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Comment by starkd | Hacker News Reader

Respectfully, I think you missed the point. There are many voices on parler not out to overthrow anything. You may disagree with them, but they are within the mainstream of political debate. The power of a tech oligarchy to take out its competitor is a serious violation of anti-trust law. There are less ham-fisted approaches to dealing with illegal activity. The DOJ and FBI have effective means to do it.

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Now that the Parler dataset has been harvested - we may actually get to see how many of those voices were rational.

If you're within the mainstream of political debate, you have no problem existing on mainstream social networks.

But, as a consumer, they have the right to choose the platform they want to be on. Twitter and Facebook have their problems. The element of user choice should be a constant incentive to improve.

Of course, I was responding to the sentiment of "You can't discuss conservative views on (platform x)!" which is generally untrue.

Whether or not there are some rational voices on Parler is beside the point: Parler is not moderating the voices that support and plan actual violence. That means that any company that supports Parler, including Apple and AWS until recently, is potentially also complicit in that violence. Those companies have warned Parler that they need to moderate, and Parler has not acquiesced.

Apple and Amazon absolutely have the legal right to not do business with anyone, for any reason; and they have the ethical obligation to not do business with anyone openly proposing violence.

They are not objective arbiters of the content on Parler, since they are competitors. They do not have the right to oust a competitor. There's similarly very nasty comments on twitter that they let stand.

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