Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

from being one of the most privacy friendly faces of the mobile to being portrayed as privacy invader (i know messages are E2EE). but see the effects. things happen slowly.

did amazon or big tech do the right thing here? probably yes.

did they see that their influence is massive? yes. (they already do know, just stirring up their convictions stronger now)

Is there a chance in future that they might just misuse their powers without anyone knowing it? most certainly yes.

Its a real trolley problem for me as a privacy supporter.

Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).

For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).

I'm sure such a platform would be despised by many in the mainstream, and most mainstream companies would not consider using them because customers would boycott them if they did. But for companies whose customers are primarily on the right, the cost/benefit could be favorable. If there are enough such companies, someone could build a business that caters to them.

I don't know anything about how complex it would be to set up companies to replace AWS, Stripe, etc., but I imagine that at least some of these services will be offered (probably at higher cost, due to lower scale/efficiencies) within the next year or two.

Even my liberal friends think that the de-platforming has gone too far — and the Trump presidency hasn't even officially ended yet. Most thought that the companies would wait until after Trump was no longer President and then ban him on the grounds that his behavior was only previously allowed because he was a political figure.

Every company I've worked with has negotiated separate agreements with providers to reduce risk. Including contracts with both AWS and Azure.

If your business gets to a certain size and you are still on the generic ToS and paying by credit card you have a big risk on your hands. You could be terminated at any point.

With a private contract you can negotiate things like a termination notice. You can put in place a grace period before things are shut off. You can implement dispute procedures that are unique to your business needs so that when you and the vendor disagree it doesn't immediately disrupt your business.

None of this is easy. But if your business absolutely depends on public cloud hosting you'd be stupid not to call up your vendor and negotiate.

If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.

I mean, video inciting violence in the name of the Jihad are also taken offline. This is pretty similar. The rules are fairly clear and rational and always have been, the only difference is that they are now enforced and there has been a coup attempt by white supremacists.

I fail to see how Parler should be expected to be responsible for the behavior of some users that share a demographic and political alignment with a group that stormed the Capitol. Was the planning for it done via Parler? Was it not Twitter where the announcement by Trump actually happened?

The bar is already low my friend. This is nothing but an excuse for big tech to wield its trust effect to shut down potential competitors.

If big tech believes that social media companies should be held accountable for its users' actions, then they should support the repeal of section 230, which would effectively have the same effect, except with the additional protections under the justice system. Why is it suddenly okay when big tech does the same without due process?

Rules for thee, not for me.

Taliban have a twitter account, Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading, Iran's supremo calls for Jew genocide, and last but not the least China calls their Uighur detention camps as "reeducation" with zero consequences.

So yes plan if you want but cost of executing the plan might be high enough to put you out of business.

Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. Companies have always pulled away from extremist groups. You wouldn't expect Microsoft to accept a contract with ISIS, would you?

This is really not that complicated. Once you attempt to overthrow a country's government, businesses in that country don't want to work with you. This has always been true.

AWS has continued to host the National Enquirer, even after that publication dug deep into Jeff Bezos's personal life. Said coverage perhaps accelerated Bezos's divorce, which cost him $30 billion in stock, as part of the settlement with his ex-wife. ($30b is 2019 valuation; it's much bigger now.)

If Amazon/AWS will quietly endure a $30b+ hit to its founder's wealth, without pulling the plug, I'd say the cloud-business risk you've identified should be one of the smallest stressors in your life.

If a service provider refuses you service and you believe it violates the terms of service that you agreed to (that's going to be a hard row to hoe), you should have legal recourse. (Still not a lawyer, though.)

Technically, the safest approach would be to build your own geographically-distributed server facilities and get your own Autonomous System Number. Remember to take care---the legal responsibilities in individual countries differ.

I think that to some extent, the availability of multiple providers, and the risk of getting kicked out, are the long term remedy. People will figure out how to mitigate sole-source risks. There might be a risk-reward tradeoff, i.e., the most desirable platforms from a short term profit standpoint might carry the biggest risk of getting shutdown. There will always be somebody who will let you in, at some level of service and security.

Since we're talking political consequences, the partitioning here would be political. Whatever nation owns the companies you do business with, find counterpart companies in nations on poor terms with those host nations and have a plan in place to ramp up infrastructure in those nations quickly (or keep it on "hot standby").

There is the risk that data migration could violate laws in the originating nation, if you're exfiltrating data that the host nation's laws don't allow to be exfiltrated.

