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Comment by zmb_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.

Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).

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 (whether it's your own vendors, or whether you are a vendor to a target).

What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? Try to reduce dependence on cloud providers and vendors by building more in-house? How far would you have to go, since a colo or an ISP can drop you just as AWS can?

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> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)?

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).

It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.

Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a similar standard to Twitter then the only way for a business to figure out if it is in breach is by experiment, and AWS just showed it can pull the plug in days with apparently no warning.

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

> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back.

And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress. But, we don't have to blind ourselves to that prior context. Given it, and given the way a number of people received those comments and have been actively organizing for violence around the inauguration since then, it doesn't seem to be to be a close call.

> taken together

Taken together primarily, along with numerous other tweets in secondary. It wasn't just those two.

Sure, I agree, but I thought that was kind of implicit in the phrase "straw that broke the camels back". This was the latest individual thing, sitting on a mountain of other things, that finally caused the dam to break.

That is a wild misrepresentation of the facts.

That was the second of two tweets, that they are taking together. This was the other

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

They explain the context and how these tweets are being interpreted.

Ok, so it looks like the two tweets were:

"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

I fail to see the issue with these tweets. He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem? Is it even something that the incoming President was requesting? And what is the issue with the other tweet?

This is a bizarre hill that Twitter chose to spend 10% of their market cap on. It seems like there must have been something else that they could have picked that would have made more sense.

If you insist on trying to identify a handful of tweets that justify this, you're going to be disappointed.

The problem is the totality of his behavior. Watch the first 20 minutes of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uSYhyFao4

I think it's some of the following factors:

- President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.

- The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

- The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

- The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.

- Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

> He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem?

It's pretty significant as it hasn't happened since 1869.

> They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form

It comes off like this statement is what big tech really has a problem with.

OK then add this to context, they had also just determined that pipe bombs had been located in 4 places (Capital area, RNC Headquarters , DNC Headquarters, and in a pickup truck bed). So if someone who was revered and you felt wrong enough to stage a potential coup or insurgence for wasn't going to be some place and still hadn't condemned your behavior, yet those who were permitted to do the wrong (in the mind of the insurgence) you were just given a green light and location. That is where it breaks down. He was also stating he was moving platforms, so then those who were prepared to perpetrate the violence would know where they could celebrate it with the person they felt had been wronged.

Now personally I took more umbrage with the fact that he hadn't been kicked off previously, I personally Don't think that the previous comments should have ever been allowed to be made on the platform since he should have been removed for TOS violations.

Also for those asking how this should impact businesses going forward, a smart company should have a mitigation plan in place for any similar issue. It would have been strange if this was the first occurrence, but just look back a few years for 8Chan. This isn't the first time, especially for an application that a bunch of the users had used since QAnon had gone there previously.

This thread started out talking about on what grounds a vendor like AWS might refuse service to a service like Parler, and what those who run companies might want to do to mitigate this risk.

You switched it to talking about on what grounds Twitter might refuse service to the President of a country or other powerful person. Which you got lots of takers to discuss that, but it seems like a very different discussion to me.

Maybe it was the part where he directed an angry mob to the steps of the Capitol building?

Wow, the contrived reasoning in that Twitter statement is beyond belief:

Trump: "I totally disagree with the outcome of the election [...] there will be an orderly transition [...] I will not be going to the Inauguration"

Twitter's interpretation: I don't think the election is legitimate, therefore I disavow my statement that the transition will be orderly, therefore you should commit violence. Also, since I won't be at the inauguration, you're free to do terrorism there without risk of harming me personally.

> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.

When President Trump published this tweet, he knew full well extremists are actively planning to attack the inauguration on January 20th.

There isn't a clear, objective bar in this kind of situation. Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos each decided for themselves if they were willing to stand by and allow Trump and Parler to continue along the path of inciting violence on January 20th.

The people voted to remove Donald Trump from office and he wouldn't and still does not accept it coupled with his calls to violent action. If he's willing to drag the entire country I can only imagine what he would try to do to a company that defied him, Trump is an abuser. While any of these companies could have taken action, I understand to some extent why they did not. It doesn't make it right, doesn't mean I condone their lack of response, but I can see why a company did not go heads up with this person and waited for the appropriate time to take action.

> not everything is a slippery slope

From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down and honestly any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Part of that plan should be projected scenarios about how low the bar will go....

Part of what is really dicey here too is that the result of getting this calculation wrong is basically annihilation for your service (unless you think you can operate without "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers"). The stakes are really high!

(Edited to fix my 'raise-the-bar' analogy)

The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2.

You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses.

Or.

You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a Lame Duck status.

The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. Yes, you should absolutely be actively paying attention. No static rule will allow you, or me, or that guy over there to go back to not paying attention.

>in 15 years, the U.S. becomes Germany, pre-WW2

>the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”.

Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t change anything, kicking so many reactionaries off of Twitter that they went off to make Gab didn’t help, and destroying Parler and kicking Trump off social media isn’t going to help.

How is silencing a group that feels oppressed going to help anything?

This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.

People need to stop hiding behind the first amendment and "but censorship" as a way of allowing democracy-threatening activity. Speech has ALWAYS had limitations. You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre. You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation. You cannot reveal classified information. You cannot imitate a police officer. Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial? Particularly when these are private corporations making the decisions, who are not duty-bound to enable free spech in the first place?

But the thing is, have you actually read the stuff on Parker this is about? These people are actively inciting violence. Their leaders are encouraging violent assaults on democratic institutions. They really aren’t that different from what happened in Germany in the late 20s and 30s. Whether they also come to resemble Germany in the late 30s is irrelevant.

Here's the thing. If you've paid attention for more than fifteen minutes to feminists complaining about mistreatment, you'd know that one of the oldest tricks in the deflection playbook is to play the "agreeableness" card, asking people to calm down and be reasonable. At its best, it's a delaying tactic, playing for time while you continue to enjoy the fruits of inequality. I don't like it when it happens to women. I'm sure as hell not going to tolerate it being turned toward me.

When they say "literal nazis", they mean literal nazis, not figurative nazis.

I don't think the entire GOP it turning into Nazis. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say they believed it. However, I don't think every German, or even most Germans, in WWII were Nazis either. That didn't stop the Nazis from being in charge. It barely slowed them down.

In order to get his 49% of the votes, #45 had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, courting every non-liberal element of society. The GOP leadership has publicly recognized these groups and groups like them as members of Team GOP. They seated them at a table as if they deserve to be peers with the folks you claim to represent.

Let me ask you a serious question. Was it worth it to win that way? Really? What entitles anyone who says 'yes' or 'maybe' to be painted with a separate brush from the people who delivered the victory at "any cost"?

