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Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

It was only two hours ago when I wrote: "I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?)" when Apple removed the app, following Google Play from yesterday.

It would seem this cycle is certainly not done perpetuating itself as of yet. I think we are going to have some rough times ahead of us unfortunately. I have no interest in this app or those on it, but they are probably going to get much more upset and feel much more persecuted.

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I was wondering if you were online to see it and thinking about that comment. I was really surprised to read that, AWS is another level beyond social media de-platforming. Wouldn't there be other harmful things hosted on AWS? Who governs this?

If harmful is planning impending terrorists attacks, they should also be removed, yes.

People weren’t and aren’t up in arms when Isis gets deplatformed.

If people are actually plotting attacks on an open platform, they should be reported to law enforcement. Deleting their accounts may actually give them a nudge towards using proper OPSEC.

Obviously, we aren't talking about people actually plotting attacks though.

The federal law enforcement currently in control by a seditious and insurrectionist president?

Yes, and I think that's one of the first complaints that many think of here, e.g. how many users on Twitter are there that post worse things than Trump, how many thousands of websites does AWS host that are worse than Parler?, and so on.

One might object "Sure, enforcement is not perfect and some bad actors will get by. But at least we are removing some things instead of nothing!", and while they are right about this as a first-order effect, they are missing what happens afterwards: people will, rightfully so, identity that policies are not evenly enforced, and this can have many further effects down the line.

Agreed, I think the underlying problem here is selective enforcement.

What happened to a cornerstone of American free world values

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Free speech is in grave danger

You can still say whatever you want, you just can't compel others (including businesses) to assist you in conveying your speech. This is really basic stuff, it is surprising how difficult many otherwise smart people are finding it.

Smart people are finding it difficult because it's absurd to accept that gigantic monopolies are allowed to control the free flow of information.

I can't even go out and speak in a public square, because it's illegal. Internet censorship by corporations is still censorship.

you are right from a constitutional perspective, but it's somewhat misses the point.

Private censorship is still censorship, particularly when the public square is privately owned.

if we can't stop the tit for tat between left and right from escalating further I truly fear for this country.

To be clear, you're referring to "the right, led by the President, organizes and executes a violent attack on the Capitol, so companies refuse to continue providing services to those people" as a "tit for tat".

There is a difference between cases when business needs to spend effort to assist you, and when it needs to spend effort to prevent you. Here preventing is actually harder, because there is no difference to AWS/Twitter which combination of numbers it stores and it has to go out of its way to read the number and block specifically your speech.

The dominant cost here isn't the cost of the employee that has to update their database, it is the cost of lost advertising or customers angry that your company is providing services to terrorists.

If twitter had done this for advertisers and the customers, their price of their shares would not fall.

Agreed. And, if I don't want to make a cake for a gay wedding no one can compel me to do so.

Certainly a relevant comparison, but if sexual orientation is, like race and gender, a protected characteristic, then it may make sense from a balancing perspective to not allow that to be a valid reason, even if "affiliation with a terrorist group" remains a valid reason to choose to deny service.

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Agreed. We are in a time where language is changing with no questions asked.

(moronically but nonetheless - amen:a-woman? Hate speech? Removing gendered terms while insisting on identifying as a gender)

Look up New Speak from 1984. This is where we are, and where the Party wants us to be :-)

What happened was an attempted political assassination: Q anon supporters stormed the capitol with guns, zip ties, and pipe bombs, chanting "hang mike pence." I imagine we make "I will kill you" exemptions for free speech.

This is wildly incorrect. ' Q anon supporters storming the capitol with guns, zip ties, and pipe bombs, chanting "hang mike pence' is a dangerous media fantasy. A huge number of people demonstrated, a tiny number broke the law. We are entering very dangerous, 1930's Reichstag like 'problem, reaction, solution' authoritarianism with these free speech crack downs. Patriot Act 2.0 is ready to go versus 'domestic terrorists'.