What are you trying to mitigate?

You can't mitigate "Getting banned for making a place to plan a coup". You can't mitigate "I want a place to allow posts advocating criminal activity".

If people were openly discussing breaking and entering houses, should that be allowed too?

Why should we tolerate publicly planning violence when we don't tolerate publicly planning other crimes?

Anything other than that at this point is a slippery slope fallacy.

For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulate. These are simple network engineering practices that can be replicated by any experienced IT staff. Sure, you might not be able to mitigate a theoretical 100+ terabit DDOS attack, but is this actually a problem in practice for your business? Even if you have ridiculous capacity, at a certain point you would still have to defer to ISPs, law enforcement and other external measures in order to restore sane operations.

Certainly, there is no perfect solution. But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.

Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.

My wife and I run a side Business Saas product. She is listed as COO on her social media profile for the company.

She is also in a bunch of groups about gardening in our local area.

During the height of BLM protests and CHOP/CHAZ, someone made a post that was very off-topic for the group, basically saying we should all support what was happening in the CHOP and all the violence against cops was justified due to racial injustice.

My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group.

Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content).

One person took it a step further and went on her profile to see where she worked. They then messaged our company's social media profile to tell our company that my wife was a racist, and she should be fired or reprimanded because she had made racist comments in a FB group (she had not, and the person provided no screenshots/proof either).

Unfortunately for that person, they did not realize they were talking to my wife's husband (me) who promptly banned them from our page and blocked their profile from my/my wife's profiles so they could no longer bother us.

However, this type of new "online activism" is rampant nowadays. Small companies often have little choice but to comply or be publicly shamed/bullied, including doxxing or going after individual employees, as in our story.

I disapprove of this type of behavior. This is mob justice in a different form. It is the court of public opinion rather than an actual court of law where someone would get a chance to defend themselves. It is wrong and our society needs to grow up past this childish phase it's going through where every angry person riled up by this or that party's rhetoric feels like they have the right to attempt to destroy another person's livelihood for the sake of pushing "their truth" or "justice". That's not what Justice is.

In this case, Parler will need to either build all their own infrastructure or sign up with some really skeevy second-world hosting sites. This, interestingly, means being hosted on the same servers that host actual terrorists like Hamas; if they intend to remain a legal corporate outfit their lawyers will probably have some very strong words about using such services. Building your own infrastructure is expensive, even without the particular threat of just being Parler. Notably, net neutrality has been dead in the water ever since Trump took office, so anything high-value becomes extraordinarily expensive fast.

I doubt other sites are going to face this same problem in the future. Parler's problem is not that they're on the "wrong side" of a political debate; it's that they deliberately aided and abetted the planning of literal insurrection. Providing any sort of service to them is a huge legal risk to your enterprise now. If the bar for technical deplatforming was lowered beyond "technically legal", you'd see the market for alternative infrastructure providers open up, because those are customers that AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are no longer serving. AWS can only "get away with" deplatforming Parler specifically due to the legally risky nature of working with them.

was it though? Wasn't it just a twitter without censorship?

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven...

Of course some absurdity lies in making believe your corporation has a conscience. You may have a conscience. But ultimately, no matter what corporate culture you instill, your corporation is a psychopath.

So your corporation will be Dexter and you do your best to operate it like it cares about people and issues and is a good citizen (since after all, it is legally a person.) If you do this poorly, it is revealed to have no soul and punished. If you do it well, you get a brand.

If covering for a psychopath whose only motivation is money and whose opinions are the amalgamation of half-formed thoughts from hundreds or thousands of different individuals isn't your idea of a good time, then maybe running a business isn't the best idea.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social

We are witnessing it now on HN. There's a huge uptick in deplatform-proof p2p mesh networks running web applications.

How do you take down a mesh network that will simply regenerate and absorb most external shocks?

I believe that the future of the internet would be fragmented into a conventional centralized server like we see with AWS dominating the market which will still serve useful purpose for most applications and another for the rest.

With Moore's law and 6G we are heading towards a hyper connected world that will facilitate the rise of robust, secure, mesh network based software that runs on our phones.

It will not be without trouble, people will find ways to poison the well. The mesh network would evolve into essentially islands where you physically travel to in order to join that private network to minimize DDOS, MITM attacks.

