This isn't some kind of censorship issue, that just isn't legal and never has been legal.
Edit:
Interesting that researchers made their findings public weeks before this event that there was specific violence was planned to storm the Capitol.
Source: Originally published in the Washington Post. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/capitol-siege-was-...
So I'm stuck defending a censorous site against censorship!?
I am a weirdo, because a public site like Parler is exactly where I hope insurrection should be planned. Why wasn't the FBI ready to swoop and arrest actual violent people given they were posting their plans in plane view? Why are we relying on AWS to moderate away trumps lies and fix the US Political landscape?
To me, killing parler (for all its shit-ness), is a perfect example of "we have to do something, and this is something".
Does anyone actually think that if Parler had gone offline 4 weeks ago, the events of the last week would have been different? They'd have planned on twitter or Facebook or reddit or wherever.
When can we solve the actual problems here (failure to deal with trump, a poor relationship with the truth for all politicians, law enforcement complete lack of interest in right wing threats, lack of basic security etc)?
Censoring random websites seems like farting in a Jucuzzi, censorship is almost always a way of ignoring actual problems while pretending you are acting. And here we are again.
Sorry, its late here in the UK and I'm ranting. Thanks for reading.
People don't like to think that censorship works, but the truth is that censorship does work a lot of the time.
So is that the plan? Keep parler but install censors there AND in every website mod office, newspaper, TV station and radio studio?
That's a lot of work. When we could just put FBI agents on parler and have them prevent crimes with conspiracy charges.
And you still can't actually justify a ban on parler.
This is the price we pay for an open society. Freedom means freedom for morons as well as for us. I wish there were an easier answer, but I wouldn't even trust myself with the power to decide who is allowed to speak and who isn't, so I won't trust Amazon Web Services PR department. So no one gets the job and sometimes that stinks.
* declaring pretty much any company (including cloud computing platforms and maybe the Apple app store and few others) a utility IF they have this sort of market breaking power.
* creating a lower tier than full "utility" status where a company does not have market breaking power but where they do have excess power.
I'm not convinced AWS has market breaking power because parler could get another provider. But getting and moving to another provider on ~24h notice is pretty market breaking. So maybe AWS (and other sub-utilities or whatever you want to call them) can cut you off BUT they need to give you 28 days notice and arrange for transfer of data and continuity of service. To me this is like if you're out of lease, your landlord still has to give you notice, they can't just turn up at 9am and tell you you need to be out by 5.
I don't think those are too onerous as requirements. And I do think that many companies (Google for search and ads, Visa/Mastercard) have gotten just as "infrastructural" as power/water/phone companies were back when the original push to utility status occurred. There should be a push to balance that.
That's power that reaches across our society without any check or balance or democratic input.
In fairness, Google etc have been pretty good at NOT abusing that power. But why wait for an abuse.
Ironically that's what parlar should teach us: be a bit more proactive about your problems, don't wait for a seige of the senate chamber.
What do you think? Have I gone off the deep end? :)
Fyi, this isn't just about parlar and controversial content etc. YouTube bans educational channels pretty much at random and no one does anything about it until there is a twitter storm. That's not right. Apple thinks it has a right to ban tumblr because nipples. Also, wrong imho. If Apple want be the main app provider (via app store for non-jail-broken users), they need to play fair not favourites.
I assume because the vast majority of such posts were and are fantasies masquerading as plans, and there aren't the resources to set up stings for each such "plan".
Original comment: Turns out the resources were just the price of a plane ticket to Washington...
Actually that is what I'm saying. Was the average insurrectionist more planning than that in this case?
I know some bombs were found, leaving them out this seems like a mob with guns. They coordinated the date and location and just winged it from there it seems.
If someone has a complex plan, you can't be sure they'll go through with it till they've taken significant action.
If the plan is "meet in Washington on Tuesday, bring a gun so we can shoot democrats,see you there" then it seems you can arrest that plotter as soon as he has a gun and a plane ticket.
I think so many people either have public profiles or wore ID or literally spelt their name out to reporters, they can't have been actual planning, prepared criminals.
Edit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-arres...
I picked the above up, it seems like 2 people Brough zip ties to take prisoners. 2 more were in possession of firearms when arrested. That's the level of planning with these people, most of them seem to have just turned up.
I'm not at all saying that excuses their actions. Quite the opposite: it brings the bar for actual conspiracy down when the crime is simple.
Some people on the right (and a very few on the left) would view being armed as the natural state of free people. Especially when discussing suggestions from righties, it seems like "bring your firearm" is right next to "don't forget your keys".
I think that's one of the issues that really worries me about all this: the cultures of the left and right are different enough that the left views behavior the right considers normal to be violently deviate, and then the right (at least on my own social feeds) reacts as though the left is targeting them personally.
My best argument that no insurrection was intended by those present is that the bombs (or bomb-making materials, or whatever) that were found weren't used, even though the mob had control of the Capitol building. Indeed, even though a significant percentage of the rioters were likely armed (see above), the only shots fired were by Capitol police. More than anything else, that confirms for me that the mob didn't arrive with the intention of taking the Capitol, or insurrection, or anything like it. They had the materials available to make things much, much worse, and instead they acted like tourists. Why? Clearly (I think!), because there was no intent by 99+% of them to do anything but show up and support legislators in finding the courage to dissent from what the Trumpists believe to be fraud.
I also don't think law enforcement has the bandwidth to deal with it.
Then when they get 50 referrals from r/knitting and 50mil from parlar, law enforcement can raise an eyebrow, investigate and prevent these things.
To me, that seems fair and effective.
The alternative is that we ban parlar. But only after the violence. And we know that banning parlar won't prevent this from happening, we're just moving the problem.
Why bother? Keep parler, by now every second account should an FBI agent. It's even better than twitter/reddit/facebook: all the noise is gone, it's just the crazies planning violence...