Quite the contrary. If anything, the coverage did not show the full story. The majority of these people were out for blood. They erected hanging stations. The fought with the police. This was no demonstration. These people were to overturn the election and hurt or kill anyone who got in their way. Free speech decidedly does not protect this.

Elections cannot be over turned by occupying a building in the USA for a couple hours, This is unnecessarily hyperbolic and very partisan.

Congress completed their duties later in the evening.

Everything said by the person you replied to is the truth, not hyperbole. Just because the mob and their fatal invasion of the nation's capitol was not successful does not mean that their motives were not anti-democratic.

Why are you apologizing for the insurrection's actions?

There's video evidence, lol: https://twitter.com/59dallas/status/1346963199778828290?s=20

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

"Freedom of religion is not freedom from consequences, you can believe in X god but don't be surprised when we do not allow you into our shops and universities"

Do you see a substantial difference between your statement and the one above?

That'd be discrimination against a protected class at a place of public accommodation.

This is more like dropping a person from club membership due to incompatible views or behaviors.

The question is not about what is defined as protected class, but why we needed to start protect religious freedom. Allowing people to escalate disagreements in one issue into sabotage of each other, leads to hostility and all out war.

California makes political view a protected class.

In fact, in 1986, the California ACLU sued a restaurant for excluding Nazis, under California anti-discrimination laws.

The restaurant settled.

http://volokh.com/2006/02/24/a-very-strange-but-true-aclu-ca...

It's not as cut-and-dried as you suggest. Individuals--but not broad classes of people--can be excluded based on their behavior. The Nazis likely could be excluded as long as they insisted on wearing Nazi pins/garb, but not merely on suspicion of their beliefs. A spineless out-of-court settlement by an insurer doesn't tell us that much about how the case might have fared in court, only that the insurer chose to avoid further risk.

I think the more interesting part is that the ACLU was committed so strongly to non-discrimination in 1986.

And I agree the settlement doesn’t prove the claim was valid. But why would protection matter less when you’re wearing the garb of the political view you’re trying to express?

If the law is trying to protect unpopular political views from being excluded in public services, it matters the most precisely when they’re wearing MAGA hats or Newsom 2022 pins.

Yes, it is. It requires some impressive mental gymnastics to claim that on the one hand you have free speech, and on the other you have no realistic ability to exercise it. A right - especially a natural right - is only a right when it can be meaningfully exercised.

In particular, free speech only applies to speech you don't like, because nobody is attempting to shut down memes of cute kittens.

If that's how you define it, nobody will ever have free speech. There are plenty of things people can say that would get them kicked out of my house, de-friended, or fired if they were my employee. I bet you could even think of some scenarios yourself. There will always be the possibility of consequences.

The same thing said in one society can result in people kicking each other, killing each other then causing blood feud for centuries while in another society merely in a lawsuit.

For economy to work, large number of people who dislike each other need to cooperate, so it is generally a good strategy for the society to arrange consequences in such a way as to not cause escalating chain of feud.

This is an excellent point. I've been thinking about how to make it succinctly, I think this is as good a way as any.

But violence is being planned on Parler, today. It is an incubator for the escalation you’re talking about. We’ve left the realm of the hypothetical.

If there’s a bar where the owner lets a gang hang out and recruit members and plans crimes, the thing to do is shut down that bar. Not let it go unchecked because the gang will be mad about it.

'Violence' is probably being planned on Facebook, Signal, text messages etc etc by all sorts of 'evil doers' to quote GW Bush. This doesn't mean you ban the medium. section 230 defines bigTech as platforms, not publishers. You don't close down AT&T because someone organized a punch up via text messages.

All reports of activity on Parler seem to indicate it’s basically a breeding ground for right wing extremism, so I think it’s incumbent on you to show why it’s more like text messaging than the aforementioned gang bar.

That said, Parler is not being shut down.

Also, Section 230 has nothing to do with AWS’s relationship with Parler.

> owner lets a gang hang out and recruit members and plans crime

Then the thing to do is call the police, not gather a mob to shut down the bar.