If getting you, or all of us really, looking in the mirror is going to be predicated on treating you with the respect you plan to earn once they've treated you as if you've earned it, then buddy, you're going to be disrespected for an awful long time. Read the warnings, take some umbrage. I certainly am.

So what do we do instead? Just continue down this path until 75% of Americans "feel oppressed" and that "BLM and Antifa and Democrats are Marxists and enemies of the people"? Yeah? 'cause that's not working out.

Or are you kind of thinking it is working out and it's your desired outcome?

The Right is excellent at projecting and playing "the victim" so I wouldn't be surprised.

>This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.

I would never refer to a conservative who recognizes the legitimate results of our free and fair elections as a Nazi! Now the question is, why in the flying MOTHERFUCK do I need that qualifier?

Clearly, vendors should be made to continue doing business with (some appropriately chosen set of?) clients, because that would be different than post-1933 intrawar Germany...how?

>You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long

"People" is a general term, "offense" is a relative term. What you may consider an offense, I might consider a complement. Additionally, what you consider an offense today, you might not do so tomorrow. There is no such thing as a static set of provisions that can handle all cases of immorality across all of time and satisfy all people.

>The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance

The price of freedom is nothing, the price of consequence is eternal vigilance. The only reason you would need to be alerted if someone commits an offense you deem immoral, is so that they can be punished for the offense. You can't reverse an act that someone committed, but sure if you have constant oversight of their actions you can definitely punish them as you see fit. Law is synonymous with punishment, but it is punishment that applies universally to all parties, as opposed to the Terms of Service applied by modern corporations, which (by design) can be applied to whomever and can be ignored for whomever the corporation feels like. Hence why it's a slippery slope.

> The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.

There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.

I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..."

I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than Twitter in all ways; it was more like a news website. I have seen more provocative comments on other forums.

I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC. Part of this is due to the comments being easier to read on Twitter than Parler. I assume bad behavior on Parler was deep in the comments, but the website didn't make those easy to read.

I thought the Parler takedown seemed random. They were used as a scapegoat. If you were a normal user, you used it to hear a different viewpoint but you still lurked on Twitter some because there was no real discussion happening on Parler.

To extend on that... the entire premise of parler was that everyone was censoring them too much(for similar calls for violence) so they needed a platform that was immune from that. well when your entire premise is flawed from the start it's not a stretch to see that they would be targeted from that like stormfront.

No, Parler was doing plenty of moderation. They actively suppressed opposing left-wing view points. It was a pure far-right agitation machine.

> It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.

The financial backers of Facebook supported the company a lot through its enabling of the Rohingya genocide. But, then again, the Rohingya are not white, nor Christian, and they don't live in a country that can be a potential source of expats (like the UK or Australia, nice, good countries), only of immigrants.

There are lots of horrible things on Parler from what I’ve seen (I don’t have an account, I’ve just seen screen shots). The most egregious example was the post from Trump attorney Lin Wood calling for Pence to be executed by firing squad. It was up for days, and only taken down when this all blew up.

> From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

If you do a sufficiently poor job, you might as well not even be trying at all. Especially if you court the content as a growth strategy.

Everyone's free to manage their risks however they please, but I personally have no less confidence in AWS than I had before this event. I have updated my understanding of their decision heuristic as it applies to kicking people off their service. But the probability of me or any company I'd manage running afoul of it is far less than the chance of getting struck by lightning.

> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ...

Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.

Are we just assuming this userbase doesn't also have twitter, facebook, signal, etc accounts? I recall a lot of live streaming and tweets during the riots.

Exactly. I already had that factored into my prior for whether my business was going to get cancelled by Amazon. I’d actually expect to fade a court for knowingly facilitating the shit on Parler.

And if my hypothetical platform is decentralized to the extent that I can’t top-down censor content, what then?

I think things are pretty clear cut, if you want to start a service to obviously harbor fascist user-driven content, then yes, prepare to be cut off from the mainstream vendors. DailyStormer and Parler are explicitly those types of services.

It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.

> It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.

This is definitely a straw-man, but at the same time, if your website hosts user-supplied content and you don't have a rock-solid strategy for moderating it, then yeah you probably should be worried. (Though the spammers will probably take down your site long before AWS...)

Twitter literally allows dictators to use their service so your point is moot. There’s a massive double standard being applied. Additionally, the term fascist is used for essentially anything people dislike anymore so forgive if your subjective take or big tech’s take on fascism doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/twitter-trump-dictators...

The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down...

I fail to see how this is a movement of the bar.

Based on these two examples, the bar seems to be that a site gets canceled if a site is used to promote violence, there is a riot, violence happens, and people return to the site to celebrate and promote future violence. That was the bar in both 2017 and 2021. Doesn't seem to have moved.

Given the fact that the attack on the Capitol was a direct attack on the US government, if anything the bar has been RAISED.

Parlor did not have a real, honest, effort at moderation.

It was done poorly, and seems to have been just a fig leaf to say they were doing it. Objectively it was not working. Way way way worse than anything on FB or Twitter.

It seems likely that this is true. But couldn't you get to the same end-result by having good intentions but a bad moderation system? (e.g. I want to keep Nazi content off my service so I subject all posts to a review by 5 other users. That might work until you get a bunch of Nazis that suddenly sign up up-vote each other's content).

Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.

> The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. They also share that same objective as their founding motivation.

Just different branding.

As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'realistic' as I like to be, saying "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.

Funnily enough I see remarkably few people using the comments on my Strava feed to organize an insurrection.

I'm not convinced Parler is meaningfully different from the DailyStormer in this regard. In fact, I would say DailyStormer is plausibly less capable of promoting violence and terrorism than Parler is, and this shows in current events. In terms of effectiveness and threat level, Parler is clearly greater.

> Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

Parler got canceled for something a lot worse than the Daily Stormer.

Doesn't sound like the bar is moving to me from your examples. Not moderating content promoting violence is a decent bar.

> any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar.

Yes... They need to moderate out content that promotes violence. This is a thing that they should do.

Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer.

It was literally a neo-nazi site.

Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown?

Why would you even bring that site up tbh?

Lol so far the bar is don’t let people plan a violent insurrection on your app.

> Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer.

I was just trying to emphasize that I was using the term in the more loose colloquial sense and not trying to exactly describe the particular actions of the vendors.

> Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown?

Wow, seriously I am not sure how you could have managed to get this from my comment. Please do not put words into my mouth.

> Why would you even bring that site up tbh?

