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Comment by Sebguer | Hacker News Reader

You can't "slippery slope" when the quoted email makes it pretty clear that Amazon has outlined specific and clear problems that Parler has refused to address. Unless your business is being used to post hate messages, including explicit threats to kill people, your concern is unwarranted.

If it is, well, then you should probably reasonably actually be concerned about AWS shutting you down.

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there is first amendment precedent for shutting down speech that incites violence. why is that not enough here?

Because that's for the court to do not the platform.

so why engage the platform at all? seems like the courts could easily be tasked with dealing with this.

Why would you assume that Amazon is only ever going to stick to that? It's a self-imposed set of rules. What's stopping them from just changing the rules if they want to e.g. block sites critical of how they treat their workers?

They don't need to change the rules. AWS can already terminate you at any point. In this case, they've very much not explicitly done that, and instead have given Parler warnings and clear requests to take specific actions to prevent their account from being terminated.

Parler has decided not to cooperate, and Amazon is taking the next step, which is terminating that relationship.

Amazon is a business, and can choose to do business with just about anyone they'd like, based on their stated terms. This isn't some weird turning point, and in fact, the email provided shows that Amazon isn't making this decision out of nowhere.

>They don't need to change the rules. AWS can already terminate you at any point

That is literally my point, the 'rules' don't matter. The post that I responded to claimed that somehow there was no slippery slope here because they have rules after all.

>Amazon is a business, and can choose to do business with just about anyone they'd like

Well, that's how it currently is, but this doesn't apply to all businesses. An electric provider can't just cut you off because they don't like you, maybe it'd be a good idea to implement something similar for services that provide equally critical digital infrastructure?

It's not hard to make an argument that referring to Amazon warehouse employees as slaves is violent speech, for example.

For example Twitter argued [1] that Trumps statement of "75 million American patriots" could refer to the hundreds of Capitol rioters and that his statement of him not attending the inauguration, which Biden supports btw, was a signal that it's a safe target to attack.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

Nothing is stopping them nor was anything stopping them before. So this changes nothing except for Parker and the people using it.

Yes, the fact that they’re allowed to make business decisions about their own platforms and freely associate is the bedrock of capitalism. Read the fine print. Plan accordingly.

Is someone assuming that? It’s perfectly normal to approve of AWS banning Parler while reserving the right to disapprove of AWS banning some other service. I’m very confused by this mode of argument “if we ever let any company perform any action that’s a slippery slope because what if they perform other actions???”

Nothing is stopping them from changing their rules. But if they change their rules from something good to something bad, one simply changes one’s opinion of their rules.

What? This isn't about whether rules are good, they said that the rules prevent a slippery slope, which is obviously bunk.

So, your argument is "AWS told a service that it needed to stop hosting death threats, the service didn't comply with that request, and AWS terminated the service... therefore they're going to shut down everyone they don't like"

You pole vaulted right over the slippery slope there.

No, not 'they're going to', but it's possible that it may happen and the fact that people don't care and just shrug this off (or even say that this is how it should be!) scares me.

So lay out your theory of things should work and be prepared to defend it. It's easy to just ask questions and never make any positive proposals.

Do you expect me to copy paste a full proposal under every single comment?

But I'll indulge you: Regulate these companies like public utility. Make laws that specify which content is not allowed (e.g. no hateful content, or whatever) and let the courts be the arbiter.

>You can't "slippery slope" when the quoted email makes it pretty clear that Amazon has outlined specific and clear problems that Parler has refused to address

Sure you can. Even if some of the circumstances will be different, it seems pretty obvious that this did not happen because of the simple facts in evidence regarding Parler, but because of the broader context that a lot of people were beginning to try to pressure Amazon to drop Parler. One could easily envision how this could also be successful in future cancellation campaigns - if a company makes a mob outraged and the company isn't going to reform on its own, then one can naturally escalate the deplatforming effort by going after any company-related apps or service providers. Do we really think this isn't going to happen absent a riot? We already have the rhetorical justification: "This is just private actors showing you the door."

> if a company makes a mob outraged and the company isn't going to reform on its own, then one can naturally escalate the deplatforming effort by going after any company-related apps or service providers.

That's capitalism in action. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For that to happen, you first have to be in violation of your contract like Parler was. They were in violation of the AWS AUP.

For many services with millions of users, if you keep your head down, it can take them quite a while to notice you're in violation of your contract... but yes, if you make a bunch of people angry, one of those people is going to notice you're on AWS, pull up the AWS AUP that's published right on their website, see that you're in violation and report you.

This should be obvious to everyone. The AUP is not a confidential agreement.. and everyone can see where your server is hosted.

Again, you cannot claim a slippery slope when Amazon has made clear, and explicit asks of Parler that they have /refused/ to engage with.

Parler does not want to moderate their platform of violent rhetoric, because their customer base is there to engage in violent rhetoric. If you think Parler should have the right to allow their users to continue to threaten violence to people, well, that's still not a slippery slope, because there is no precedent being set here other than "Amazon will not allow unmoderated calls for violence on their platform."

Amazon always will, and always has, had the ability to terminate users for just about any reason. This is not them doing that, since they've provided a clear solution for Parler which is "stop allowing your users to make violent threats", and they've provided apparently an abundance of examples. Examples which Parler has not taken action against.

> In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across Parler violated its terms of service and that Amazon is unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate such things will be effective.

The article seems to suggest that it's calls for violence that have violated its ToS (presumably agreed upon at time of hosting or earlier).

> it seems pretty obvious that this did not happen because of the simple facts in evidence regarding Parler, but because of the broader context that a lot of people were beginning to try to pressure Amazon to drop Parler.

So I don't see how what you say is indeed obvious, since Amazon's relationship to Parler suffice to explain the termination, absent any public sentiment or pressure.

Perhaps your argument would be bolstered if you can provide an example of a service with similar volume of calls to violence that has not yet been booted off.

Yes, if you get too many people mad at you, you're going to have a bad time no matter how just your cause. In some cases we've decided as a society to protect people who might get a lot of anger directed at them through no fault of their own, like because of their race or sexuality. I doubt we're going to extend those protections to include people who incite violence, but maybe we can extend them in other ways as appropriate to make sure people aren't undeservedly deplatformed.

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