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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

And here we see the problem with centralized social media. Did anyone think that handing control over to megacorps would end differently?

Today it’s Parler, tomorrow it’s whatever political ideology Big Tech finds inconvenient.

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Parler had the same "political ideology" the week before the violence. No one cared about their ideology. Once specific violent acts occured, and calls went un-addressed on Parler for more violence, people started to care.

The violence is the issue, not the ideology.

> The violence is the issue, not the ideology.

If this was true,

- Twitter would be banned for hosting the heads of mass-murdering regimes

- Facebook would be banned for CSAM and violent content

- Reddit would be banned for the false Boston Bomber doxxing and subsequent murder

As long as Parler is free to use any other provider, or to host their own servers, I see no problem. I was not popular when I said that bakers may refuse (gay) clients, I will not be popular when I say that Amazon may refuse to host Parler.

Please stop pretending this was motivated only by "political ideology".

The facts are pretty simple here. Parler had illegal content on their servers and refused to moderate it effectively. Companies asked them to fix their moderation issue and they refused, this is the consequence.

They aren't being kicked off because they said "I like Trump" they are being kicked off for inciting violence and hosting content that called for some truly horrendous acts.

Please stop pretending that every other major social media platform does not or has not hosted users calling for - or actually committing - truly horrendous acts. Parler is hardly the first social media company that has had violent users.

"Handing control over." Seriously, do you have a realistic alternative? If we are going to have social media, at scale, in a capitalist society, it's hard to see how there's much of an alternative to for-profit companies. Do you want the government to run Twitter?

In some ways, yes. For example, Parler could self-host instead of relying on cloud offerings. For something controversial that will likely face legal challenges, this seems like the only reasonable way to do things (see: wikileaks, sci-hub etc.)

> For example, Parler could self-host instead of relying on cloud offerings

what do you think the difference between AWS' terms of service, and the terms of service of a data center will be?

the last data center contract i signed had most of the same stuff, they just had to return my hardware if they were kicking me out.

We could rebuild social media on the same principles as the World Wide Web, where it's not run by any single group at all. (I'd argue that's actually what we had back in the days of the "blogosphere".)

Why not decentralized/federated services run by by various communities all across the world?

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