implement dispute procedures that are unique to your business needs so that when you and the vendor disagree it doesn't immediately disrupt your business.
None of this is easy. But if your business absolutely depends on public cloud hosting you'd be stupid not to call up your vendor and negotiate.
If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.
I agree with this general idea, but also any bespoke service contract approved by a competent attorney will still have clauses for instant-kill under certain circumstances.
For example, no provider would provide service under a bespoke contract obligating them to knowingly host & serve illegal content (because this creates legal liability for the provider).
What is alleged about Parler would likely fit into the instant-kill provisions of even any reasonable bespoke contract.
[Edit: obviously this does not apply to providers specifically in the business of catering to high-risk customers. Stripe doesn't do gambling or porn, but other providers presumably have different pricing or risk mitigation/tolerance and therefore on can use credit cards to pay for these items.]
I think the poster was worried about slippery slope - today they come for the evil men, tomorrow they come for the unpopular men, the next day they come for me. In such a context i assume the poster isnt actually planning to host anything illegal or even distatsteful to current views, so a good contract should be fully negotiatable.
You could be "terminated at any point" regardless of what the contract says if something as bizarre as what happened last week occurs and your platform was an integral part of it. Contracts only go so far. Not everything in human affairs runs like clockwork, contracts are broken all the time.
> If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.
Isn't that what happened, they lost all of their cloud providers because the providers could not justify being part guaranteeing reliable service delivery of under moderated content?
I don't think it's possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property. OP would also need to be a fairly large player to able to negotiate favorable terms with someone like AWS to begin with.
> I don’t think it’s possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property.
Not only is it not possible in the pragmatic sense, I don’t think its legally possible, since knowingly carrying such content is quite often criminal (not just for you, but if the higher-level vendor knows about it its criminal for them), and a contract to commit a crime is usually void.
> If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.
I actually think that the providers would fall like dominoes. See what Apple and Google did to the app. Once a big company shows you the door because they worry about legal risks and reputational damage, other companies will take note and you'll have a hard time staying on.
You'll have to find a company that does it out of
idealism. Or one that is socially disconnected enough that the threats to reputation and legal risks do not apply.
If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you don't like X, then build your own X." I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. My guess is that BitChute is next.
What unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in when the cost of doing business with a company associated with white supremacists, insurrectionists, and murderers outweighs the benefits so much that other private businesses won't sell them things.
Everyone is entitled to force themselves on Apple, Google, Amazon, Twilio, Stripe, et al., right?
I find a depressing majority of the people screaming censorship at the top of their lungs believe people are not entitled to health care or free education in this country. That would be big government. People however are entitled to make you do business with them, even if it's financially damaging to you.
If just Apple suspended them for a clearly identified infringement of codified policy and then gave them steps to correct it, I wouldn't care nearly as much as multiple sectors of industry banning one company within hours of each other. It's the coordination that is terrifying. When a group of powerful people says, "You have to let me do crazy thing, or the boogieman wins," you must forgive me for having doubts. I have heard that too many times to count.
It’s not coordination if multiple companies actually agree on reality. I would think it would be worse if some companies said this were fine and other didn’t - THAT would imply that someone was being treated unfairly maybe. This is just a unanimous jury, that’s all. I think it’s rather silly to say that if, for example, someone goes on tv and says they’re planning on building nuclear bombs in their closet, you believe Apple can’t suspend them until they say that exact same thing on their platform. If you are a violent threat in the real world, then you also are on all the platforms whether you reveal that there or not.
The problem with your example is I don't turn off the bomb maker's electricity. I call the police. They take violent threats seriously. If you think someone is making a violent threat, that is what you do. They want to shut down non-violent speech. The police won't deal with that.
As for the collusion, I might believe you if this were the first time. After all, it was such an enormous, public incident. But it is not the first time and it will not be the last time either.
Imagine there's a number of farmers in a village who all stop working and go inside when a thunderstorm is imminent. Did they all coordinate to stop working at around the same time or did they individually make a judgement of what's in their best self-interest?
I think our disagreement may be that you don't believe there was a thunderstorm. You may think it was a perfectly clear day, hence their reasoning and timing are suspect, and there must have been some communication. I think there was a thunderstorm of regulatory pressure (imagine more people dying as attacks are planned on an app in the AppStore), employee pressure, reputation / brand damage that was brewing due to the actions in DC on 1/06. This tipped the calculations away from maintaining the status quo, and whatever revenue Parler may have generated (along with other factors, like outcries of bias vs. the right) was no longer enough.
The case for companies further down the supply chain is even more clear: Imagine you're Twilio and are doing cost / benefit analysis on if you should continue your relationship with Parler. Outside of public outrage, employee calls for action, etc.., the other side of the equation is Parler brings in revenue. Your calculations became much simplified due to upstream actors like AWS. Parler has 0 users now and 0 revenue now after Apple, Google and Amazon's actions. Why in the world would you take the continued costs of maintaining your relationship with them in that case? There's still no coordination, only actors making the best decision as the values of underlying variables are updated.
I might believe you if this were the first time I have seen something like this happen. After all, it was such an enormous, public incident. But it is not the first time and it will not be the last time either.
Great. The burden of proof is on you to prove coordination.
A parting analogy (since I'm awful at them but keep making them):
A group of Spanish speakers are spread across a number of gates waiting for their flight at SFO. A person stands up and yells in Spanish they have a bomb. All the Spanish speakers simultaneously duck. Was this coordination or actors acting in their best self-interest based on privileged information they share?
In whatever incident you keep referring to, that isn't this one, that also occurred (you imply there are many -- listing one should be no problem) where you suspect there was coordination across tech companies to censor, please ensure it isn't the tech companies all have similar data and drew the same conclusions.
Is it “coordination” if lots of companies have been contacted as law enforcement authorities following the connections out from the events at the Capitol and looking for assistance both in investigation and in forestalling the upcoming attacks they have said they have intelligence on being planned, and a bunch of corporate counsel have all had their attention directed to the statute on material support for terrorism at the same time and come to the same conclusion?
> When a group of powerful people says, "You have to let me do crazy thing, or the boogieman wins," you must forgive me for having doubts.
Sure, e.g.:
crazy thing = provide support to domestic terrorists
This is happening to normal folks with small businesses too. I have some friends who are being targeted by google and fb, for no good reason as they’re completely in the dark. We need to decentralize the web yesterday.
Parler obviously only existed to cater to right wing extrimsm and violent rhetoric. It's the reason they "couldn't" moderate it, as if they did there would be no reason for it to exist.
Reddit is still around even after r/thedonald and other violent / hateful subreddits were on the site and finally banned. The difference is reddit doesn't primarily exist to foster violence and extremism.
I'd expect the bar to remain in exactly the same place.
AWS has continued to host the National Enquirer, even after that publication dug deep into Jeff Bezos's personal life. Said coverage perhaps accelerated Bezos's divorce, which cost him $30 billion in stock, as part of the settlement with his ex-wife. ($30b is 2019 valuation; it's much bigger now.)
If Amazon/AWS will quietly endure a $30b+ hit to its founder's wealth, without pulling the plug, I'd say the cloud-business risk you've identified should be one of the smallest stressors in your life.
Just strategically this doesn’t make any sense as banning National Enquirer would draw 100 times more attention to the story. If Bezos wants revenge he’s surely smart enough to get it quietly.
Banning Parler also draws similar attention to it (I’ve never heard of it before today, for one), but it’s a calculated and coordinated (with Google, Apple) move to 1) take them down and 2) send a message to anyone watching. The point is the additional attention here is not unwanted and even desired.
Not to mention such a retaliation would have come at a time when Trump (highly critical of Bezos) was still very much in power and had enough support in congress to use it against him.
Excellent points I agree that this sets a dangerous precedent.
> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social
We are witnessing it now on HN. There's a huge uptick in deplatform-proof p2p mesh networks running web applications.
How do you take down a mesh network that will simply regenerate and absorb most external shocks?
I believe that the future of the internet would be fragmented into a conventional centralized server like we see with AWS dominating the market which will still serve useful purpose for most applications and another for the rest.
With Moore's law and 6G we are heading towards a hyper connected world that will facilitate the rise of robust, secure, mesh network based software that runs on our phones.
It will not be without trouble, people will find ways to poison the well. The mesh network would evolve into essentially islands where you physically travel to in order to join that private network to minimize DDOS, MITM attacks.
It would be a cyberpunkesque reality where to buy a bag of weed in a non-legal state, you simply head towards a dark alley, connect to the mesh network, find the drop, and head back to your tiny apartment occasionally poking your head out the window to take in the sights of foggy neon-lit streets with flying cars and spiky haired gender-neutral entities shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it no more!"
If you host user-generated content, you will have to decide on community standards and do your best to enforce them. This will be expensive. You are legally obligated to police things like terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and even DMCA violations. You are morally obligated to do more than just that, not just by your conscience, but also by the global zeitgeist.
Of course some absurdity lies in making believe your corporation has a conscience. You may have a conscience. But ultimately, no matter what corporate culture you instill, your corporation is a psychopath.
So your corporation will be Dexter and you do your best to operate it like it cares about people and issues and is a good citizen (since after all, it is legally a person.) If you do this poorly, it is revealed to have no soul and punished. If you do it well, you get a brand.
If covering for a psychopath whose only motivation is money and whose opinions are the amalgamation of half-formed thoughts from hundreds or thousands of different individuals isn't your idea of a good time, then maybe running a business isn't the best idea.
You can't mitigate "Getting banned for making a place to plan a coup". You can't mitigate "I want a place to allow posts advocating criminal activity".
If people were openly discussing breaking and entering houses, should that be allowed too?
