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hug

Just in case this is a serious question, without editorialising, the following has happened in the past 48 hours:

* Trump has been bannned from Twitter.

* Trump has attempted to use the POTUS account, and had those tweets removed.

* Trump has been removed from Facebook.

* Trump has been banned from Twitch.

* The Discord server for the_donald has been banned from Discord.

* Parler has been removed from the Google Play Store and the App Store.

* AWS has announced plans to discontinue Parler's hosting.

And I think that's about it, for very recently. For those who support Trump, "deplatforming" is a major concern, as Trump has now lost access to essentially all of his base via social media. Once he's out of office, he's not going to have anywhere near as significant a reach as he may have.

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Did AWS pull the plug?

I think this is roughly equivalent to Visa telling you that it won't do business with you. Which they recently did with Pornhub.

There doesn't seem to be many good solutions. The Refragmentation (http://paulgraham.com/re.html) was the only pg essay I truly disliked, because I didn't want it to be true. Yet here we are.

AWS has announced that they are cutting Parler off as of Sunday at midnight PST.

Article: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

And HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25708142

A few years ago the comparison wouldn't had stood :

If both Visa and Mastercard happened to have banned you, them being pretty much the only two players in the market, you would be pretty much fucked.

Meanwhile there were tons of ways to be hosted, including self-hosting.

Nowadays I'm not so sure, both Visa/Mastercard duopoly doesn't seem to be as uncontested as before, and AWS kept growing ?

I don't really have the impression there's that much less hosting options now than a few years ago?

Maybe not, it's just that even more developers are going to use AWS without even considering other alternatives for hosting, just like using Github for their "open source" projects ?

> * Parler has been removed from the Google Play Store and the App Store.

I support the other "deplatformings" (he loooong had it coming), and am neutral about AWS, but this is bullshit. Google, and especially Apple (where there's no workarounds) shouldn't have the right to ban generic software like that !

If we go back to October-November, we also had a major newspaper banned from Twitter for weeks for posting a story critical of Hunter Biden with an implication that Joe Biden may have been involved in some type of corruption.

To those who voted down the parent, know that your reaction is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Pravda and Izvestia only printed "approved news", we made fun of them here in the west while in the Soviet Union is was said "there is no news in Pravda, no truth in Izvestia". I don't want to go there and will speak up against this type of censorship no matter who gets censored. Let the law be the bar which needs to be passed to be allowed to publish, not some ideological stance. If you do want to use ideology as a guideline to what gets published you a) have to be honest about it and b) don't get too claim protection as a common carrier, i.e. you will be responsible for what gets published through your channel.

> For those who support Trump, "deplatforming" is a major concern, as Trump has now lost access to essentially all of his base via social media.

There are also a lot of people who are concerned about the dangerous precedent being set, regardless of whether they support this individual or not.

That is true, and it was remiss of me (and a good example of recency bias) to at all imply this is a Trump-specific problem.

I'm afraid that Trump's case is exceptional to the point that it's only hindering the discussion about what Twitter(/Facebook/YouTube) should be allowed or not to do.

The payment networks have been banning risky clients for many decades. Many other businesses do the same, so I don’t think this is any new precedent.

And it’s trivial for someone kicked off of the big social media networks to make there own website and post whatever they want.

I have a hard time understanding why people feel like this is a new thing. If I start shouting obscenities during a live interview on ANY major media outlet, they will immediately kick me off. Is their refusal really the end of Free Speech?

Consider it from this perspective: Donald Trump was elected, not because he represented conservative people so well. Not even close.

He was elected because conservative opinions have been given so little credence versus liberal opinions on the biggest platforms that they turned to someone who would fight those platforms head on.

Liberal voices and opinions have been lauded, applauded, and promoted more than their fair share by most media and social media platforms for decades. That has created deep resentment in large areas of the country.

Donald Trump is a symptom of the disease that American politics and the associated media outlets have contracted. He is not the disease itself.

The way he is acting is not that surprising to anyone who pays attention to his personality. And the response in the last week by media and social media and big tech companies has also not been surprising, although I think they should have been more measured.

But the underlying problem still remains. De-platforming Donald Trump will not fix the broken and biased system. And every move and countermove escalates the resentment.

Very well said.

I hear you - but, at least in my case, it doesn’t feel true.

I’m from a small town in the upper Midwest. My entire childhood and teenage years were dominated by Rush Limbaugh/Charlie Sykes/et al on the radio and Fox News on the television (always Fox News). Did NPR/CNN/etc exist? Sure - but I (literally) didn’t know anyone who listened/watched them until college.

This idea that conservatives are being crushed under the boot of “liberal” media feels like a cop-out. Conservative politicians could have gone big tent in the 80-90’s, but they didn’t. They focused on consolidation of a specific demographic and are now in a kerfluffal because that base is becoming a cultural minority.

Edit: also - the resentment was always there. Go listen to Rush in the 90s. Nothing about what conservatives are complaining about is new.

Preventing dangerous incitement to violence is in no way recent, not is what is happening now in any way new. The only difference between now and 200 years ago is the amount of damage that speech that is unconstrained by social norms can do. I get very frustrated with all this "Oh no, if we prevent this dangerous person from saying dangerous things our society will fall apart!" while it has been precisely this clamping down on dangerous speech throughout the last ten thousand years that allows us to live together at all.

I think the precedent of "if you incite violence you're no longer welcome" is a perfectly fine precedent to set.

This would be great if it applied universally. Except, 2020 demonstrated very clearly it only applies to specific violent protest, not all violent protest in general.

umm email. Umm, press releases. jeez

CampaignMonitor, the service the Trump organisation used for its mail services, has suspended Trump's access.

https://twitter.com/DaveLeeFT/status/1347724204473372672

Press releases rely on press organisations to distribute, which aren't under Trump's control, unlike his previous social media accounts, which had a reach of millions by themselves.

I am not trying to impute any kind of values onto these facts. They're just things that have happened around the deplatforming of Trump, post 6th January.

Nothing stops the Trump org from doing what InfoWarz does and sign up with Akamai and Lumen/Centurylink/Level 3 for their server hosting and CDN.

Until they ban them too.

If the whole world is against you, maybe you are doing something wrong

The merged entity known as Centurylink/Lumen/Level 3 is a common carrier unlike Twitter, Facebook, etc, they have no need to cease serving anyone and would lose their status as a common carrier if they were to start moderating the content of the data that clients move over their pipes.

If served with an injunction by a court, or if the user failed to pay their bills, those are the only cases in which you would see them stop serving a client.

Akamai is fronting InfoWars? Didn’t know that.

EDIT: Just checked and it’s resolving to Cloudflare IPs where I’m at. Same same but different I guess.

There are actually A LOT more too but they aren’t huge names. The left are going on a banning spree right now.

the left? these are massive multibillion dollar corporations mate.

And? Those multi-billion companies have been toeing a certain line for a long time now, partly in the hope of being left alone to gather even more money if they only did some token gestures, partly because they've taken on their own share of activists in their HR and communications divisions.

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