It is a broadly known example of a website that was dropped by pretty much all major online services (including even CloudFlare). What happened to Daily Stormer generated some interesting discussion around online service provides denying services (see the CloudFlare blogpost on why it terminated Daily Stormer: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/).

As the 'bar' goes 'lower' the reason for other vendors to refuse your money becomes less clear. It is quite clear the Parlor is not someone you want on the books.

Hopefully they keep it up and self sabotage themselves so we don’t even need to break them up.

A nit - I think your high/low bar metaphor was backwards. A high bar means that standard is more strict while a low bar means it is less strict.

Ha, you are right! Fixed.

What's the calculation you need to make?

Don't provide an unmoderated online platform for neo-nazis preparing for genocide.

I didn't finish my math major but this seems straightforward.

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that there was even the slightest, faintest, remotest chance of the dude in the viking outfit overthrowing the US government?

It was a violent protest that got way out of hand, absolutely. There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though. It's like someone dropped a cigarette butt on the ground and people are leaping on the opportunity to call it attempted arson.

What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death?

No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.

You are deflecting from the armed militia attempting to breach the house and senate chambers while the lynch mob chants for blood.

> There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though.

That doesn't really matter, does it? Isn't it like criminal conspiracy where all that really matters is for at least two people to plan a crime? AFAIK it doesn't matter if the plan is bad, there just needs to be a plan.

The mob of people who stormed the Capitol building beat a police officer to death. If the mob had reached the rooms with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, I think they would have been assaulted, too, killing them by accident or deliberately. That would have triggered a Constitutional crisis which could have given Trump grounds to keep power.

Was this a well thought out plan? No. But would it have been enough to derail the process of formally choosing the next President? Quite possibly.

Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that Trump and his supporters were not trying to keep him in power when he had clearly lost the election?

That was their clear goal. It has been for months, and Trump himself has been saying as much in no uncertain terms. They were looking to intimidate, possible kidnap or kill, members of congress and the Vice President in order to prevent the results of the election from being confirmed.

It's easy to get political fatigue in the current climate, I understand the knee-jerk impulse to assume "hey, you're probably overreacting about this political issue". But some things really are a big deal. Like overturning an election.

AWS's letter to Parler explains quite well why they are taking them down and I don't see any rational argument against it

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1348136296976408576/p...

> but not everything is a slippery slope.

This is indeed why it is called the "slippery slope fallacy".

It's a fallacy because the implication of a "slippery slope" is that once the merits of this specific idea are evaluated, then all subsequent ideas following will be implemented immediately without a separate debate and discussion of the merits of those ideas.

Pursuant to the current issue: if you're not planning on running a "somewhat moderated" platform where you'll host content calling for violence against the current government representatives, resulting in an actual attempt at a coup...then you've nothing to worry about.

>attempt to... install an illegitimate government

I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it.

I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life that accompanies an uprising, with the explicit goal of installing a new government.

Is this claim misinformation? Should it be censored?

Failing to succeed at your coup doesn't mean that wasn't what you were attempting to do.

Being stupid about it has never been a criminal defense. "Attempted murder" is still a felony (and you know, the crowd actually murdered a capitol police officer).

They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government.

You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.

Didn't BLM install gallows outside Jeff bezos house or something like that? Were they trying to overthrow Amazon?

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/jeff-bezos-guilloti...

If so, that would be a crime and those people should have been arrested. So what? I love the conservative view that if any liberal anywhere did anything bad, then it’s a get out of jail card for them to also do that bad thing. No dude. A crime is a crime.

That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself.

Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts?

Did the owner/company make a call to violence?

Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different)

It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust.

No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship.

This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition.

This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.

It really isn't a straw man.

If clients or customers bring bad publicity to a company they can refuse them service. They can in fact refuse service for any reason that isn't discriminatory in many jurisdictions.

Censorship has nothing to do with this. Any person can host a website from home, pay for a dedicated line, build their own datacenter, find a colo, host on a decentralised network, etc.

Amazon is under no obligation to provide service to Parler. They are not censored by Amazon refusing them as customers.

It's also not relevant to antitrust, literally at all.

A far more dangerous precedent would be compelling companies to provide service to hate groups and terrorists.

I must of missed the section of the parler site that said it was a hate group or terrorist organisation..

Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming.

No company should be forced to lose money.

> It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave.

What is the source of that statement? I did not find anything confirming that.

> We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself

Why though? On some level in seems impossible to make a distinction "from the outside," and I'm not sure it should matter that a decision was made by a person (probably following an Excel spreadsheet) or software.

> 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 don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair?

What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced?

Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections are fair and enforce action?

I think the problem is either you are a neutral platform, or you hold too much power.

The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.

This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.

The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.

This isn't just another political issue. The most existential issue facing the state is the integrity of the Constitution.

> The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.

So if the Russian government and Russian courts decide their election was fair and just, should Amazon shut down any websites which counter that viewpoint?

Because that's the precedent we are presumably setting.

> The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.

Yep, same in Russia for questioning election. You get sent to gulag. Or in China - what do you mean you are talking about Taiwan being it's own independent country in a group chat?

> This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.

Most of the coordination actually happened on Facebook, not Parler. None of those arrested so far had a Parler account.

We're setting the precedent that supporting White Supremacist insurrection against the United States will get punished the same way each time.

Russia doesn't have democracy, and Amazon isn't a Russian company, so I hardly understand your analogy.

Why would you compare what Russia does to political prisoners with the military's discipline in the United States?

This may be news to you, but military service members are subject to an independent justice system with different protections, different laws, and different penalties.

You're arguing that US corporations should be restricted from taking action to suppress insurrection on the basis of having your head in the sand. The US should be in a state of emergency now, and it's obvious to me that it's solely because a white supremacist has replaced the civilian leadership of our government with those complicit in this act.

You're free to ignore what has happened, or believe in an alternate reality. Some of us would be guilty of violating our oaths were we to do the same.

well stated

Despite being headquartered in USA, aws is a global company and these questions about the future is common sense. Not everything is about American politics, people around the world are used to violence happening on your soil, it's just another news.

> the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair?

That one is easy: it was approximately 60 different courts of law that laughed the "evidence" of fraud out of the room

It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room.

To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story.

If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AWS and says shut them down, what do they do?

Now suddenly they're the arbitrators of what is true in the world.

I don't want to get too hypothetical here, because I think this time it was pretty black and white.

100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation.

Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech?

And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)

Except Amazon aren’t determining what is true for the world, they’re determining it for themselves based on their assessment of the evidence and control only their own actions? This is true of everyone. To impute a stupid decision-making algorithm to AWS and then point out that it’s stupid does not a great argument against AWS’ actual process make.