Why should we tolerate publicly planning violence when we don't tolerate publicly planning other crimes?
You can mitigate anything (i dont think you should, but that is a different question). I dont think the original poster was suggesting that type of thing (more a fear of slippery slope), but for the sake of argument, if they were tor hidden services would be the obvious way to mitigate.
I think you're reading in things he did not say. He seems concerned he will be unpopular not illegal. Whether or not that is a reasonable concern is debatable... but history certainly has examples of that sort of thing.
That said, there are plenty of websites that do conspire to do illegal acts and seem to get away with it, for a time at least. (pirate bay, sci-hub are two im ok with ethically. The silk road is an example im less ok with)
Parler had no trouble getting in the App Store and AWS when they were perceived as merely espousing an unpopular opinion.
Parler was blocked only after there was clear evidence that criminal activity was being openly planned on their platform and that planning was acted on.
I'm a Freemason. Some people don't like that. They think we worship the devil (we don't) and that we control the world (were that wishing made it so but, no, we don't).
It's not out of the realm of possibility that enough people have that view and decide that I and/or my company need to be shamed, shunned, and shut down. What do I do then? I've done nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical but a group of people have decided I need to lose everything simply because I joined a fraternity.
That view in particular has already happened once, by the way. It could easily happen again.
I say all that to say this: I think OP's question is what happens when it takes less than criminal activity to get kicked off of vendors such as AWS?
> I think OP's question is what happens when it takes less than criminal activity to get kicked off of vendors such as AWS?
Right now I have my own virtual machine for my web services. There are half a dozen of similarly affordable, neutral platforms not owned or affiliated with Amazon. Even my opinion were unpopular in the US, I could host in the EU, Canada, or Sweden.
Not to put too fine a point on what you said but since lot of people here are saying, in essence, "Unless you do support storming the Capitol then you have nothing to worry about" I think it's worth highlighting with a concrete example that isn't outside the realm of possibility.
Let's say you own a company with about 100 employees. You have never taken a political stand beyond voting. Now let's imagine that two of those employees say something on their personal social media that is insensitive to some. Someone somewhere is going to figure out where those two people work and show up at your digital doorstep.
If you as the business owner don't respond in a way that people approve of then those same people are going to go to your vendors such as AWS, etc... and demand they drop you as a customer. If those vendors side with those people strongly enough, or are afraid of them enough, then you may get dropped as quickly as Parler was.
Let's be clear on a key distinction here: you're the CEO of a company providing a SaaS product with no relation or affiliation to politics whatsoever, whereas Parler was clearly enabling and encouraging illegal and seditious activity and their being shut down is completely justified. That distinction isn't clear in the minds of a great many people. Especially in today's highly charged political environment.
Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties.
For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulate. These are simple network engineering practices that can be replicated by any experienced IT staff. Sure, you might not be able to mitigate a theoretical 100+ terabit DDOS attack, but is this actually a problem in practice for your business? Even if you have ridiculous capacity, at a certain point you would still have to defer to ISPs, law enforcement and other external measures in order to restore sane operations.
Certainly, there is no perfect solution. But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.
I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers.
> But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.
Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent. And with Parler, I'd assume that that point comes sooner than later. I mean I don't know their funding situation, but I find it reasonable to assume that if they'd built a NOC first they wouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.
I'd say if they don't have the means to stand on their own and build all their own mitigations against this sort of attack, then they've bit off more than they can chew.
If their goal is to be a free-speech-above-all platform that is definitely going to piss off both infrastructure providers and the world of people who might attack them, then they better have the technical capabilities to back that up or they're going to get torn to shreds. Nobody else is required to help them in their misguided (in my opinion) endeavor.
And yes, it's possible that such a grand plan takes more resources than they actually have. Not anyone else's problem.
Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented.
Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).
100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation.
Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).
Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content.
Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your application such that you can move it to another cloud vendor.
If your content is so toxic that other cloud vendors won't accept you either, then maybe the problem isn't with the cloud vendors.
"legal" in a democracy is something that only a court can decide.
I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?
So if someone posts a plot to kill lawmakers, take over the government all while using their website to organize the insurrection, you're saying that they can't be held to ToS terms banning illegal content until a court has ruled on whether or not their insurrection is illegal?
I haven't seen the examples that AWS provided to Parler, but I trust that AWS lawyers signed off on the plan so they show a lack of moderation on Parler's part.
When there was a plot against the Michigan governor, without a single step of the plot going into action everyone was arrested and convicted and no one from either party complained about that, after being shown the evidence.
If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law.
AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.
If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law.
So you're in favor of removing moderation entirely and hosting providers given broad immunity from liability for any type of content -- feel free to plot your murder, host child porn, plan an insurrection, whatever; and it should be up to the government to track down the responsible parties.... even if those parties are untraceable or not even in the USA?
AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.
So you don't dispute that Parler violated the ToS, you're disputing the ToS themselves and that they unfairly target companies like Parler?
AWS is within their legal rights. This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear.
I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities.
Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason. If they wanted to turn a blind eye, they would have kept it anonymous.
It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.
They didn't say "98 people posted bad things so you suck", they said that Parler was lacking a system to prevent those kinds of posts and provided 98 examples.
I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities.
Why do you think that Parler should be able to moderate their users, ban them or report them to authorities, but AWS should not be allowed to do the same with their own customers?
This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear
That's the funny thing about ethics -- everyone has their own set of ethics. I think that if a site abuses the ToS of a provider and allows their platform to be used to plan an insurrection, then that provider ought to be able to terminate services.
Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason
You don't need to give ID to post on Parler. Becoming verified gives you some additional access/visiblity (for example, users can block posts from unverified users), but verification is not neccessary to post.
I was addressing OP who said the content was illegal. AWS is within their legal rights to boot anyone off because of the Terms and Conditions. This thread is about the ethical side of what they did.
If a service provider detects illegal activity taking place on their services, I assume the correct action is to contact the relevant authorities and suspend the activity until it gets straightened out. Which seems to be what has happened here. I don't know exactly what efforts were made to work with Parler in advance but I do believe there have been some, and Parler has refused to take action on their own behalf.
And it is being decided. This is how that looks. Parler has sued Amazon, and Amazon will presumably respond. Expecting Amazon to sue Parler to show that it has the right to drop it just isn't realistic. IANAL, but I can't imagine how Amazon could show that it had standing in that situation.
There is already a precedent from decades ago. The U.S. and pretty much every developed country on Earth have laws against distributing and possessing child pornography, because child pornography creates a market for exploiting children and selling the recordings online. The universal consensus is that this kind of expression needs to be restricted in the strictest possible terms, because it causes material harm to disadvantaged people. Nobody loud enough to be picked up in the media bats an eye at this reasoning for sanitizing the open Internet of such content, and online the words "illegal content" have become more or less synonymous with child pornography. Researchers looking into the subject to study its actual effects have been ostracized themselves because it's so hated. Its illegality has entered the realm of common sense at this point. So maybe there exists some extreme in terms of what you can post online such that if you disagree and insist that a certain class of content needs a platform because of reasons relating to "free speech," you will be almost universally disagreed with and vehemently ostracized. That's why the deplatforming doesn't surprise me much.
But determining what counts as inciting violence is harder to determine. You can't post images of children that were actually exploited and later declare with plausible deniability that the content of those images were not to be taken seriously, because they act as photographic evidence of a crime. But how many people that post online about hanging a politician would really act on those words if the politician was within arm's reach?
It's another question as to whether or not child pornography incites child exploitation, instead of just incentivizing it, similar to the argument that pornography incites rape. But it seems to be agreed on that humanity would be better off without it entirely, to the point of very harsh legislation. I'm wondering if this is the direction some people would want to take the spreading of misinformation and alleged incitement. I wonder how many people who distribute child pornography would change their outlook on it in the face of evidence.
Child abuse websites all get seized and their owners arrested by a court order. The websites don't just get "blocked".
Parler was not, and in all likelihood, cannot be convicted, because they were only sharing speech. The SCOTUS even ruled that anti-gay-marriage was considered free and protected speech because a good percent of the population has different opinion than the rest. Same for pro-Trump material. He had seventy two million votes just a couple of months ago. That's not the same as child abuse which is universally condemned by the entire population.
Everyone is responsible for knowing if their actions are legal or not. If you shoot someone on the street and use the defense that you thought it was legal because a court didn't tell you that it wasn't in advance, then you're going to have a bad time.
There is no evidence I have seen that Parler was doing anything illegal.
Note that my understanding is that hosting someone else’s illegal speech is not in itself illegal (if it was, the buzzfeed article would also need to be taken down).
Parler was essentially 90% MAGA shouting. There was virtually no content that was non-political and it was basically the Twitter version of the anti-Obama rumor emails my boomer dad kept forward me from 2008-2016. I had the app, checked it quite a bit while trying to understand the other side better.
I got flagged when my post was literally only this one line:
"Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?"
Either both are illegal or neither is. If anything, the many of the anti-Trump rumors have reached a point that the anti-Obama have never had.
I remember back when the Internet was the place to be open minded and avoid the real world biased or ill-informed discussions. Now its the total opposite.
Though by nature the internet is an interconnected network of large tech companies. If the club has decided to ban you, even if you build your own datacenters, you may have trouble peering into anything useful.
That means you as a Infrastructure provider can jugge what normally justice will do, but when you have the money to run your own DC you can jump over that problems? Don't you see that this is the opposite of a free society? It does not matter if it's extreme right or left, Wikileaks, Wikipedia Pirate-bay or Sci-hub.
BTW: Totally not right wing, but in a free an fair society justice should have the decision if a Service is illegal and NOT Market-providers like Amazon Google or Apple.