If people openly plan violence on Parler, then shutting it down will only make it harder for police to prevent it.

No mob has gathered to shut down Parler, so I’m not really sure where that fits in (ironic, though, since people are using Parler to plan literal mob attacks).

Parler’s business partners are abandoning it, sure, but that’s by no means a “mob”. It’s much more akin to the bar’s suppliers refusing to sell it ingredients for drinks, if we want to stick with this analogy.

You kicking someone out of your house doesn't change the fundamental balance of society.

AWS, Apple and Google deciding on behalf of 3 billion people what they're allowed to read, most certainly does.

Ding, ding, ding. No points for abiding viewpoints you don't vehemently object too.

Disagree, loud and resolute by all means, but stifle not the discourse, lest civility lapse to violence.

but is perfect enforcement even possible? If it isn't, does that mean companies shouldn't bother enforcing at all?

I agree, it's a very complicated issue, and there will be repercussions, but that shouldn't stop a company from taking down this sort of thing. No reasonable company wants to be associated with this. Especially if people on Parler are planning something worse in the future.

The number of users that almost pulled off an insurrection is pretty small.

They banned the app because the moderation policies allowed for said insurrection attempt to occur. There are tons of posts explicitly calling for violence that violate Parler's Terms of Service, yet have not been removed from Parler, meaning that there's a failure to moderate the platform. If Parler actually moderated its content to prevent users from plotting insurrection, the app would probably not have been removed. But the whole draw of Parler is that it never would have removed that content. Since high-profile Parler users were promoting Stop the Steal and potential violence, the app's userbase would see removal as a violation of "free speech social media" and move on from Parler to the next thing that allows them to talk about it.

It's not punishing all Parler users for the actions of a small group on Parler, it's punishing Parler itself for failing to keep that small group from breaking its own rules, along with Apple's, Google's, Amazon's, etc. I don't see anything wrong with that.

They were dancing around in viking hats! That is not people almost pulling off an insurrection. What is with this lunacy?

Gallows were setup outside, multiple pipebombs found, many carrying guns, molotov cocktails found.

Does this look like a buncb of people dancing around?

https://youtu.be/cJOgGsC0G9U

As much as I dislike Parler, I very much so hope that ISPs don't ban it. Imagine if ISPs get to block whatever website they deem dangerous. That cannot have a good ending.

Somehow ISPs are going to use this as an argument against https etc.

This might be an interesting argument for municipal broadband which occurred to me last night: in that situation the ISP is in fact bound by the First Amendment, which limits its ability to do that sort of thing quite a bit...

Is Cloudflare still hosting ISIS sites? I know it was when the owner woke up in a "bad mood" and booted the first site from the service.

I think we should worry less about those users who are already radicalized, and more about those who would have been if Parler remained.

There are a lot of rumors right now that the president will spin up his own media service after leaving office. He even hinted at that in his last tweets. Parler recent troubles is maybe opening up a space for him. But I’m curious what steps they will take to avoid this situation. I suspect it will be heavily moderated...

He can't afford that financially

Well, Trump might not. But it would be an EXCELLENT grifting opportunity. He personally pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars with "Stop The Steal" donations. No way he can't pull the same thing out of office and make money of off people.

Interesting. I wonder if software has already been developed and is just waiting for launch. Just imagine him doing a daily livestream on his own social platform. Ugh.

It’s also rumored that he’s fleeing to Scotland ahead of the inauguration. He could be planning to operate an opposition platform from the relative safety of a foreign location.

I find it hard to imagine that anyone, let alone Tr*p and his coterie, can just spin up an engaging social media platform in short order, especially if they can’t be hosted on well known cloud infrastructure.

Additionally even if he does somehow succeed, it seems unlikely that this platform would get any kind of traction beyon his most fervent supporters. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are great because people are on the platform for other reasons. Not so much for a dedicated site.

Scotland says he can’t: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/world/europe/trump-scotla...

Wait for the major DNS servers to delist them too.

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