> who decides if the democratic election was fair?

The several states, of which all 50 had certified their votes well in advance of January 6th. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the votes being counted were even cast in public.

Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?

There were claims that Russians hacked the election, voting machine issues, voter fraud and suppression. Democratic leaders objected to the legitimacy of the election results. There were even protestors who interrupted the electoral vote counting [1].

Did the big tech companies miss a chance to censor those peddling theories of an unfair election in 2016? Or do we have a moving definition of what constitutes a fair election and is allowable for questioning depending on which side won?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/01/06/508562183/biden-to-democrats-...

> Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?

Yes, of course. I wasn't happy about it, but I was aghast that so many people voted for a con man, not convinced that it couldn't possibly be true that more people (in the right places, at least) wanted him than the second-worst political candidate I've ever seen run for President.

Also, by the time the certification comes around, the actual voters, all 538 of them, have publicly voted, so not only did I think the election was fair, but by then I knew it was 100% legal.

IMO big tech doesn't really do much censoring until pushed into a corner, now or in the past; they're more about the money than the politics. The Russians (along with a few other players, no doubt) absolutely fuck with our elections, but they do it the old fashioned way -- by spreading propaganda on social media and convincing American citizens to believe in conspiracy theories, and turn against their fellow citizens, etc.

FWIW, no Democrats stormed the Capitol in 2017. The losing candidate conceded, and relatively quickly at that. After losing by a lower margin than Trump in 2020, while beating him by millions of votes nationwide.

There isn't really a good way to spin it. Trump supporters storming the Capitol is bad, but it's actually a fairly distant second place to what the sitting President is doing.

The platform being used for organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups. If the screenshots are correct of what I have seen then AWS had no choice. They would have been liable if something really bad happened and was made aware of this before it happened. Parler has no monitoring of this activity and that is why everyone shut them down once it was exposed.

Note that in the past AWS has been more than open to hosting platforms organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups, to the point of issuing a lawsuit after a competitor was chosen to host the platform. [1]

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/amaz...

I look forward to AWS removing itself from this lawsuit now it has worked out it is fully anti-violence.

Surely it’s ethics aren’t just swayed by money and political pressure?!

>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.

There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.

There is a big difference between “controversial” and a place where people are actively planning criminal activity. It’s not close. No bank, for example, could continue serving a known crime org. They themselves would be charged if they did that.

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3].

To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_repu...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-th...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-el...

Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.

I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.

Probably, which might have something to do with the fact that there's no genuine belief that Biden is going to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to administrational incompetence, or going to spend his entire term attempting to subvert democracy. On the other hand, it turns out the people who said those things about Trump in 2016 have been proven 100% correct.

The purpose of faithless electors isn't to stop the appointment of arbitrary candidates based on personal preference, it's to stop the appointment of people who are completely unfit for the position. It absolutely makes sense that it would only be justifiable to exercise that option on certain individuals. An individual who blatantly and repeatedly lies about election results and encourages their supporters to commit voter fraud in an attempt to retain power seems like the exact type of person you might want to stop from having that power in the first place.

To be fair, Michael Moore didn't try to assassinate the Vice President and hold Senators for ransom.

Were either of those things attempted?

That's a good point, but I think it actually services to show just how bad this situation was. It's not a stretch to say that faithless electors are a "feature" of the electoral college. One of the stated reasons behind choosing electors rather than voting directly is that the electors could exercise their own discretion in the choice. I agree that it's unscrupulous to attempt to coax electors like that, but it's at least within the bounds of the framework of presidential elections.

This was a crowd of thousands of people, many armed, attempting to interfere with the actual process of counting the votes of those electors. More than a couple members of the crowd had zip ties, which can only be reasonably explained as hostage taking paraphernalia. A literal gallows was erected, and members of the crowd were chanting for violence against Pence and Pelosi (the next two after Trump in the order of succession). A couple IEDs were found on the premise. A police officer was beaten to death. If security hadn't managed to evacuate congress and the VP before the crowd got to them, it seems likely that there would have been deaths among them.

Treating those two things as equivalent is absurd.

To be fair they wanted to do that because they saw Trump as a would-be dictator unwilling to leave power peacefully and deadest on using the government to punish his enemies and line his own pockets. They did THAT to avoid THIS. Being right about the reasons why you are doing things is actually important.

But that isn't the standard that was used. It seems to be something more akin to 'don't not moderate content that encourages...'. Except it isn't quite clear what moderation is considered good enough, as one can look at other sites which hosted and continue to host similar content. Sure, they haven't taken the stance they won't moderate, but they haven't done enough to moderate the content to remove it.

Or is it that stance? Perhaps that was the defining standard, that they took a stance instead of passively allowing it to remain like other sites do (until called out, at which point they'll react based on the size of the call out).

> 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.

This is key advice that a lot of founders seem to forget. Capturing a capital is an extremely bold and risky action, which shouldn't be attempted by anyone with fewer than 4 or 5 high-production cities of their own (some of which ideally also having an Encampment district to support training siege units faster). I encourage new players to focus on obtaining a scientific or cultural victory instead, as these are more straightforward for beginners.

>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.

Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.

Which has always been Twitter's defense when similar things happened on their platform. Shouldn't 230 apply here?

> don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

Erm, was Parler as a platform even doing that? Or you know, PEOPLE on the platform, which is not the exact same thing?

The platform refused to moderate that content.

In fact it was its raison d'étre.

Turns out you should keep those attempting to over throw democratic elections off your service.

Ouch, that's going to hurt. USA government is a pretty big customer. Or do we not care about democratic elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, etc.?

At some point it is the same thing. By act or omission.

"... something that is more genuinely a popular social issue ..."

We shouldn't let minority rights or freedoms be ignored just because they aren't popular. If this is an important issue to that other person, then they should bring it up for discussion.

Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc.

This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated.

Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegitimate government.

Did parler really try and overturn an election? Or did some of the people that use the site walk around a building?

I didn't know it was common to bludgeon police officers to death on your morning walk.

People also left IEDs in the building, walked around with weapons and zip-ties, chanted "Hang Mike Pence," and did a lot of property damage.

Please don't downplay what happened on Jan 6 as "walk around a building," it's absurd and that kind of equivocation doesn't belong here.

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

Buy a server?

Buy a server where?

On eBay, maybe?

> I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope

This won't age well.

Nope. Decentralized services will be very important moving forward. Most people just haven't realized it yet.

What works for Al Qaeda could work for Y'all Qaeda, who knows.

Thank you for saying this. Personally I'm fine with there being rules against things like websites for how to make a pipe bomb or as you mentioned, overthrow the government

> 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.