That means you as a Infrastructure provider can jugge what normally justice will do, but when you have the money to run your own DC you can jump over that problems?
You can't since you still need to have an upstream internet provider. (or in the case of Facebook, access to internet exchange points). If Facebook was promoting illegal content, even if they host their own servers, they'd lose their internet connectivity.
If you want entitlement to a court on the legality of content before getting cutoff from service, negotiate a contract that specifies that you can carry any legal content, and the other party must assume content is legal absent a determination by a court to the contrary.
OTOH, that’s not part of anyone’s boilerplate, and adds a lot of potential cost, so expect to pay an extremely hefty premium to get a business to agree to those terms.
Then it's a good thing it's being decided in a court.
Which is what provides checks and balances, AWS says "You violated our ToS, we're cutting you off", "Parler sues and says 'No we didn't and here's why'".
If Parler wins and can prove that they were unfairly targeted, then they can sue Amazon for damages. Which is what keeps Amazon from unfairly applying its ToS. And if they can demonstrate irreparable harm, then they can get an injunction forcing AWS to restore their services immediately rather than waiting for the court case to be decided.
But I think the best they could do is present monetary damages, which the court could decide AWS is able to pay.
Their business is already shut down - guilty until proven innocent, which is great because it really streamlines the whole justice process.
In fact this new form of justice is so efficient we can even shut down a company before the court proceedings have even started. By we I mean our corporate overlords, but they wouldn’t ever turn on us.
That's not the point, i'm ~sure that illegal stuff is removed from parler too, and if not that's the Justice who should make the rules and NOT Amazon...like you know Facebook just made those moderation's after a justice ruling.
Isn't that exactly the point? Apple removed them because: Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety. We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues
And AWS said:
“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”
If they were removing the illegal content, then why did AWS say they don't have an effective process to remove it? If they can show that they already have effective moderation, then they should win their lawsuit against AWS and quickly be back online.
>If they were removing the illegal content, then why did AWS say they don't have an effective process to remove it?
Because you get a Sympathy-Star-Sticker in your book and Amazon is the good guy who try's to safe the United States, it's more Marketing then real fear being extreme right wing.
BTW: Wanna buy a real Postage stamp from Hitler? No Problem:
Those items may be distasteful, but are they illegal? I'm not aware of a prohibition on selling Nazi memorabilia in this country.
On the other hand, inciting violence is illegal:
"by all the Patriots descending on Washington DC on #jan6 ....come armed...."
Another expletive-laced message posted the day before the riot warned: "To all our enemies high and low you want a war? Well you're asking for one...To the American people on the ground in DC today and all over this great nation, be prepared for anything."
>"by all the Patriots descending on Washington DC on #jan6 ....come armed...."
That's not violent per se, maybe the right wing is in fear of polar bears near the Capitol. Please don't get me wrong, but if you let big Marketplaces and not Justice make decisions whats right or wrong...well then that can go really fast the other way too.
Don't be silly. Courts will decide based on the meaning in context. A reasonable person may very well conclude that that quote is a call to arms. I mean I don't know how a court would interpret this specific example, but polar bears won't factor in their deliberation.
The provisions against incitement of violence in the AWS TOS are standard. If Parler sues AWS, a court will actually decide on whether Parler violated the TOS. And I'm pretty sure that the AWS decision will hold. They didn't do this lightly.
Refusing service to trolls is a standard occurrence. The justice system would be clogged immediately if it were forced to decide every TOS violation before the accused party could be banned.
That is the point though. The reasons cited by AWS for their actions were due to violent posts and content moderation. When addressed with the issue Parler said they'd use volunteers to proactively moderate violent posts, but AWS said that "nascent plant to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts".
Youtube has paid staff whose sole duty is to remove videos that violate their TOS. Parler does not. That is the distinction AWS used in there reasonings to terminate service.
That's a private rule and with Amazon as big as it is, we need to have a discussion if a TOS is even legal, if you take a blind eye on that, nothing stands in the way that big company's take over everything, if you want such a world...well then welcome to cyberpunk.
>I don't see how you could argue that a TOS is not legal when both parties signed and agreed to it.
Because it clashes often with existing law, many TOS's you can simply ignore (at least in europe) and yes even when you signed it. A TOS does not stand above existing law.
I don't know how the law currently works, but it seems reasonable to me that it should be the responsibility of the government to determine what's legal and what's not. I think Amazon would not be acting improperly if they alerted law enforcement that they suspect illegal activity and then waited for the authorities to issue an official order to take down the content (presumably based on a court order). I get that the current ToS allows Amazon to terminate the relationship unilaterally, but I don't think Amazon has to do that morally. And if they have to do that legally, I think it's fair to ask that the law be changed to allow private organizations selling a platform to not have to determine the legality of the actions of their customers. The FBI, police, and courts can do that.
It is the responsibility of the government to determine what's legal and not, there's an entire court system that does just that. And Parler is using that system by filing a suit against AWS.
But that doesn't mean that I can help someone load a body into his car, then tell police later "Well, I wasn't sure if he was legally killed or not, so I was just trying to help out, it's not my job to determine legality, I was going to come in later today and ask you guys about that. You can probably still catch him if you want to, I got his contact info: he said his name was John and his car said he lives in the Ukraine"
Ok, fair point. I think you convinced me that Amazon had a moral responsibility to terminate their relationship with anyone they believe is breaking the the law. I suppose that if the customer sues and wins they can try to recover damages.
98 examples is nothing. We dealt with an entire year of content on Facebook encouraging and inciting violence but it was okay because it was aligned ideologically with the powers that be.
I personally lost track of how many people just in my own friend's list advocating for "punching nazis", where "nazis" is a generic term for "anyone I strongly disagree with politically". Heck, I saw multiple people post videos of violence against people they consider "nazis" and celebrating it.
Personally, I'm 100% against the violence both last year and on Jan 6th, but it's amazing how egregious the double standard is between last year and Jan 6th.
> Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal
Amazon is leading Cloud yes, but it stands at 40% market share at best. Azure/GCP are pretty competent alternatives, though I am not sure if they would not do the same as AWS (probably yes)
The wider impaction to me, is that AWS is setting some precedent, and many people are not fully comfortable with it, and I think it will haunt AWS for a long time to come.
They needed 300-500 servers according to the CEO. There isn't much choice in the market when it comes to that kind of need, specially when you need to be hosted in the US because you're a political website. Imagine if they were hosted in Russia instead, they would have lost all their credibility.
Thousands of companies host 300-500 servers on a couple of racks in some data center in the Midwest.
There is not reason at all to have your content hosted in the US if you felt its legislators or IT providers aren't up to par to your idea of what free speech represents. Credibility? Yeah, seems that the crediblity issues weren't exactly about the hosting provider.
Look at their growth curve, they weren't planning from the beginning on that. I am sure they would have gone with their own DC if they did.
The legislative and judicial system didn't say anything about Parler, and that's the core of the problem. Big tech acted by themselves to appease the new king.
In this Great country, everyone is a "protected class" unless a court determines otherwise. It is their "right" to kick anyone off because of their overly broad Terms and Conditions, but they have no right to label anyone as a criminal.
You have the notion of “protected class” backwards. Everyone in this country has the right to equal protection under the law, but private companies are allowed to discriminate except in cases of protected class.
AWS can say “we don’t want Parler as a customer” but they cannot say “we don’t serve black people on our platform” as race is a protected class while being Parler is not.
No one said AWS did something illegal. Any company can do anything given how Terms and Conditions are written. Doesn't make that immune from discussion tho on their ethical side.
Of course there is! There are at least hundreds of hosting companies that can provide that as a service, and of course they can just buy their own servers. Nobody is obliged to make it easy for them to run their site.
It's not political. It's an immediate refusal of service to a client that is clearly causing commercial harm to AWS. They have no obligation to host Parler!
I think it’s a fairly transparent political move too - this is happening with the background of an ongoing investigation of these companies by congress.
Trump is a political leader, not a musical celebrity. Any moves that hinder his or his supporters speech (he had an account on Parler) is by default a political one, even if at the same time it is a "PR/business reputation move". In this case its big tech wanting to appease the new king on the hill.
Was Parler blocked because Amazon did not like it, or because Democrats do not like it, and they have full control of government, and can pass arbitrary laws e.g. to break up Amazon?
Edit: an unfairly flagged comment in reply to this says
> Why would democrats break up Amazon, when it helps them in banning the republicans? That will not happen.
That's exactly my point, this is a form of lobbying to stay on good side of the government.
It can definitely shut down companies - I used to work at a supermarket that had most of its infra in AWS. If AWS was totally nuked getting systems back up properly would probably have taken months. Even trading would have taken a few days to be fully back.
Even distribution centres operate on the cloud these days.
Cloud migration at any scale isn’t a 24 hour process.
What you've written doesn't contradict anything that I've said.
> It can only shut down a company from using its services.
> Amazon can't shut down *any* company at the push of a button
If you've chosen to use AWS, then yes, Amazon can shut that down. If your business relies critically on AWS, then yes, Amazon can shut down your business.
But they can't shut down *any* company. There are lots of companies that don't rely on AWS and Amazon can't shut them down.
How is any social media platform up? I understand why Parler was taken down, but why is this not applied to every single website? I'm sure we can find a 'conspiracy to commit violence against the US' in this single article thread
Because there is a difference between 1% of your content being illegal and you actively working o it and like 50% of your content being illegal and you telling everyone profusely you refuse to moderate?
I am not sure why people are treating this like it's new? There is already a massive list of things you can't do on AWS, for example running a spam operation, pirated software trading site, drug trading site, etc. Is it really so surprising that this list also includes running a site where violent attacks are planned?