It would be a cyberpunkesque reality where to buy a bag of weed in a non-legal state, you simply head towards a dark alley, connect to the mesh network, find the drop, and head back to your tiny apartment occasionally poking your head out the window to take in the sights of foggy neon-lit streets with flying cars and spiky haired gender-neutral entities shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it no more!"

It's surprising and disappointing how few people get this. It's like the idea that profit requires selling things for more than they cost.

Ah, yes, the "everything is a slippery slope" propaganda technique.

Don't violate the terms of service of other businesses you depend on?

For all the hard-core libertarian/corporate/free market cheerleaders, isn't this the libertarian way to handle it? CorpA and CorpB have a service agreement/contract, CorpA feels like CorpB violated it, kicks them off, courts handle the aftermath?

It should have been dropped a long time ago, as should any platform that allows that kind of talk.

It's going to be cheaper to bribe people into doing the right thing than to bribe them into doing the wrong thing... We just have to let good people know that bribing is OK so that bad people don't have a monopoly over it... As is the case today.

Let's say you own a company with about 100 employees. You have never taken a political stand beyond voting. Now let's imagine that two of those employees say something on their personal social media that is insensitive to some. Someone somewhere is going to figure out where those two people work and show up at your digital doorstep.

If you as the business owner don't respond in a way that people approve of then those same people are going to go to your vendors such as AWS, etc... and demand they drop you as a customer. If those vendors side with those people strongly enough, or are afraid of them enough, then you may get dropped as quickly as Parler was.

Let's be clear on a key distinction here: you're the CEO of a company providing a SaaS product with no relation or affiliation to politics whatsoever, whereas Parler was clearly enabling and encouraging illegal and seditious activity and their being shut down is completely justified. That distinction isn't clear in the minds of a great many people. Especially in today's highly charged political environment.

Why is that? In general, a slippery slope argument is a poor one.

> Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist

I can imagine a lot of things, I'm sure you can too. But what matters is, is it likely? If, let's say, Slack got taken down by this because it was found that sound rioters used it to coordinate, I would imagine there would be an absolutely huge backlash even today with a situation as dire as the capitol riots.

I can't answer your last question, and it is a good question. But I do agree with AWS and others: the answer is not to do nothing.

Apply them to your scenario if you can. Two cloud providers from different countries. Duplicate your data across both, which is good for backups anyway. Maybe try and use chaos computing to stimulate entire data centers going down on you.

Parler would've done well to encrypt their data and use some kind of distributed data storage for their usecase. Probably should've gotten servers in Russia, China, Romania or something and maybe even hosted an eep- or onion-site. They were obviously on the fringe and hosting their stuff on mainstream services would've ended badly sooner or later.

Know your usecase, know your risks, and prepare accordingly.

America is a country that prides itself (to an absolute ridiculous fault) on "freedom of speech" and "the free market will handle it". Well, the market handled it, didn't it. When the government fell short, the market stepped in.

The last 20 years have polarized society to the breaking point. To think that we can continue down this path and be governable, as a people...it's just not happening. The "free ride" we've enjoyed so far is basically over. Sadly, too many Americans can't tell conspiracy theories and made-up fairy-tales from reality and so now we all lose.

The coming administration already has an axe to grind with Big Tech and they will grind it. Both the Left and the Right want to see Big Tech reigned in in some way and even though the reasons might be different, the end result will be the same - host "uncomfortable" content and be censored.

The days of the internet as a wild west no man's land is over.

The packets I send and whom I send them to should be protected by law in the same way that the letters I send are. It is a crime to open someone else's mail without a warrant, even if that mail contains hate speech or incitement to violence. Private companies who carry mail are not excempt from this restriction, they are content-agnostic. I beleive ISPs fall firmly into this category, and that a strong case may be made for cloud hosting providers as well.

With regards to accountability, individuals are accountable for their actions. It was those people who trespassed and committed violence who should be, and it seems will be, held accountable. Those who directly (as in "go here and do this") incited them, or directly planned their actions, committed crimes as well. Those who simply failed to condone them, or who expressed sympathy with their ideals and causes, or who delivered their mail, are not responsible for the actions of those people.

This will become more common, all it will take will be an allegation even without proof and you'll be denied all services.

This is nothing new, and the risks of running a business are the same. If your suppliers drop your business, you have to find a new supplier or you are dead. And you get to decide if you want to chase compensation in the courts (breach of contract, persecution based on protected classes such as politics or race) or not.

The suppliers who are not allowed to drop you are regulated and called utilities. AWS dropping the ban hammer here is interesting, as the end result might end up with cloud services getting regulated and defined as a utility.