Ohhhh. You hear that? Overturning a fair democratic election. Where was the same argument when the whole Russia narrative played out - including intelligence agencies trying to "wire" the sitting president and sending agents to his national security advisor's residence to frame him? And trying to plot 25th amendment. And the whole 3years subsequent to that trying to find "collusion".

Also there is no evidence the founders of Parler were actively trying to sabotage the election and install illegitimate president. Some rouge users decided to co-ordinate through apps like Parler and FB. Same applies for FB.

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

If we want to continue down a path of honest discussion, at no point did people who firmly believed Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia devolve into storming a government building.

And, the Russia topic by and large never called into question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, attempting to disenfranchise voters. The Russia narrative followed a path of legal investigation into questionable situations. Trump did not get impeached for the outcomes of the Mueller report. Dems did not force their way into political buildings. They (at least the mainstream ones) never called for violence.

So, it seems that the left, in the end, did believe it was a fair election in terms of ballot numbers, and never suggested that the democratic election be overturned.

The last part of your statement says something entirely different than the first part. I don't think anyone is claiming that Dems haven't worked hard to undermine Trump during his time in office. Just like I don't think anyone claimed Republicans weren't working to undermine Obama when they took control of the Senate. That's politics, good or bad. But that does not correlate to a belief that a fair election should be overturned.

Not really an apt comparison in my opinion.

Bullying is real.

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.

Bullying from internet trolls is real and spans political boundaries. It goes into even things like sports fandom and video game culture. This is a fundamentally different issue than what we're seeing with Parler.

I don't think it's anything new. People used to call political activists' house to make death threats. It's a recurring theme in Selma, the movie about Dr. King.

I never had to deal with this as a community moderator, but these sort of virtue spirals can destroy communities if they're not nipped in the bud.

> 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).

Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?

Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?

Why is it privilege to avoid discussing politics in a gardening group? I'll grant that "take no position" can be a privileged position in some contexts, but a gardening group discussion seems pretty clearly not one of those contexts.

I mean to tie it to a more concrete example: Take the incident with the white lady and the black guy who was bird watching in New York. I'm pretty sure he'd love nothing more than to be able enjoy his pretty chill hobby of bird watching without it becoming racial or political or what have you. But the fact of the matter is that's not his choice.

So yea, being able to say you don't take a position in politics can definitely be a privilege.

Edit: Not to say I think people should really be hounding this lady anyways but just want to explain the point about privilege there.

The black guy was the one who attempted to lure her dog away from her to teach her a lesson by "doing something she's not going to like" to her dog(which certainly sounds like a threat).

He admitted to carrying dog treats with him to do just that. And then he posted the video online, attracting even more attention to what would normally just be a "crazy people are crazy" experience that you get in NY when you confront strangers for bad behavior.

I've been accused by a crazy person on the subway of being a rapist, but that doesn't mean that I'm oppressed for being a male of a certain color. It was just a crazy person doing crazy things.

Yes, it's called Facebook Group Admin privilege. Has nothing to do with race.

It is unreasonable to expect every individual to shoulder every "other" groups genuine or perceived injustices. It just is.

This new flavor of the month which attempts to make silence on an issue a state of complicity and therefore ... a sin is something that I find deeply manipulative.

If that's a privilege - then so is being able to post about political issues in a group that makes posting political issues against the rules.

Fuck off with that bullshit

Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned here. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The best mitigation strategy here is to engage your vendors with private contracts instead of depending on generic terms of service (ToS) alone.

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 agree with this general idea, but also any bespoke service contract approved by a competent attorney will still have clauses for instant-kill under certain circumstances.

For example, no provider would provide service under a bespoke contract obligating them to knowingly host & serve illegal content (because this creates legal liability for the provider).

What is alleged about Parler would likely fit into the instant-kill provisions of even any reasonable bespoke contract.

[Edit: obviously this does not apply to providers specifically in the business of catering to high-risk customers. Stripe doesn't do gambling or porn, but other providers presumably have different pricing or risk mitigation/tolerance and therefore on can use credit cards to pay for these items.]

I think the poster was worried about slippery slope - today they come for the evil men, tomorrow they come for the unpopular men, the next day they come for me. In such a context i assume the poster isnt actually planning to host anything illegal or even distatsteful to current views, so a good contract should be fully negotiatable.

> You could be terminated at any point.

You could be "terminated at any point" regardless of what the contract says if something as bizarre as what happened last week occurs and your platform was an integral part of it. Contracts only go so far. Not everything in human affairs runs like clockwork, contracts are broken all the time.

> 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.

Isn't that what happened, they lost all of their cloud providers because the providers could not justify being part guaranteeing reliable service delivery of under moderated content?

I don't think it's possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property. OP would also need to be a fairly large player to able to negotiate favorable terms with someone like AWS to begin with.

> I don’t think it’s possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property.

Not only is it not possible in the pragmatic sense, I don’t think its legally possible, since knowingly carrying such content is quite often criminal (not just for you, but if the higher-level vendor knows about it its criminal for them), and a contract to commit a crime is usually void.

> 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 actually think that the providers would fall like dominoes. See what Apple and Google did to the app. Once a big company shows you the door because they worry about legal risks and reputational damage, other companies will take note and you'll have a hard time staying on.

You'll have to find a company that does it out of idealism. Or one that is socially disconnected enough that the threats to reputation and legal risks do not apply.

If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you don't like X, then build your own X." I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. My guess is that BitChute is next.

What unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in when the cost of doing business with a company associated with white supremacists, insurrectionists, and murderers outweighs the benefits so much that other private businesses won't sell them things.

Everyone is entitled to force themselves on Apple, Google, Amazon, Twilio, Stripe, et al., right?

I find a depressing majority of the people screaming censorship at the top of their lungs believe people are not entitled to health care or free education in this country. That would be big government. People however are entitled to make you do business with them, even if it's financially damaging to you.

If just Apple suspended them for a clearly identified infringement of codified policy and then gave them steps to correct it, I wouldn't care nearly as much as multiple sectors of industry banning one company within hours of each other. It's the coordination that is terrifying. When a group of powerful people says, "You have to let me do crazy thing, or the boogieman wins," you must forgive me for having doubts. I have heard that too many times to count.

This is happening to normal folks with small businesses too. I have some friends who are being targeted by google and fb, for no good reason as they’re completely in the dark. We need to decentralize the web yesterday.

Why bit chute? Aren't they just a peertube alternative?

They host content that YouTube will not. That seems to be enough. Peertube is federated, and I haven't seen them attack a federated service, yet.