It's not too different from how you should diversify your income as a Youtuber, especially if you make content about controversial topics. They knew that their platform was going to host controversial content, I'm honestly surprised how little redundancy they had planned for here.
Every week there's a front page story on HN to the tune of "X froze my account and won't tell me why, and their appeal process is totally opaque."
I think that to some extent, the availability of multiple providers, and the risk of getting kicked out, are the long term remedy. People will figure out how to mitigate sole-source risks. There might be a risk-reward tradeoff, i.e., the most desirable platforms from a short term profit standpoint might carry the biggest risk of getting shutdown. There will always be somebody who will let you in, at some level of service and security.
BLM caused the deaths of over 80 people and nobody deplatformed Facebook or Twitter. This is obviously about the belief that republicans are not human.
A nuance: AWS de-platformed Parler for its insufficient moderation on violence-inciting discussion, not for existence of such discussion. Not that I agree with or disagree with AWS decision, but it's worth having a nuanced discussion. A larger problem I see in the US is that many, if not all, nuanced discussions are considered evil by the left or by the right.
I think you're setting an egregiously false equivalence here. BLM didn't openly plan to kill 80 people on Facebook. And if the right-wingers had merely planned to have protests and some crimes happened to be committed at those protests, Parler wouldn't be shut down now.
At the risk of sounding snide, it appears that if your business plan is to attract the type of users that foment hate and violence ... you are in a risky business.
Anything other than that at this point is a slippery slope fallacy.
Mitigation: don't try to overthrow a democratic government. If you want to build meinspace, be prepared to secure a server in Switzerland or something.
I mean, video inciting violence in the name of the Jihad are also taken offline. This is pretty similar. The rules are fairly clear and rational and always have been, the only difference is that they are now enforced and there has been a coup attempt by white supremacists.
If you a run a business that violates the terms of service of your vendors, be prepared to be cut off. It's like if I rent an apartment and decide to make meth; I shouldn't be surprised if I get evicted.
from being one of the most privacy friendly faces of the mobile to being portrayed as privacy invader (i know messages are E2EE). but see the effects. things happen slowly.
did amazon or big tech do the right thing here? probably yes.
did they see that their influence is massive? yes. (they already do know, just stirring up their convictions stronger now)
Is there a chance in future that they might just misuse their powers without anyone knowing it? most certainly yes.
Its a real trolley problem for me as a privacy supporter.
Messages are E2EE, but by default get backed up into your Google/Apple account which are easily accessible by a search warrant, or from a prism backdoor.
It seems like disagreement in any degree can be interpreted as an incitement to violence if you have supporters who are prone to violence. While I support the right of private companies to do as they please, I think that Net Neutrality has a role to play here.
The packets I send and whom I send them to should be protected by law in the same way that the letters I send are. It is a crime to open someone else's mail without a warrant, even if that mail contains hate speech or incitement to violence. Private companies who carry mail are not excempt from this restriction, they are content-agnostic. I beleive ISPs fall firmly into this category, and that a strong case may be made for cloud hosting providers as well.
With regards to accountability, individuals are accountable for their actions. It was those people who trespassed and committed violence who should be, and it seems will be, held accountable. Those who directly (as in "go here and do this") incited them, or directly planned their actions, committed crimes as well. Those who simply failed to condone them, or who expressed sympathy with their ideals and causes, or who delivered their mail, are not responsible for the actions of those people.
>What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social?
Don't violate the terms of service of other businesses you depend on?
For all the hard-core libertarian/corporate/free market cheerleaders, isn't this the libertarian way to handle it? CorpA and CorpB have a service agreement/contract, CorpA feels like CorpB violated it, kicks them off, courts handle the aftermath?
It is easy to see where that trend is going. Little steps by little steps, GAFAs while turn the West in an environment similar to Iran or China when it comes to freedom of speech.
> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward.
This is nothing new, and the risks of running a business are the same. If your suppliers drop your business, you have to find a new supplier or you are dead. And you get to decide if you want to chase compensation in the courts (breach of contract, persecution based on protected classes such as politics or race) or not.
The suppliers who are not allowed to drop you are regulated and called utilities. AWS dropping the ban hammer here is interesting, as the end result might end up with cloud services getting regulated and defined as a utility.
Read the TOS before subscribing to a service would be a good start. And have a plan 'B' and if you plan on starting a revolution maybe have a plan 'C', 'D' and 'E' as well just in case.
You’re preaching to the choir. We’ve been having discussions on HN for years about the dangers of swapping the short-term benefits of AWS for the long-term dangers it can bring. I’m sure there’s some Nostradamus on here that predicted this exact situation with Parler. The dangers were obvious and clear to anyone who was paying attention but not everyone was paying attention. Hopefully, this gets managers and CEOs to double-check if the benefits of AWS/EWS truly outweigh the risks.
I'm not sure anyone in the (near) future will be able to guarantee you some sort of "right" that you can host/publish whatever you want and not be held accountable.
America is a country that prides itself (to an absolute ridiculous fault) on "freedom of speech" and "the free market will handle it". Well, the market handled it, didn't it. When the government fell short, the market stepped in.
The last 20 years have polarized society to the breaking point. To think that we can continue down this path and be governable, as a people...it's just not happening. The "free ride" we've enjoyed so far is basically over. Sadly, too many Americans can't tell conspiracy theories and made-up fairy-tales from reality and so now we all lose.
The coming administration already has an axe to grind with Big Tech and they will grind it. Both the Left and the Right want to see Big Tech reigned in in some way and even though the reasons might be different, the end result will be the same - host "uncomfortable" content and be censored.
I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.
Here are the AWS Service Terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/). You are responsible for understanding and following these as well as the appropriate laws (which probably require the assistance of a lawyer, which I am not, and which is probably a good idea in any case).
If a service provider refuses you service and you believe it violates the terms of service that you agreed to (that's going to be a hard row to hoe), you should have legal recourse. (Still not a lawyer, though.)
Technically, the safest approach would be to build your own geographically-distributed server facilities and get your own Autonomous System Number. Remember to take care---the legal responsibilities in individual countries differ.
The problem is that someone (Parler in this case) would have to actively build automated moderation systems or be philosophically aligned with moderation in order to fulfill the TOS in this case since its the users driving the violation. The baseline shouldn't require them build something, that seems like a burden too far. Suppose the violators were bots, doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?
If you build your entire business on a platform controlled by one entity and they decide they don't like you then you better hope none of the debt is secured because that's the end.
It's surprising and disappointing how few people get this. It's like the idea that profit requires selling things for more than they cost.
I would echo the words of that black dude in that show about drugs and cops in Baltimore:
"Diversify yo bonds, nigga" aka "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".
Apply them to your scenario if you can. Two cloud providers from different countries. Duplicate your data across both, which is good for backups anyway. Maybe try and use chaos computing to stimulate entire data centers going down on you.
Parler would've done well to encrypt their data and use some kind of distributed data storage for their usecase. Probably should've gotten servers in Russia, China, Romania or something and maybe even hosted an eep- or onion-site. They were obviously on the fringe and hosting their stuff on mainstream services would've ended badly sooner or later.
Know your usecase, know your risks, and prepare accordingly.
> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward.
Why is that? In general, a slippery slope argument is a poor one.
> Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist
I can imagine a lot of things, I'm sure you can too. But what matters is, is it likely? If, let's say, Slack got taken down by this because it was found that sound rioters used it to coordinate, I would imagine there would be an absolutely huge backlash even today with a situation as dire as the capitol riots.
I can't answer your last question, and it is a good question. But I do agree with AWS and others: the answer is not to do nothing.
Parler isn't the first app to get cut from app/play store, and it's not the first online service to be given the cold shoulder by its infrastructure providers.
If you rely on a provider, don't motivate the provider to end its relationship with you. The best mitigation here is, first, don't cater to fascists who want to tear apart the fabric of American society.
Second, if you're going to piss people off, either set up a contract that doesn't give your infrastructure provider the freedom to end its relationship with you, or do without the benefits of cloud. AWS isn't a utility, and its services are largely replaceable -- buy some computers and set up your own servers.
This problem would have been even more pronounced if running from a co-lo/non-cloud entity. Imagine getting a court-ordered shutdown or confiscation of servers for evidence etc. Frankly you would expect a "high"-profile/controversial service like Parler to have at least conceived of the possibility of a take-down from a cloud service and had a plan in place for it. Amazon had already cut ties with Gab last year [1] so this should not have been a huge surprise.
Probably to mitigate the way one mitigates against other disasters, such as natural disasters or political upheaval in a nation: have an exit plan to a partitioned cloud environment.
Since we're talking political consequences, the partitioning here would be political. Whatever nation owns the companies you do business with, find counterpart companies in nations on poor terms with those host nations and have a plan in place to ramp up infrastructure in those nations quickly (or keep it on "hot standby").
There is the risk that data migration could violate laws in the originating nation, if you're exfiltrating data that the host nation's laws don't allow to be exfiltrated.
These days you have to create 'financial incentives' just to get people to do the right thing... Every business is going to need crypto. You need to bribe people into doing the right thing to prevent them from being bribed into doing the wrong thing.
It's going to be cheaper to bribe people into doing the right thing than to bribe them into doing the wrong thing... We just have to let good people know that bribing is OK so that bad people don't have a monopoly over it... As is the case today.
Taken from The Book: "don't lend money to someone more powerful than you!". I would say this is a business failure. They should have prepared for that and they did not.
I think the mitigation is "don't build a platform to attract white supremacists banned from other sites and then watch as they use it to plan a riot in the Capitol."
