Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

Why would anybody think that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft are against censorship? Recent events have demonstrated that they love them some censorship, when they do it. Witness the case of gab.ai - Google was happy to pull their app from the Play store. Microsoft didn't mind at all threatening to shut down their Azure account unless they censored a post. The Azure case is particularly amazing. I can't believe the tech press isn't picking up on a supposed cloud provider threatening to shut down someone's account unless they make their website behave in a particular way.

I will say I haven't heard of Amazon censoring anything yet, at least not at a level I would consider massively inappropriate for a cloud services provider. Not selling something on their normal store is one thing, but pulling the plug on an AWS account for website behavior would be something entirely different.

View on HN

AWS has absolutely taken down websites because they didn't like what was on them, just recently, in fact:

https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gu...

I'm a journalist and have seen a screencap of the takedown that Amazon issued to the Firearms Policy Coalition, which started and maintains the censored site (CodeIsFreeSpeech.com). The takedown erroneously cited a temporary restraining order issued against an entirely different site (defcad.com) as the reason for the sudden, no-warning booting of the site from AWS.

And as you mentioned, Azure just now threatened to pull Gab.ai off its platform over a pair of anti-Semitic posts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-an...

So these infrastructure providers are absolutely involved in censorship right now.

I wrote about this last year:

https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

It's easy to side with CloudFlair when they go against a site like The Daily Stormer (Which is so out there it might just fall into Poe's Law).

The fact is that most decent hosting is only available in a handful of industries. Even the CF CEO has had misgivings of his decision and it gets us into a really questionable space.

Platforms should be free to do what they want right? They should be able to deny customers .. just like an airplane company should be allowed to keep people who crazy political opinions from boarding plans right? .. oh and black people too. Oh wait..what?

The freedom of speech in the US is pretty limited to government censorship. But we don't let businesses do whatever they want. They can't keep a certain ethnic group from eating at their restaurant, and in many states they can't choose if their venue allows smoking. The big question is, does speech need to fit into this same framework?

With the recent child protection act that gutted craigslist and took down backpage (an act that is leading to more violence against sex workers in the US and an act that the EFF and ACLU are actively fighting as being unconstitutional), we see the US government holding content hosting companies liable for the criminal actions of their user base. That is disturbing and already a form of government control over what customers a business is allowed to have.

It'd be one thing if censored sites could just go to another provider, but there are only a couple of big providers and their mass has the ability to crush anything they find questionable.

It's actually worse than there being only a couple of big providers.

The problem is that the same sort of people who are trying to shut down sites through legal pressure tactics against Amazon, Google etc are absolutely happy to use illegal tactics too. In particular once sites are booted off large providers onto smaller ones or self hosted sites, that's when the DDoS attacks start. Infowars already saw one, for instance. How many firms can sink large DDoS attacks without needing to kick out the target? Not many.

If a pressure group or activist employee base can get content off CloudFlare, Google, Amazon and Microsoft then DDoS-wielding ideological zealots will do the rest and then the site is gone for good.

Where does speech go then?

It's a very dangerous game for the people at these content platforms to play. I don't see Republicans sitting back doing nothing as their worldview and voter base is systematically wiped off the internet. Legislation seems likely.

> Where does speech go then?

Federated / p2p systems like Mastodon? Non-Web-proper sites based on Dat and IPFS?

If I were an adviser to the conspiracy theorists' insidious world government, I would suggest that pressure on non-consenting opinions be put carefully, to securely remove them form the normal mass Web, but not too strong as to push the normal users away from the (controlled) Web, to harder-to-control media. One way to achieve this is to allow some mild fringe content, and actively demonize any serious non-consenters, so that they'd look way off the chart to general public, thus "worthy" of being censored out.

Dat/IPFS are peer to peer protocols. There is nothing that makes them DDoS resistant, you can just locate each peer rehosting content and blast each one off the net.

But more to the point, being forced onto Dat or IPFS is equivalent to being erased, given that nobody would know how to find or access the new location (Google doesn't index such net spaces).

Finding and blasting every peer is a bit harder, especially since pieces of content are encrypted on peer nodes, AFAICT. It's not any easier than to blast every peer torrenting chinks of a particular file (which, AFAICT, is still unheard of).

> being forced onto Dat or IPFS is equivalent to being erased

Yes, for now it is! It's a wild frontier without amenities for a normal netizen, such as a decent search engine. So the point of censorship is to force every important non-consenter to that wilderness without having enough other people to go there and civilize it, as they civilized the web, the online music access, etc.

I agree. I see this all the time when otherwise reasonable people spout "oh well, Google/FB/Twitter are private companies so free speech argument does not apply to them and that racists/nazis etc aren't owed anything by social media platforms."

This is based on a slippery slope argument: if the major platforms can ban speech inciting violence against Jews and African-Americans, then what's to stop them from doing it for other classes of speech? The answer is that the public outcry for kicking off other kinds of users is likely to be more pronounced and more justified. I'm not shedding any tears for the Daily Stormer or Gab, and I don't view them as canaries in the coal mine.

Relying on public outcry to defend free speech is by definition guaranteed not to work, because the only speech that needs protecting is unpopular speech.

Is it? The public outcry against what these firms are doing is pretty loud. Members of Congress have expressed concern. Even Vox has published stories about Twitter suppressing content from conservative politicians (but no democrats). It has no effect.

Moreover how do you measure "public outcry"? The very point of censorship is to stop public outcry. If the media aren't writing stories and anyone who expresses concern is deemed to be supporting hate speech and banned, then it will look a lot like nobody cares even if many people do.

Step 1 is to normalize censorship for racists. Step 2 is to redefine racism until it captures most of your political opponents, up to and including "supports free speech" as a racist viewpoint.

Interesting, thanks! I hadn't heard of that.

The post is about resilience to censorship from outside organizations. That is, it's about governments not being able to selectively block content from service providers.

What you're talking about is the service providers themselves deciding what form of speech is allowed on platforms they own. Some may feel that it's inappropriate for Microsoft not extend their platform to white supremacists. Others may think it's inappropriate for service providers not to provide extend their platform to ISIS or Al Qaeda. You may feel that service providers should provide a voice to any possible opinion, but the organizations actually providing the service don't feel this way.

I'm a supporter of extremely strong free speech protection, but this doesn't seem entirely black and white to me.

AWS is a private hosting company, and they may be exposed to legal or authority action based on what their clients host. It seems a lot like the Facebook arguments to me.

If you want to obligate them to support free speech, I think they need to be regulated as carriers otherwise it's not a reasonable standard to hold a private entity to. At least there is more competition in the hosting space than there is for Facebook.

Maybe this is an argument for regulation, but I don't think it's an argument for finger wagging. Either there is some sort of enforcement, or we acknowledge there are alternatives.

> Recent events have demonstrated that they love them some censorship, when they do it.

I'm not sure that I would conflate running a business with loving censorship.

> I can't believe the tech press isn't picking up on a supposed cloud provider threatening to shut down someone's account unless they make their website behave in a particular way.

What would the headline be exactly? "Business drops client for violating agreement and bringing negative attention to their service."

Why does everyone assume that businesses have a moral obligation or imperative? When a company goes around saying "We value..." they're really saying "By uttering the magic phrase we hope to make more money off you".

> can't believe the tech press isn't picking up

? It was widely reported.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com