Parler obviously only existed to cater to right wing extrimsm and violent rhetoric. It's the reason they "couldn't" moderate it, as if they did there would be no reason for it to exist.

Reddit is still around even after r/thedonald and other violent / hateful subreddits were on the site and finally banned. The difference is reddit doesn't primarily exist to foster violence and extremism.

> I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep.

Magical?

I believe the commenter is referring to the coordinated collusion of the activity, which is reminiscent of anti-competitive cartels.

I'd expect the bar to remain in exactly the same place.

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.

Just strategically this doesn’t make any sense as banning National Enquirer would draw 100 times more attention to the story. If Bezos wants revenge he’s surely smart enough to get it quietly.

Banning Parler also draws similar attention to it (I’ve never heard of it before today, for one), but it’s a calculated and coordinated (with Google, Apple) move to 1) take them down and 2) send a message to anyone watching. The point is the additional attention here is not unwanted and even desired.

Not to mention such a retaliation would have come at a time when Trump (highly critical of Bezos) was still very much in power and had enough support in congress to use it against him.

Excellent points I agree that this sets a dangerous precedent.

> 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!"

If you host user-generated content, you will have to decide on community standards and do your best to enforce them. This will be expensive. You are legally obligated to police things like terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and even DMCA violations. You are morally obligated to do more than just that, not just by your conscience, but also by the global zeitgeist.

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

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?

You can mitigate anything (i dont think you should, but that is a different question). I dont think the original poster was suggesting that type of thing (more a fear of slippery slope), but for the sake of argument, if they were tor hidden services would be the obvious way to mitigate.

> You can mitigate anything

My point is what this guy seems to want to enable is fundamentally conspiring to commit crimes.

He seems to talk around that, but that's where we are.

Not to put too fine a point on what you said but since lot of people here are saying, in essence, "Unless you do support storming the Capitol then you have nothing to worry about" I think it's worth highlighting with a concrete example that isn't outside the realm of possibility.

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.

Either the baker gets to decide whether to make a gay wedding cake or they don’t. Which one is it??

That's quite a straw man comparison to the scenario I describe.

Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties.

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.

I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers.

> But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.

Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent. And with Parler, I'd assume that that point comes sooner than later. I mean I don't know their funding situation, but I find it reasonable to assume that if they'd built a NOC first they wouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

I'd say if they don't have the means to stand on their own and build all their own mitigations against this sort of attack, then they've bit off more than they can chew.

If their goal is to be a free-speech-above-all platform that is definitely going to piss off both infrastructure providers and the world of people who might attack them, then they better have the technical capabilities to back that up or they're going to get torn to shreds. Nobody else is required to help them in their misguided (in my opinion) endeavor.

And yes, it's possible that such a grand plan takes more resources than they actually have. Not anyone else's problem.

I totally agree. Their situation looks untenable.

I'd love to know the risk-scenarios they considered. Could they imagine getting booted off AWS?

Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented.

Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).

I responded to your claims around DDOS mitigation. At 100 Mbps you're swamped the second a couple cell phones decide to flood you.

100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation.

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).

Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content.

Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your application such that you can move it to another cloud vendor.

If your content is so toxic that other cloud vendors won't accept you either, then maybe the problem isn't with the cloud vendors.

"legal" in a democracy is something that only a court can decide.

I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?

>98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence."

Just imagine how much that would be in Facebook numbers? I think we can block Facebook too, no?

I don't know how the law currently works, but it seems reasonable to me that it should be the responsibility of the government to determine what's legal and what's not. I think Amazon would not be acting improperly if they alerted law enforcement that they suspect illegal activity and then waited for the authorities to issue an official order to take down the content (presumably based on a court order). I get that the current ToS allows Amazon to terminate the relationship unilaterally, but I don't think Amazon has to do that morally. And if they have to do that legally, I think it's fair to ask that the law be changed to allow private organizations selling a platform to not have to determine the legality of the actions of their customers. The FBI, police, and courts can do that.

> Was the parler content legal?

Yes, unless there is a court judgement I missed. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of the land.

But is that Parler breaking the law or its users??

> "encourage and incite violence."

98 examples is nothing. We dealt with an entire year of content on Facebook encouraging and inciting violence but it was okay because it was aligned ideologically with the powers that be.

I personally lost track of how many people just in my own friend's list advocating for "punching nazis", where "nazis" is a generic term for "anyone I strongly disagree with politically". Heck, I saw multiple people post videos of violence against people they consider "nazis" and celebrating it.

Personally, I'm 100% against the violence both last year and on Jan 6th, but it's amazing how egregious the double standard is between last year and Jan 6th.

> 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

Amazon is leading Cloud yes, but it stands at 40% market share at best. Azure/GCP are pretty competent alternatives, though I am not sure if they would not do the same as AWS (probably yes)

The wider impaction to me, is that AWS is setting some precedent, and many people are not fully comfortable with it, and I think it will haunt AWS for a long time to come.

Parler chose to use AWS for their hosting. When you build your company on someone else's platform, you're explicitly giving them that market power.

They needed 300-500 servers according to the CEO. There isn't much choice in the market when it comes to that kind of need, specially when you need to be hosted in the US because you're a political website. Imagine if they were hosted in Russia instead, they would have lost all their credibility.

Was Parler blocked because Amazon did not like it, or because Democrats do not like it, and they have full control of government, and can pass arbitrary laws e.g. to break up Amazon?

Edit: an unfairly flagged comment in reply to this says > Why would democrats break up Amazon, when it helps them in banning the republicans? That will not happen.

That's exactly my point, this is a form of lobbying to stay on good side of the government.

AWS being able to shutdown a company is the fault of that company not having a multi-provider arch.

Amazon can't shut down any company at the push of a button. It can only shut down a company from using its services.

There are many other hosting providers in the world. If Parler hadn't hosted its service on AWS, then Amazon wouldn't be able to shut them down.

It can definitely shut down companies - I used to work at a supermarket that had most of its infra in AWS. If AWS was totally nuked getting systems back up properly would probably have taken months. Even trading would have taken a few days to be fully back.

Even distribution centres operate on the cloud these days.

Cloud migration at any scale isn’t a 24 hour process.

Amazon is not the only cloud provider. Parler could have just as easily been a customer of Microsoft or Google

Hehe as is if those are any better.

It is illegal to conspire to commit violence against the US

Parler didn’t conspire to commit violence against the US.

And it’s actually not illegal to host other people’s illegal speech. It’s super pedantic, but also very important!

So what did Parler do that was illegal?