Imagine a hypothetical, well-intentioned free speech focused platform, without censorship and with low moderation: it will attract those people because those people have nowhere else to go. That strategy is a non-starter. The real requirement is that we are pushing for a world of auto-moderation where robots have to approve every single thing we say online - otherwise you are not allowed to let people communicate.
You platform is indeed hypothetical because what you're asking for is essentially impossible. Low moderation just doesn't work at large scale without a substantial number of people suffering from its effects, including harrassment, threats of violence, spamming, and child pornography.
I would say that this hasn't been possible for at least the last 15 years.
Just to be clear about this specific case: There is "evidence" (Twitter posts) coming out that showed that all new users of Parler were shadowbanned by default, until their posts/content were approved by a small group of "right-think" moderators.
So while your hypothetical isn't invalid in general, it's really not what was happening here with Parler.
What they said they were trying to be was not at all what they were actually doing - a common theme in extremist spaces.
But your overall concern about the concentration and centralization of our communications is legit. There's no easy answer there.
Right, if someone wants to build a business and can't do it without making it easier for hate groups and terrorists to organise, why would any government allow the business to exist? It's fundamentally a threat to any nation for it to allow profit from enabling sedition.
This debate has been happening since Anglin and Cloudflare. There was a similar discussion when Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, and Laura Loomer isn't even allowed to order an Uber anymore.
This will become more common, all it will take will be an allegation even without proof and you'll be denied all services.
The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised.
Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.
Penalties for non performance is like the most standard thing possible in a contract. Its hardly some unfair clause like you agree not to sue ever. Hell, even without a clause specificly stating penalties, you could still probably sue for damages from breaching a contract. (Obviously in the parler case amazon probably didnt breach, but if you are negotiating your own contract it probably wouldn't allow for arbitrary termination with no notice)
Kinda interesting as a threat model, if 4chan/the wrong people can maliciously use your service enough to get it cancelled / shutdown just for the lols. I imagine a few startups aren’t building moderating content / moderation teams as part of their MVP..
President has been set long ago. From child porn, pirating websites, to al-Qaeda websites. There is nothing new about Parler being kicked off hosting sites. It took me five minutes being on the site to see calls for violence.
I find the "overnight" more shocking than terminating a contract. That they would be so callous toward a customer should make anyone think twice before signing up.
I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t have conversations beforehand. It’s also really black and white - they were proud of their lack of moderation and said it publicly. It’s not like there was a misunderstanding. Plus an org like Parler has its own lawyers. There is no way they weren’t warned of their contractual obligations by their own counsel. They just chose to take that risk.
> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).
Ah, yes, the "everything is a slippery slope" propaganda technique.
"Every cloud vendor in the world telling you off" is a particular threat model only usually encountered by literal terrorist groups, torrent sites, Sci-Hub... and now right-wing filter-bubbles.
In this case, Parler will need to either build all their own infrastructure or sign up with some really skeevy second-world hosting sites. This, interestingly, means being hosted on the same servers that host actual terrorists like Hamas; if they intend to remain a legal corporate outfit their lawyers will probably have some very strong words about using such services. Building your own infrastructure is expensive, even without the particular threat of just being Parler. Notably, net neutrality has been dead in the water ever since Trump took office, so anything high-value becomes extraordinarily expensive fast.
I doubt other sites are going to face this same problem in the future. Parler's problem is not that they're on the "wrong side" of a political debate; it's that they deliberately aided and abetted the planning of literal insurrection. Providing any sort of service to them is a huge legal risk to your enterprise now. If the bar for technical deplatforming was lowered beyond "technically legal", you'd see the market for alternative infrastructure providers open up, because those are customers that AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are no longer serving. AWS can only "get away with" deplatforming Parler specifically due to the legally risky nature of working with them.
It appears there is a business opportunity to (re)create infrastructure for use by companies/individuals that have been banned from the mainstream platforms.
I'm sure such a platform would be despised by many in the mainstream, and most mainstream companies would not consider using them because customers would boycott them if they did. But for companies whose customers are primarily on the right, the cost/benefit could be favorable. If there are enough such companies, someone could build a business that caters to them.
I don't know anything about how complex it would be to set up companies to replace AWS, Stripe, etc., but I imagine that at least some of these services will be offered (probably at higher cost, due to lower scale/efficiencies) within the next year or two.
Even my liberal friends think that the de-platforming has gone too far — and the Trump presidency hasn't even officially ended yet. Most thought that the companies would wait until after Trump was no longer President and then ban him on the grounds that his behavior was only previously allowed because he was a political figure.
The end result will probably be two separate frameworks distanced from each other where each side is free to babble away in their echo chambers as much as they want.
The two big issues that come to mind with this are DNS and SSL certs. AFIK both are really hard spaces to become a "provider", so you end up being reliant on the existing providers to do business with you. Sure there are decentralized solutions to these problems, but none of them really let you operate in the "normal" internet space...
I've been kicking around how to do something like that because you need to consider all the layers.
On the app side, you need neutral phones/devices and the app distribution to get apps out there.
On the hosting side, you need the hosting itself (cloud or colo), the DNS and registrars, the SSL to secure it, SMS or emails for verification & resets, and probably a few others.
On the financial side, you need payment processing and the banking system behind it. That's one of the hardest because even if you can handle it, your customers have to be able to send you money from their bank.
All of those (and other components) have been cut off/disrupted for various organizations in the last year or two.
I'm sure that alternate platforms will pop up. Parler is an alternate platform. However, how good will those platforms be? There are already many clouds, and a lot of them have trouble competing. Stripe also has many competitors, but few of them are that good.
I’m wondering — this has been downvoted, but the replies all seem to agree that the comment is true/reasonable. Am I misunderstanding the comments, or are there other thoughts on why this is an objectionable observation?
> You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen.
I fail to see how Parler should be expected to be responsible for the behavior of some users that share a demographic and political alignment with a group that stormed the Capitol. Was the planning for it done via Parler? Was it not Twitter where the announcement by Trump actually happened?
The bar is already low my friend. This is nothing but an excuse for big tech to wield its trust effect to shut down potential competitors.
If big tech believes that social media companies should be held accountable for its users' actions, then they should support the repeal of section 230, which would effectively have the same effect, except with the additional protections under the justice system. Why is it suddenly okay when big tech does the same without due process?
How does ISIS and other terrorist orgs host their propaganda? I see a pretty funny future where Trump supporters and ISIS work together to figure out where they can host their content.
Parler was not "designed to host right wing extremists", same way 1st amendment was not designed to provide free speech to "right wing extremists".
It was designed to provide free speech to everyone. And hypothetical right wing extremists occasionally use it same way they use telephones and supermarkets.
This looks a lot like the gun discussion. Some people believe X is just a tool, other people say because X is used for doing bad things, it should be banned. Technically this is exactly the line separating left from right, I don't think there will be a conclusion or agreement on this.
These companies are sucking up to their new democratic overloads so make sure you do not anger them.
Taliban have a twitter account, Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading, Iran's supremo calls for Jew genocide, and last but not the least China calls their Uighur detention camps as "reeducation" with zero consequences.
So yes plan if you want but cost of executing the plan might be high enough to put you out of business.
> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.
Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. Companies have always pulled away from extremist groups. You wouldn't expect Microsoft to accept a contract with ISIS, would you?
This is really not that complicated. Once you attempt to overthrow a country's government, businesses in that country don't want to work with you. This has always been true.
> Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about.
What is your definition of a terror cell? Do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google qualify as terror cells for competing for billion dollar contracts with the DoD? This is an absurd benchmark with no basis in reality.
It's really not, and has never been. A group of people literally organized on Facebook and brought guns to overtake the capitol. It's pretty cut and dry. Again, nobody would've expected Microsoft to support ISIS' tech. Businesses have always pulled away from extremist groups like this, as is their right to do.
The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant. If your stance is "Our own government is a terror cell", well obviously then our entire society is gone anyway, so why even bother discussing the ethics of tech in america at all? But obviously this stance is just hyperbole in an attempt to dismiss the validity of claiming the rioters as legitimate terrorists.
And even by your own example, when has the DoD ever stormed the capitol? Or attempted to overthrow the US government? Spoiler: they haven't. And these insanely silly attempts at implying that legitimate businesses are under the same category as fascist extremists is a joke. This tech precedent pearl clutching is such an insanely bad look it's difficult to even fathom. My assertion is simple: when you try to overthrow a country's government, companies in that country don't want to work with you. The waters are muddier with respect to overthrowing other people's governments, but the DoD has never once attempted to overthrow the US government. There has never been an AWS-supported US coup (before last week). SO the "whatabouts" aren't even relevant.
> The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant.
Only if you take a US-centric view. If you take a world-oriented view, the US military-intelligence complex is by far the most destructive terrorist organization in human history, doing things like erasing democracy in Latin America and overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran which was going to take away its oil.
What the MAGA terrorists did for 4 hours to the US Capitol, the US has been doing to the world for more than 50 years.
Parler exists solely to provide a place for right wing ideology to escape from facebook and twitter’s moderation and fact checking policies.
It has already been used as one of the primary means of coordinating an attempted coup, and it was being used to coordinate subsequent attempts on the 19th and 20th. This is the activity which was not effectively being moderated, and arguably it was the kind of activity that it was created to foment.
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”.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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".
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.
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:
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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'?
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"... 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
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!
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.)
> 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.
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'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.
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.
This is a weird case of private companies getting together and voluntarily enforcing the supremecy of the state. I'm sure it's happened before, but probably not in situations we'd like to emulate.
Insurrection is bad, but the possibility of insurrection is good. When any possibility of insurrection is crushed, for everyone now and in the future (not just insurrectionists), that sounds like it won't end well for the people.