If you rely on a provider, don't motivate the provider to end its relationship with you. The best mitigation here is, first, don't cater to fascists who want to tear apart the fabric of American society.

Second, if you're going to piss people off, either set up a contract that doesn't give your infrastructure provider the freedom to end its relationship with you, or do without the benefits of cloud. AWS isn't a utility, and its services are largely replaceable -- buy some computers and set up your own servers.

Socially the best mitigation is the same as always, be honest and peaceful.

This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.

If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers won't be associated with it and thus hosts can't or won't afford to host it, that's on the author.

Apparently Amazon sent them 98 examples of posts directly inciting violence, Parler replied with a proposal to manually moderate such posts with volunteers, and most of the posts Amazon gave as examples were still up (including some urging for systematic assassination or blowing up AWS data centers.)

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1348688644173934593

[2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1348699888209461249

People really have no idea what the "left" even is anymore do they?

I was once down voted here for mentioning that the NYTimes is not an extreme left wing publication. The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left.

It's amazing to me that the media (not just Fox-news and co) has constructed this bizarre bogey-man of the left as some control hungry liberals. Those people certainly exist, but they aren't, by anyone who is engage in leftist politics and theory, remotely left.

Believe it or not people on the left have been critical of the growing role that corporations have in setting public policy for decades. Sure, centrist liberals my be cheering, but nobody on the left wants to see corporations be the unchecked regulators of society.

However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy.

The entire fact that the will of the people has no direct power over corporate action is exactly why the left doesn't like the perpetual growth of corporate power and of its deregulation.

The unfortunate conclusion of all this confusion for me is that this is clearly not political in the slightest. Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.

Companies bowing to play nice with the state is troubling regardless of your politics.

A ruthlessly self-interested left would benefit tremendously from the successful assassination of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. It would be a galvanizing event that would ultimately turn most of the country against the Republican party. It would likely clear the way for younger, left-leaning Democratic leaders (AOC, Cori Bush), and it would eliminate a major contender for the 2024 presidential race. Biden would enter power with the same level of political capital as George W. Bush after 9/11.

In a state that protects speech, one shouldn’t stand by when default-web-megacorp does the censorship dirty work on our behalf.

Or maybe we do. If this is a once in a generation aberration then it can slide. Time will tell.

That, itself, is propaganda.

Here's the elephant in the room:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Quote:

Popper's paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

To my eye, that has been happened since 2016 and DJT took office.

However, democracy itself is actually an exceedingly fragile system, more so than many people realize. We have lived in a golden age for democracy for centuries now, but that actually only represents a tiny blip on the time scale of human existence, which naturally tends towards tyranny.

What we need to protect above anything else is the democratic systems and institutions that make free speech even possible at all. And sometimes that means placing restrictions on forms of speech that seek to destroy the very foundations on top of which free speech protections is built upon.

Without those limits on free speech, it'd be a very realistic possibility for those who are in fact against free speech to co-opt it to gain enough power to then turn around and abolish it. I think we'd all agree that would be the worst possible outcome, considering all the progress humanity has made on this front.

So based on this, Amazon made a business decision to deny service to Parler, due to the adverse publicity (and perhaps, potential legal liability) generated for them by hosting this content.

We live in a capitalist free-market system. Amazon (or any entity) is free to choose with whom they do business (oh the irony!). They are dropping Parler because the the current political climate has manifest in such a way that they think it will cost them more financial and/or political capital than the alternative (recall there is a lot of antitrust sentiment out there right now).

Too bad so sad. Sorry not sorry. This is exactly the kind of "freedom" for which many of the above platform's users would advocate. Parler's PR team is missing the opportunity to applaud AWS for exercising their freedoms.

Yes. The funny thing is that it happened to people who foam at the mouth about the rights of private businesses to do what they want and decry government intervention.

Picture instead private businesses who all refuse to do business with Jews. Anyone who does business with them are subject to reprisal and boycott by their vendors, friends, and neighbors. The Jews themselves of course are fired from their jobs if anyone finds out they're a Jew. In practice the Jews cannot do business and must live a marginalized existence or hide who they are. So it's not enough to say "well it's a private business they can do what they want" when you would not consider this valid in other contexts.

And of course all this is ignoring the question of whether any of this is likely to be successful in the end or if it will further justify reprisals and enrage anyone subject to this mob justice. Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.