How is any social media platform up? I understand why Parler was taken down, but why is this not applied to every single website? I'm sure we can find a 'conspiracy to commit violence against the US' in this single article thread

I am not sure why people are treating this like it's new? There is already a massive list of things you can't do on AWS, for example running a spam operation, pirated software trading site, drug trading site, etc. Is it really so surprising that this list also includes running a site where violent attacks are planned?

It's not too different from how you should diversify your income as a Youtuber, especially if you make content about controversial topics. They knew that their platform was going to host controversial content, I'm honestly surprised how little redundancy they had planned for here.

Every week there's a front page story on HN to the tune of "X froze my account and won't tell me why, and their appeal process is totally opaque."

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.

BLM caused the deaths of over 80 people and nobody deplatformed Facebook or Twitter. This is obviously about the belief that republicans are not human.

A nuance: AWS de-platformed Parler for its insufficient moderation on violence-inciting discussion, not for existence of such discussion. Not that I agree with or disagree with AWS decision, but it's worth having a nuanced discussion. A larger problem I see in the US is that many, if not all, nuanced discussions are considered evil by the left or by the right.

Have you seen Parlor? It actually hosted and glorified violent videos. In comments, people were celebrating beating of cops.

As for BLM, I don't know if they have any central location where they plan any violence and then share videos of that.

citation needed

I think you're setting an egregiously false equivalence here. BLM didn't openly plan to kill 80 people on Facebook. And if the right-wingers had merely planned to have protests and some crimes happened to be committed at those protests, Parler wouldn't be shut down now.

At the risk of sounding snide, it appears that if your business plan is to attract the type of users that foment hate and violence ... you are in a risky business.

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

Mitigation: don't try to overthrow a democratic government. If you want to build meinspace, be prepared to secure a server in Switzerland or something.

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.

Even their own lawyers dropped them out of fear....

If you a run a business that violates the terms of service of your vendors, be prepared to be cut off. It's like if I rent an apartment and decide to make meth; I shouldn't be surprised if I get evicted.

exactly. look at whatsapp now for example.

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.

Messages are E2EE, but by default get backed up into your Google/Apple account which are easily accessible by a search warrant, or from a prism backdoor.

It seems like disagreement in any degree can be interpreted as an incitement to violence if you have supporters who are prone to violence. While I support the right of private companies to do as they please, I think that Net Neutrality has a role to play here.

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.

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

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 is easy to see where that trend is going. Little steps by little steps, GAFAs while turn the West in an environment similar to Iran or China when it comes to freedom of speech.

> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward.

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.

Read the TOS before subscribing to a service would be a good start. And have a plan 'B' and if you plan on starting a revolution maybe have a plan 'C', 'D' and 'E' as well just in case.

You’re preaching to the choir. We’ve been having discussions on HN for years about the dangers of swapping the short-term benefits of AWS for the long-term dangers it can bring. I’m sure there’s some Nostradamus on here that predicted this exact situation with Parler. The dangers were obvious and clear to anyone who was paying attention but not everyone was paying attention. Hopefully, this gets managers and CEOs to double-check if the benefits of AWS/EWS truly outweigh the risks.

I'm not sure anyone in the (near) future will be able to guarantee you some sort of "right" that you can host/publish whatever you want and not be held accountable.

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.

I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.

Here are the AWS Service Terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/). You are responsible for understanding and following these as well as the appropriate laws (which probably require the assistance of a lawyer, which I am not, and which is probably a good idea in any case).

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.

The problem is that someone (Parler in this case) would have to actively build automated moderation systems or be philosophically aligned with moderation in order to fulfill the TOS in this case since its the users driving the violation. The baseline shouldn't require them build something, that seems like a burden too far. Suppose the violators were bots, doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?

> doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?

Yes.

If you build your entire business on a platform controlled by one entity and they decide they don't like you then you better hope none of the debt is secured because that's the end.

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.

I would echo the words of that black dude in that show about drugs and cops in Baltimore: "Diversify yo bonds, nigga" aka "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".

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.

> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward.

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.

They used to say the same thing about wiretaps. Now the government can enter your name into xkeyscore and have access to your life

Parler isn't the first app to get cut from app/play store, and it's not the first online service to be given the cold shoulder by its infrastructure providers.

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.

This problem would have been even more pronounced if running from a co-lo/non-cloud entity. Imagine getting a court-ordered shutdown or confiscation of servers for evidence etc. Frankly you would expect a "high"-profile/controversial service like Parler to have at least conceived of the possibility of a take-down from a cloud service and had a plan in place for it. Amazon had already cut ties with Gab last year [1] so this should not have been a huge surprise.

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

Probably to mitigate the way one mitigates against other disasters, such as natural disasters or political upheaval in a nation: have an exit plan to a partitioned cloud environment.

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.

These days you have to create 'financial incentives' just to get people to do the right thing... Every business is going to need crypto. You need to bribe people into doing the right thing to prevent them from being bribed into doing the wrong thing.

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.

Taken from The Book: "don't lend money to someone more powerful than you!". I would say this is a business failure. They should have prepared for that and they did not.

I think the mitigation is "don't build a platform to attract white supremacists banned from other sites and then watch as they use it to plan a riot in the Capitol."

Imagine a hypothetical, well-intentioned free speech focused platform, without censorship and with low moderation: it will attract those people because those people have nowhere else to go. That strategy is a non-starter. The real requirement is that we are pushing for a world of auto-moderation where robots have to approve every single thing we say online - otherwise you are not allowed to let people communicate.

You platform is indeed hypothetical because what you're asking for is essentially impossible. Low moderation just doesn't work at large scale without a substantial number of people suffering from its effects, including harrassment, threats of violence, spamming, and child pornography.

I would say that this hasn't been possible for at least the last 15 years.

Just to be clear about this specific case: There is "evidence" (Twitter posts) coming out that showed that all new users of Parler were shadowbanned by default, until their posts/content were approved by a small group of "right-think" moderators.

So while your hypothetical isn't invalid in general, it's really not what was happening here with Parler.

What they said they were trying to be was not at all what they were actually doing - a common theme in extremist spaces.

But your overall concern about the concentration and centralization of our communications is legit. There's no easy answer there.

The irony. You mean they did exactly what twitter does but on the right wing? They deserve to be digitally obliterated!!!!

Right, if someone wants to build a business and can't do it without making it easier for hate groups and terrorists to organise, why would any government allow the business to exist? It's fundamentally a threat to any nation for it to allow profit from enabling sedition.

The planning was largely done on Facebook https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293

This debate has been happening since Anglin and Cloudflare. There was a similar discussion when Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, and Laura Loomer isn't even allowed to order an Uber anymore.

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

The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised.