It is hard to separate the fact that they are distancing themselves from a fascist, white-supremacist platform that was instrumental in a near-overthrow of the US government. And even if you think that's okay, this wasn't insurrection in response to oppression, it was an insurrection to overthrow an uncontested democratic result. I guess Parler is so radioactive that Amazon would rather be sued than continue to business with them. Further, there are reports Amazon gave them weeks of warnings and were ignored. AWS has rules.
I don't think the Jan 6 insurrection was OK, or even close.
My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary.
It's like fitting everyone with a shock collar and saying it will only be used against insurrectionists. The government will be a lot less worried about resistance, and the definition of "insurrectionist" is likely to move over time.
If it helps, I agree with you here. This whole situation has made me a bit uneasy. While I generally agree with the decision made by these private companies in this specific instance, it does feel like there was a domino effect where one platform banned people for inciting violence, and then the rest followed suit when there was media traction on the story. The fact that a few people have this much unchecked power is a bit scary.
Yes, these are private companies. Yes, they don't have to spend time, money or infrastructure on anyone they don't want on the platform, I understand all of this.
What I merely want to comment on is the ubiquity of these websites. Facebook, Google, Twitter and even TikTok are increasingly becoming primary means that people around the world communicate. If I'm a racist prat that spams that we should "kill all those muslamics, innit", sure I should be warned or removed from these platforms, however that significantly diminish my means of contacting other people.
I have friends that I can only really contact through Facebook. I'm trying to add them on multiple services so that I stay away from a single-point-of-failure, however some of my relatives are old and/or technologically inept, and they never check their email or SMS. While I could call them, if I were to get banned from Facebook that could reduce my ability to communicate with these people down quickly and easily to near zero.
I understand that there are actions for your consequences, I just fear that with these services becoming so commonplace (see WeChat in China, for example), being locked out of these walled gardens could have severe, real world impacts to those that the platform doesn't like.
I'm surprised that no-one's dived deeper into WHY these private companies don't want these people on the platform.
From the perspective of Amazon, Google, Apple, and many others, the overthrowing of the US Government negatively impacts their long-term goals in many areas, such as profit and employee retention. If the US Government were overthrown and Trump became dictator, Amazon would have to move a ton of customer data to other countries because America would be the new China.
It's crazy that it took a coup attempt to open their eyes to this risk. The fact that they didn't take action sooner suggests that a lot of C-level folks throughout the tech world have been pretty complacent in regards to government stability.
That's a really fair point, and it's a really hard problem.
In this case, you had people trying to overthrow a democratic vote. So they are literally the enemies of a free society. But the same laws and infrastructure to prevent this can be misused.
That's the hard stop. You can't have a governmental system that is fault tolerant to malicious misrule. You need to apply laws or laws lose power, and you need to trust those carrying out governing to obey some norms.
Trust isn't about blind, 100% trust. You can trust democracy to work without fitting yourself with a shock collar controlled by the pooular vote. You can trust government officials without assigning them blanket power of attorney.
I am just saying that there are limits to trust. And when someone you 99.9% trust tries to convince you to give them 100% trust, you should pause.
> My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary.
Don’t think this is even vaguely true. We know that one of the primary tools of activists (or insurrectionists / terrorists depending on your point of view) in other countries are WhatsApp groups, and other encrypted chat platforms.
If one is organising a serious insurrection, then I believe one does not normally broadcast their plans to the enemy. That’s kinda strikes me as op-sec 101.
Only in a free and open society could you possibly hope to organise an insurrection in public, on broadcast platforms, without direct and immediate consequences brought down by the state. We must be so pampered to believe that the right to organise in public is a requirement insurrection.
We can theorize and rationalize all day. But I just get a feeling this is something we will look back on as a red flag that warned us of a bad outcome.
A few hundred people stalled the counting of electoral votes for literally a few HOURS. Hardly a "near-overthrow" of anything other than Trump himself.
That's only because house and senate members were successfully evacuated - if they weren't, what exactly did you think the rioters were going to do? What do you think they had zip ties for? What was the gallows erected outside for?
That's giving WAY too much credit. The US Government is not a room or a building. A coup is considered successful if it holds power for 7 days; these jokers didn't hold power for 7 seconds.
> insurrection to overthrow an uncontested democratic result.
This is overstating from a certain point of view. It was contested in court (and soundly affirmed). Bear with me for a moment - if what Trump was saying about the election were true, we would want this kind of reaction. I think we can all agree that rigged elections are an affront to democracy. It's just that this election wasn't rigged, as affirmed by courts many times, so the mob wasn't acting righteously. This train of thought has some nuance so I'm not going to be surprised when some folks misinterpret it.
There are two things to think about:
1) how have we let misinformation get so bad that it ultimately forms insurrection? We've got Snopes, disclaimers on social media, etc - is deplatforming the only thing left to counter fake news that calls people to violent action?
2) what are the implications of giving social media & hosting platforms the power to arbitrate what's fake news and what's not? This is incredible power and without checks & balances it is probably too much for individual private companies to hold the keys.
> if what Trump was saying about the election were true, we would want this kind of reaction.
This is an counterfactual to consider. Indeed, we should defend the integrity of the democratic system at almost any cost. However, facts matter.
Trump's statements about the election were not, in fact, true. They are lies. The votes have been counted, recounted and certified. The courts have been consulted. The media has investigated. Election observers from both campaigns watched the whole thing.
Some of the insurrectionists may have thought they were defending democracy, but that doesn't change the fact that they were actually attacking the very democracy they claimed to defend.
> how have we let misinformation get so bad that it ultimately forms insurrection?
Catastrophically bad leadership. While the individual insurrectionists must fact justice, the leaders who intentionally deluded and incited them must also be held accountable. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance, a lawful democracy cannot tolerate democratically-elected leaders who use their authority to attack the core mechanisms of democracy.
It happens all the time in the banking arena. Banks are frequently used to deny market access to businesses that are undesirable to the federal government but are otherwise legal businesses.
Porn type content also tends to have trouble with many services like payment processors. A simple example is paypal doesn't support most porn related content. I also recall a video game company that makes weirder porn (stuff like hypnosis hentai) saying hypnosis is a trigger for some payment processors so they've had to avoid that terminology.
> private companies getting together and voluntarily enforcing the supremecy of the state
Your choice of words implies some sort of conspiracy here. The response has been widespread and quite frankly should be unsurprising. No coordination is necessary. Any sane CEO running a profit driven organization will not tolerate a group of people whose words of violence against the state cross beyond hyperbole and words and into actual action. If more actions take place and are more successful and these companies decided to stick their heads in the sand then the existence of these companies would be under threat.
> This is a weird case of private companies getting together and voluntarily enforcing the supremecy of the state.
It's maybe weirder than that, because of the involvement of the president. Even if you believe the president was entirely uninvolved and unaware, the purpose of the insurrection was to keep a leader in power, not remove one. The actions of tech companies are both a challenge to the supremacy of the (current administration of the) state and a way of enforcing the supremacy of the state.
There was the case of PornHub/MindGeek and MC/Visa. PH was hosting a ton of videos which showed exposed minors (likely most of it was "revenge porn") and other unsavory content. It wasn't until Visa/MC decided to halt processing of all PH transactions that PH decided to haphazardly delete ALL non-partnered content on the platform.
This all happened in less than a week of Visa announcing it.
I think the outcome was "good" but the damage had already been done as these videos are likely residing on servers that are not owned or controlled by PH. Additionally, there's probably a shit ton of non-partnered content that was innocuous.
In just a matter of 10 days, a billion dollar corporation deleted a significant amount of their content without even having to step into a court room.
To be honest, it's kind of scary. What if you are just on the wrong side of a person at XYZ company? Maybe a cloud executive wants Y company to succeed because he or she has significant capital investment in it, and X competing company is about to roll out their product to the masses. Executive then writes up a scathing internal report by X company to ban them from using their products, or even worse "leaks" false information about X company to get them tied up in a public opinion battle.
It's amusing that people are simultaneously complaining that tech companies are censoring the president of the US and "enforcing the supremacy of the state" at the same time.
True "deep state" conspiracy material. After four years of running the country, they are still underdogs.
It's too out in the open to call it a conspiracy. Amazon,Google, Amazon and Apple (twitter, facebook) are putting out press releases that say this is what they are doing.
They are enforcing the supremacy of the state for the next government. If he was going back as president these companies would not be making these press releases.
“The only thing that keeps leaders in check is the knowledge the population can rise up against them. By eliminating the Bowman’s Wolves ability to string you up by your own intestines, you’ve removed them from a very important part of the political process.”
But what if you want to change who's in power but you don't have a majority?
That's the fundamental problem facing Trump voters. How do they replace this slapdash democracy with one where they can determine who's votes actually count.
Under our current system, they can only throw out a bunch of roadblocks to make it difficult. The new "Trumpocracy" would likely make voter discrimination a little more structured.
Fun fact: I spoke with two of my good buddies one up high Amazon another at Twitter. The fellow from twitter told me they will never suspend Trump because despite what he says, Twitter makes few million dollars daily (!!) off of his feed. The reason you see him being booted out is because my buddy from Amazon told me they may be ready to drop Twitter as a client altogether (mostly because of Trump) and the way their contract is designed is that Twitter would still be up for tens of millions of (now unfulfilled) hosting contract fees. And that something they won’t digest. So really the decision to boot Trump had nothing to do with freedom of speech - its AWS who thretened to withdraw, and Twitter folks did some simple math and realized the loss from AWS contract would cost more than gains from RealDonaldTrump feed.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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]
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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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".
> 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).
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.
> 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".
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)
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.
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.")
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
Who decided that Twitter does a "good enough job" at moderation? The platform was used to organize riots all summer, unchecked. I can find MAGA insurrectionists talking about violence with a simple search right now.