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.

No provider is going to sign a contract that forces them to host illegal content that opens them up to liability.

Poster never said he intended to host illegal content.

“Your faith in the legal system is appalling.”

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26

Penalties for non performance is like the most standard thing possible in a contract. Its hardly some unfair clause like you agree not to sue ever. Hell, even without a clause specificly stating penalties, you could still probably sue for damages from breaching a contract. (Obviously in the parler case amazon probably didnt breach, but if you are negotiating your own contract it probably wouldn't allow for arbitrary termination with no notice)

Kinda interesting as a threat model, if 4chan/the wrong people can maliciously use your service enough to get it cancelled / shutdown just for the lols. I imagine a few startups aren’t building moderating content / moderation teams as part of their MVP..

President has been set long ago. From child porn, pirating websites, to al-Qaeda websites. There is nothing new about Parler being kicked off hosting sites. It took me five minutes being on the site to see calls for violence.

It is a reminder to operate with sensitivity to the laws and customs of the land we do business in, even if we don't agree with it.

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

Technically the best mitigation is to use a decentralized service that cannot be censored.

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

I find the "overnight" more shocking than terminating a contract. That they would be so callous toward a customer should make anyone think twice before signing up.

I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t have conversations beforehand. It’s also really black and white - they were proud of their lack of moderation and said it publicly. It’s not like there was a misunderstanding. Plus an org like Parler has its own lawyers. There is no way they weren’t warned of their contractual obligations by their own counsel. They just chose to take that risk.

I wasn't under the table but Parler's CEO claims there was no prior notice.

I think it means that if you blatantly violate their ToS and don't fix it after multiple conversations then you won't be able to use their service.

> specifically targeted at those people for this to happen.

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

I'm not sure there is a real risk. Slippery slope falacy is easy to reach for here.

> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).

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

Parler was filled with posts urging the killing of jews, lefties, BLM supporters, democrats, university professors, and millennials.

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

Why would the bar be lower in the future? This action is really not something any company wants to do. I expect the bar to remain nearly the same.

"Every cloud vendor in the world telling you off" is a particular threat model only usually encountered by literal terrorist groups, torrent sites, Sci-Hub... and now right-wing filter-bubbles.

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.

It appears there is a business opportunity to (re)create infrastructure for use by companies/individuals that have been banned from the mainstream 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.

The end result will probably be two separate frameworks distanced from each other where each side is free to babble away in their echo chambers as much as they want.

We are certainly moving in that direction, unfortunately.

The two big issues that come to mind with this are DNS and SSL certs. AFIK both are really hard spaces to become a "provider", so you end up being reliant on the existing providers to do business with you. Sure there are decentralized solutions to these problems, but none of them really let you operate in the "normal" internet space...

If we're going to talk about universal access obligations then this should be where we start, this is real unavoidable infrastructure.

Yet we don't often see calls for this from anyone worried about deplatforming, they're more worried about having an audience than a right.

I've been kicking around how to do something like that because you need to consider all the layers.

On the app side, you need neutral phones/devices and the app distribution to get apps out there.

On the hosting side, you need the hosting itself (cloud or colo), the DNS and registrars, the SSL to secure it, SMS or emails for verification & resets, and probably a few others.

On the financial side, you need payment processing and the banking system behind it. That's one of the hardest because even if you can handle it, your customers have to be able to send you money from their bank.

All of those (and other components) have been cut off/disrupted for various organizations in the last year or two.

I'm sure that alternate platforms will pop up. Parler is an alternate platform. However, how good will those platforms be? There are already many clouds, and a lot of them have trouble competing. Stripe also has many competitors, but few of them are that good.

I’m wondering — this has been downvoted, but the replies all seem to agree that the comment is true/reasonable. Am I misunderstanding the comments, or are there other thoughts on why this is an objectionable observation?

> You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen.

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.

How does ISIS and other terrorist orgs host their propaganda? I see a pretty funny future where Trump supporters and ISIS work together to figure out where they can host their content.

Don’t run a social network designed to host right wing extremists, and you should be fine.

Parler was not "designed to host right wing extremists", same way 1st amendment was not designed to provide free speech to "right wing extremists".

It was designed to provide free speech to everyone. And hypothetical right wing extremists occasionally use it same way they use telephones and supermarkets.

This looks a lot like the gun discussion. Some people believe X is just a tool, other people say because X is used for doing bad things, it should be banned. Technically this is exactly the line separating left from right, I don't think there will be a conclusion or agreement on this.

These companies are sucking up to their new democratic overloads so make sure you do not anger them.

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.

"Taliban have a twitter account"

President Trump came to an agreement with the Taliban, so somebody seems to think they're legitimate. (https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-usa-int/...)

"Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading"

Which comment Twitter removed. (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/a-bigot-without-principl...)

1. Since when Twitter started complying to Trump?

2. Tweet stayed up until French government got involved. Mahatir is still free to post do it again.

What about China and Iran? Last I checked Trump don't like them so why are they up?

> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.

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.

> Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about.

What is your definition of a terror cell? Do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google qualify as terror cells for competing for billion dollar contracts with the DoD? This is an absurd benchmark with no basis in reality.

https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-clo...

It's really not, and has never been. A group of people literally organized on Facebook and brought guns to overtake the capitol. It's pretty cut and dry. Again, nobody would've expected Microsoft to support ISIS' tech. Businesses have always pulled away from extremist groups like this, as is their right to do.

The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant. If your stance is "Our own government is a terror cell", well obviously then our entire society is gone anyway, so why even bother discussing the ethics of tech in america at all? But obviously this stance is just hyperbole in an attempt to dismiss the validity of claiming the rioters as legitimate terrorists.

And even by your own example, when has the DoD ever stormed the capitol? Or attempted to overthrow the US government? Spoiler: they haven't. And these insanely silly attempts at implying that legitimate businesses are under the same category as fascist extremists is a joke. This tech precedent pearl clutching is such an insanely bad look it's difficult to even fathom. My assertion is simple: when you try to overthrow a country's government, companies in that country don't want to work with you. The waters are muddier with respect to overthrowing other people's governments, but the DoD has never once attempted to overthrow the US government. There has never been an AWS-supported US coup (before last week). SO the "whatabouts" aren't even relevant.

You are making a false equivalency.

Parler exists solely to provide a place for right wing ideology to escape from facebook and twitter’s moderation and fact checking policies.

It has already been used as one of the primary means of coordinating an attempted coup, and it was being used to coordinate subsequent attempts on the 19th and 20th. This is the activity which was not effectively being moderated, and arguably it was the kind of activity that it was created to foment.

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