Was Parler shut down simply because they don't moderate at all? Signal doesn't moderate at all, either. Because they can't. It's by design. Why don't we go after Signal? Out of sight, out of mind? Is that it?
This needs to happen. Parler is not a "social network" in the same way Twitter, Facebook or Reddit are. It is a radicalisation platform hiding behind a Silicon Valley style startup veneer.
I signed up for Parler 6 weeks ago and what I have seen from the platform is frightening. It isn't dumb memes and gifs but hardcore alt-right propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Within hours of commenting on posts I was contacted about joining groups of "like minded patriots" (their actual words). This lead to Telegram and Discord servers dedicated to "their cause". These places are highly organised. Unique URLs with multiple 'decoy and delay' steps to find and remove people from sharing links with authorities for example.
They have detailed (probably some of the best tbh) guides on signing up for secure services like Protonmail for email, installing Tor and Tails to access Onion services (this leads to a whole other world of horrors), how to use Bitcoin to purchase what are essentially burner SIM cards and phones to sign up to other services, and advice on how to recruit your friends and family such as conversation topics and “gotcha” responses, manipulated media to share, psychological and emotional manipulation techniques, etc.
The techniques used are no different to what we have seen from groups like ISIS/ISIL over the past decade.
I support free speech but this goes beyond that IMHO. This isn't strongly disagreeing with government policies but clearly talking about murdering those they believe are wrong. I have seen people seriously talking about kidnapping and murdering politicians. Posting photos of their weapons. Sharing detailed instructions on homemade chemical weapons and IEDs from people who clearly have military knowledge of such things.
When ISIS was releasing daily videos of horrific murders everyone called for such recruitment platforms to be shut down. It wasn't a matter of free speech then and it isn't now. The only difference is that these are (mostly) white American and European people not brown people from the middle east. The message and methodologies used are the same though.
Parler is without question a platform for radicalisation and recruitment for "western jihad" as I have seen people un-ironically use. It needs to go and I fully support Amazon, Apple, Google and whoever else in shutting them down.
Note: I posted this yesterday in the mega thread so my apologies for repeating myself but I feel quite strongly about this and the mega thread was indeed mega so my post was most likely lost in the huge number of comments.
>Parler is not a "social network" in the same way Twitter, Facebook or Reddit are. It is a radicalisation platform hiding behind a Silicon Valley style startup veneer.
Actually, that's exactly how I'd describe modern reddit, and I guess Twitter too.
The difference, in my opinion, is that reddit, etc are quite active in removing such "communities" once they are aware of them and they become a problem.
Parler does not. In fact, to me, it seems they take delight in it and promote it under the guise of "free speech".
So while reddit and co undoubtedly have similar problems they at least take action albeit a lot later than I think they should.
No, I meant almost the entirety of reddit nowadays is attempting to radicalize people to the left. Just look at the vitriol you see toward conservatives in the average /r/politics thread.
I agree places like /r/politics and /r/conservative are vitriolic towards each other but I haven't seen open death threats that are not removed swiftly and the user banned.
I don't agree that /r/politics attempts to "radicalize" people though. At least nothing I have ever seen in my 14 years on reddit I would classify as radicalization. Do you have any examples you can link to?
I've been a Parler user for multiple months and have never seen any of the activity like the above poster is claiming. While I occasionally read the far-right stuff for fun (and the far-left stuff on Twitter), my interests are mostly in tech. Never once has someone tried to "recruit" me for any of the above.
I can only assume this nonsense is trolling/preaching to the choir, etc.
I take some basic precautions such as not using any real information about myself and never using Parler on an identifiable device such as a phone. I also only ever accessed Parler, etc from a generic Windows VM and making use of Tor or a VPN service. Likely not enough to protect myself from serious investigation but I can't say I am at all concerned.
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.
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.
Most providers also don't allow ISIS on their platforms. Another known terror-sponsoring organization. For a long time now. And yet I don't see people tying themselves into free speech knots over ISIS getting deplatformed. I wonder why that is?
You can't compare a group that kills thousands of people with a group that has it's own ideas. You could claim it is a dangerous one but you'll find many other accepted groups that would fall under the same category given the right perspective.
Freedom of speech is not about hearing the ideas you like but the ones you dislike.
ISIS used to publish videos of them beheading people as propaganda to recruit young people for the jihad. They'd also claim terrorists attacks and encourage their supporters to do the same. So, what is your point?
I can't say for sure, but I think the point is to highlight some hypocrisy of the "free speech" argument.
That is, if you claim censoring ISIS speech is okay but not Parler speech, then you must also be claiming that there is a line somewhere between the two that is being crossed. You are therefore acknowledging a limit to free speech. But that isn't the point yet.
The point is that you (not necessary you) are drawing a line at all. It's that there is a line. And if there exists a limit to free speech, it means someone has to decide where that limit is placed. We are almost to the point.
And if someone gets to decide where the limit to free speech is placed, who gets to make that decision and why? Clearly you have put that line between ISIS and Parler according to your own belief system (or maybe not, you haven't explicitly denoted anything). But the point is that there exists a reason to limit free speech. I promise the point is coming.
If there exists reasons to limit free speech then we have a problem. You see, you and I may agree ISIS should be de-platformed, but other people may believe other things and therefore have other reasons. The point is that there is no such thing as "free speech". That everyone has their reasons. And that the people shouting "free speech" often mean "free speech within the thresholds that I am comfortable". That nobody actually, truly, deep-down believes in "free speech".
The point is that "free speech" is a myth.
So quit wasting your time calling out Amazon for infringing on something that doesn't exist (again, not necessarily you).
Because ISIS leaders and the organization have been convicted by courts all over the world. Parler and the other conservatives who got banned were not convicted by any court within or even outside the United States. People are mad because big tech is shutting things down without any due process simply to appease the new emperor in power.
Big tech made a decision that the hell with the judicial system, Democrats now have the executive and the senate, we have to bend the knee and kiss the ring to keep our section 230 and don't get taxed into oblivion.
If I dont have to wait for a child porn conviction to ban you from my site for posting 'illegal' content. I will do it immediately and sever all contracts.
Its funny how we have the freedom of association right up to the moment it affects those supporting fascism, then all of a sudden a different set of laws matter.
If they're doing illegal things, an American court should decide that and shut them down with criminal charges. Otherwise, they shouldn't be shutdown. That's how it works in all democracies I know of.
Where are US opposition groups supposed to host their content now? Russia or China, the same way groups in those countries host their content in the US?
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.
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.
So Facebook admits it incited violence in Myanmar but is still online but parler incites violence in America and is taken down? Who's making these rules?
I don't know why but I find it vey difficult to sympathize with parler. as a developer I was about to shun AWS because of their role as a infrastructure provider of the web, but even before the news came out and it was just rumors that employees were pushing for the removal. people on the platforms were calling for the bombing of server locations and the killing of the employees. At what point do we say its enough?
Our critical communications infrastructure is in danger. Are there any serious companies or organizations out there countering this wave of censorship?
Politics aside. Amazon shouldn't be signing up to a private service monitoring posts and removing a site because a good enough moderation system wasn't in place?
They sell disk space and bandwidth and possiblity ram. If all that Amazon is hosting is an encripted blobs I can't see how they would know what internal content they provide without spying (making an account/recording posts).
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.
The worst thing about Parler is the bots. I browsed it a bit out of curiosity, a huge portion of the content is obvious bot. I looked into this further, and apparently Parler doesn’t bother blocking or banning bots unless the FBI or police contact them.
Parler really is just a haven for nonsense and conspiracy theories. My finger in the wind guess is 40-60% bots.
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?
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.
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]
Could a Muslim owned cloud service drop a gay customer, say an app like Grindr? I recall a case about a baker and a gay couple or something.
Is this a civil matter or criminal?
I grew up in a different era seriously none of this makes sense. Which groups are legally allowed to cancel the others? Where is that set forth in law?
In the US? Protected classes. This is the idea that some discrimination is so pervasive and damaging that it needs protection from the law, despite the fact that that directly conflicts with the idea that businesses should be able to be run as the owner likes. The harm of the latter is small compared to the harm of allowing the former, so the argument goes (and which I agree with, not that that matters to the answer).
If I decide my soup shop won't serve you because you ask a question or put your money on the counter instead of handing it to me, no problem, questions askers are not a protected class. You can trivially go to the restaurant next door and get served. If I decide I won't serve soup to anyone in a same sex relationship, someone of Jewish descent, women, or whatever, then there are legal protections in place that prohibit me from doing that.
I am not a lawyer, but this goes back before you were born. There was the civil Rights act of 1866 which banned discrimination due to race or color. The Civil Rights act of 1964 added sex, national origin, religion. In 1967 age discrimination was added, and in '73 disability. ADA was introduced in 1990, and that was expanded further in 2008. So now, for example, a business is required to make reasonable accommodations for a disability. But they don't have to hire you if you scream obscenities, or wear yellow shirts, or I dunno, are vocally planning to murder a politician or destroy a Government. None of those are protected classes. No requirement to do business with them or to hire them, or to keep them in your employ.
Literally any company can drop any user. It’s in their terms of service. Of course there is a lot of calculation around dropping a high profile user, or a large class of users. It could result in social upheaval and backlash if they do or do not drop someone.
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.
Something interesting here is that not only the Parler app was pulled... the _entire_ parlor.com domain and website registration is non-existent at the moment. It's like a black hole:
Dreamhost is/was their domain name registrar- and even though Dreamhost didn't host Parler's services, they were taking massive heat on Twitter over it.
So I guess at some point, Dreamhost as a registrar silently deleted them. Now, even if Parler wanted to move somewhere, they would have to regain control of their domain from Dreamhost.
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act."
Also Robert Jackson:
"The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."
Here is what I dont understand, is Parler violating Amazon's TOS or its users? Suppose that some of the users are bots, doesn't that mean that in order to fulfill amazon's TOS Parler would have to actively build something (moderation systems) to keep up with the bots? Doesn't this make any service that can't do this collateral damage? What if people built bot systems good enough to sidestep twitter (speaking in code for example, using a cypher) and levelled them at twitter, etc. would the same thing happen?
There is a risk of radicalization of masses. And banning people will not help with reversing it. They will find another way to communicate and the tech giants will no longer be able to challenge the flawed message. And the ideas should be challenged, especially the bad ones. Why the tech giants act this way and decrease their reach/base? It would be naive to think it is out of a good will. I suspect they want to show the new government that there is no need to regulate them, because they can do it themselves.
I made an account on Parler last week, just to see. It is a cesspool of hate and delusion. I ran into some potentially illegal materials I wish to unsee, but cannot, encountered as I perused the streams chosen for me. The amount of crazy I saw made me fear posting anything, much less leaving replies that included reality, but failed to conform to their indoctrination.
This has serious implications for any business thinking about hosting their applications on Amazon or other providers.
I used to be a big proponent of doing this on AWS or Azure but with these actions there are suddenly real risks to consider.
The precedent has been set, and it will now be used to force down other businesses, when the time is right and there is a clear viable target for outrage.
I'm really sad to see people on this thread acting this way. You Americans have some real issues to work out as one people I'm not sure isolating into walled gardens is really the best path forward.
I'm sad to say I'm worried about the state of your country. I hope you come together without the aid of an 'external enemy'
So is it legal to boot out a store from a plaza, selling offensive items?
I think Amazon is in a very difficult position, do or don't, it is doomed. But I guess it will have to make a call on this one, to avoid looking like standing on the wrong side by the coming administration.
From the other side of the coin, I see that technology can be controlled if certain events happened. I remember the time when people discuss if artificial intelligence will take control of human, and we can't do anything to stop.
My colleagues laughed at me when I told them my next billion dollar startup would be running on racks of Rasberry Pis in my garage instead of the big cloud players.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Here's what I've seen when the powers-that-be disrupt online communities... most people who were "casuals" stop paying attention when the convenient options (Twitter, Parler) disappear, and just go on with their life, watching Netflix or football instead. But the truly hardcore get pushed underground into a smaller and more virulent community (which Parler was to Twitter, and which something will be to Parler).
I expect Trumpism to take a hit as a political movement but thrive as an extremist movement as a consequence of this "shunning." Expect fewer 2016 elections and more January 6th terrorism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well the 90s vision of a free and open internet are dead. We now have big tech censored speech where anything the right of bernie sanders is targeted for removal and any platforms that are created to combat this are systemically attacked at the infrastructure level. Do people not understand WHY people were at the capitol? It's because of this bullshit.
Many of the questions here are of the form “Can a private business drop a customer?” And the answer is a resounding YES and has nothing to do with constitutional free speech. A company refusing to provide service to a customer is NOT constitutional free speech censorship.
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.
Trump/parler is being de-platformed for "inciting violence" but what exactly does that mean?
Obvious case: "Go and hurt that person"
Trump's case: "The election was rigged"
Trump created a (wrong)conspiracy theory that was believed by enough (radical)people to cause real violence and death. I don't __think__ he ever actually said "Storm the capital and break down the doors".
So if I say on Twitter that Google is hiding Elvis in their Mountain View office and people break down the doors of Google to go see, did I just insight violence? If any idea leads to violence, should the author of the idea pay the price for the violence created by others?
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...
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.
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.
I am also quesitioning if shutting down Parler servers is a pure business decision.
90% of Americans don't know what AWS servers are so I don't think they would care
if AWS kept running them or not.
On the other site 70 millions Trump voters will certainly take notice.
I am one of them and a big fan of AWS but I am going to redirect my buying
to other online companies as much as possible.
I am also questioning if shutting down Parler servers is a pure business decision.
90% of Americans don't know what AWS servers are so I don't think they would care if AWS kept running them or not.
On the other site 70 millions Trump voters will certainly take notice when they are ready to place their next Amazon order.
I think what I've learned this week is that there's an economic failure mode that has societal harm. It goes something like this:
1. Some people want to share toxic harmful material with the world. Sharing that has real material hosting and serving costs that those individuals would rather not pay.
2. Platform hosts like AWS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. will host material for people. They pay for that by also showing users ads and the advertisers fund the company.
3. Advertisers don't want their brand associated with toxic content. But when a platform host has a sufficient diversity of good and bad content, the brand association is with the platform itself, which is neutral, and not the content it is shown next to, which may be toxic.
The end result is that advertisers end up inadvertently funding the dissemination of toxic content. Extremists are essentially free riding, sort of like riding on the back of one of those rolling billboard cars and tossing out pamphlets.
This happens because the host is essentially image laundering the toxic content. When a host isn't diverse enough to accomplish this, you can see that advertisers won't touch it. That's why Parler is toast. Advertisers do not want to be funding this stuff but the hosts they use are too much of a black box to give them much control.
So why do hosts end up accepting this toxic content? Is the relationship between host and toxic content authors parasitic or symbiotic? Cynics believe the hosts deliberately allow this because toxic content drives engagement and increases advertising revenue. A charitable perspective is that hosts would rather not be free riders for toxic content, but the problem is that separating the wolves and the sheep is too difficult (where "difficult" involves some combination of social, technological, and financial costs).
What I haven't seen is anyone suggest that it is an emergent property of financial incentives. The primary way these hosts compete in the marketplace is through network effects and economy of scale. Social media host success is dominated by network effects. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are, and people go where the other people are. I don't think there is any natural stable equilibrium that leads to a large number of small thriving social media companies.
Economies of scale exacerbate that. Users don't like viewing ads so the less ads a host shows, the more popular it becomes. This puts heavy competitive pressure on them to minimize costs which relies on all of the economies of scale that software and tech offers.
The end result, I think is a consolidation onto a few hosts which in turn host so much of everything that they end up with a neutral brand that advertisers can use even though there is a mixture of toxic content in there. I don't think anyone intended this to happen.
But the good news is that if we do create regulation to break up tech monopolies and push against the natural forces of network effects and economies of scale, we may also see a natural decline of toxic content free riders. Because as these hosts get smaller, they're less able to be used as image launderers.
The rise of the Authoritarian left is upon. Brace for patriot act 2.0. Being banned from banking, flights, job opportunities, and society based on political association.
Watch the crackdown as Biden is a deeply problematic and corrupt individual, that won an election that increasingly
people will question as taxes are raised on the productive, and covid rules are used to justify taking away rights.
"if you don't want your website shutdown for terrorism, you should probably moderate your site for terrorism" seems like a pretty clear and concise terms of use.
To all the HN users defending Parler by drawing false equivalencies to BLM, the NYTimes, Saudi Arabia, and China, without acknowledging the events of The last few months: shame on you.
Parler and it’s moderator team , as well as Donald Trump, has supported COVID denial, the election fraud conspiracy, and Q conspiracy, for over a year. This was a concentrated effort to brain wash American conservatives to completely distrust and disassemble the institutions of American democracy. I don’t know if you are from other countries and do not realize the context and severity of these actions, or if you’re troll accounts wishing to sow the same discord on HN. It won’t work.
This isn’t a first amendment of free speech issue. This is a lifesaving step for the public commons.
You can still have conservative values. Nobody got banned for supporting lower taxes, states rights, or being anti-abortion. You can promote and discuss those on Twitter Facebook and AWS on any day of the week. What you cannot do is organize thousands of individuals to commit violent acts, or call for and attempt the murder of rightfully elected public officials not just on January 6 - but again on Inauguration Day. That is why this disgusting content, on the same level of snuff porn and child porn, had to be purged from the internet.
seriously. millions of conservatives are still on twitter/fb with no censorship. some of the biggest conservative "celebs" built their audiences on twitter and benefit from the outrage machine. it's so hilariously out of touch and ironic to me that they are criticizing these actions uncensored and then trying to make slippery slope arguments or play the persecuted minority. what happened to parler is the exception, not the rule.
They are in twitter as long as they don't step the line. Try to misgender someone in twitter to see what happens. The idea of misgender comes from a very specific political tribe in certain western countries.
Just one remark about your COVID denial president. He got the vaccine way faster then Europe. Especially Germany where the vaccine was developed as well. Not sure how many would be saved if Germany ordered in the same way.
feels like the US people is asking for ruler like CCP, is it all what you want? Parler is likely not innocent, but why it's Amazon to take them down? Is that mean all these big companies can shutdown any customers on their platforms for some reasons they believed are right, but what if they use it to shutdown competitions?
This only proves that the Big Tech companies need to be regulated and that Section 230 should be repealed. Break their power! Parler should sue them for billions. The federal gov't should also sue them for antitrust violations.
You seem to be confused. Repealing Section 230 would vastly increase the amount of moderation on social media platforms, because they would be directly liable for anything posted there.
Also, the US has free enterprise. Businesses are free to choose who or what they do or don't do business with. Parler can sue all they want, but its a waste of their time and money.
Repealing Section 230 would have no impact on this. In fact, if Section 230 was repealed than Parler would be exposed to liability for the violent coup content users posted on it and be sued.
> In fact, if Section 230 was repealed than Parler would be exposed to liability for the violent coup content users posted on it and be sued.
Parler may still be liable for the violent coup content; liability for that isn’t exclusively, or even mostly, the kind of “civil liability dependent on status as a publisher” that Section 230 provides immunity from.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=5