How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=2

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=5

I'm generally anti-regulation, but one potential consideration is to apply the same standards of eviction to cloud hosts as we do to landlords.

I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations.

Even if the landlord insists on a contract abrogating this, it's unenforceable. Policy restricts this because 1) landlords generally have very high negotiation power, and 2) tenants rarely read the fine print. It seems to me that both conditions are approximately true for the major cloud providers.

If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. AWS/GCP/Gmail/iCloud could ban you as a customer, but only with 90 days notice. Otherwise, immediate eviction could only occur if it involved legally codified egregious behavior, and would require a court judgement.

I think this would eliminate nightmare scenarios where somebody suddenly finds themselves locked out of their Google Drive and Gmail for some algorithmic mishap. But it would put very little operating burden on the cloud providers.

I... don't understand? You were an unpopular speech platform. I worked in porn for 20 years. I know what it's like to get kicked out of AWS, so does John Young. Why weren't they dockerized and prepared to move containers and backups at the drop of a hat? Why didn't they have hot spares elsewhere? There are literally thousands of hosting companies running the gamut from penny-ante to larger platforms like Rackspace, operating in a hundred countries, many of which don't know and don't wanna know what you're doing. The same is true to a lesser extent of registries. And Apple/Google kicking you out of their stores? You can still bookmark a mobile-friendly web app onto the home screen of an Apple device. You're not going to lose Qspiracy fans and nazis just because they have to do an extra step to get to your site.

Nevermind that maybe, just maybe, if your platform users advocate for violent revolution, you're going to have a harder go of things. Prior to approximately October, 2001, there was a taleban.com too. I didn't read any hand-wringing when they got the axe. Newsflash: At least Tor can't remove you.

The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom.

Perhaps mine is a bit of a strange/controversial view among the HN crowd - but I find the conflation of "right to free speech" and "right to a platform for said speech" to be odd.

I don't agree that "infringement of free speech" can happen in a commercial context. The right to free speech is the right that you cannot have government force act on you for what you are saying; e.g. the government has no right to tell you "don't say this or it will have consequences". As for private contracts: Trying to enforce "free speech" that must not be infringed upon in private contracts would also mean all NDAs are always void, and would be a huge intrusion into another liberty: That of entering into arbitrary agreements with each other.

The .cn regulator cracking down on Ant Financial because they did not like what Jack Ma said is an infringement on free speech. A private business actor deciding to terminate a contract because they don't like the business partner is not.

Related: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/midtown-uniform-patagonia-will-...

Glenn Greenwald never disappoints me. He is spot on once again. For years all of these conspiracy theories, calls for violence and allegations of fraud make it to the front page of Twitter/Facebook/YouTube for any user that shows interest in similar topics. However, the day that a competitor decides to openly embrace this content, Silicon Valley goes against it like a pack of predators.

I guess they want a monopoly in being the only platforms allowed to subvert democracies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48349671

In the early 1990s, if you wanted to have an online presence you needed to buy hardware, connect it to the internet and run some software on it.

If Parler had done this, the ways they could have been "destroyed" would have been:

  1. refusal to provide DNS for their address
  2. refusal to certify an SSL certificate (not absolutely required but more than just a detail in 2021)
  3. refusal by an ISP to carry their bits

I believe that even the progressive end of the tech community would have been extremely negative about any company that did any of these 3 things. I also think its very unlikely that any of them would have happened, though the Gab case provides some evidence to the contrary.

Instead, Parler followed the unfortunate dumbification of online presence over the last 20-30 years, and instead of doing the above, contracted with a large corporation to take care of things for them. The large corporation decided they didn't want to do that anymore, and Parler lost its online presence.

Parler is not exactly unique in having made this choice. But perhaps the consequence of the choice they made might convince more people/organizations/corporations to think a bit more clearly about the type of hosting infrastructure they really want/need. If Parler had followed the self-hosted pathway, I think it is extremely unlikely (though sure, not impossible) that they would be offline at this point.

When we used to talk about "monopolies", we referred to specific private enterprises. But these companies aren't actually monopolies. Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on social networking, there's Twitter and TikTok and Snap too. AWS doesn't have a monopoly on cloud infra, there's GCP and Azure and Oracle and Digital Ocean too.

The author knows that these companies aren't actually monopolies, so he insinuates that the whole region (Silicon Valley) is a monopoly. And one of these companies (Amazon) it isn't even located in the Silicon Valley region; it's located in the state of Washington.

So really the author has expanded the target of the ire to a whole industry. That is to say, the tech industry has a monopoly on the tech industry.

Meta: Hey @dang and crew, I just want you all to know how much I love this community and all the hard work you do- reading articles like this makes me aware of how much effort it must take to keep HN a fun civil place. Thank you for all your efforts.

As someone who makes a boatload of money in large part because tech companies are not regulated, I have to say - it's time to regulate large platforms like utilities. You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house. All you can do is sue (if that). It should be the same with oligopolistic cloud and social media platforms, since "breaking them up" doesn't really seem workable.

Glenn is wrong that Parler is pro-free speech. They censor all kinds of things, including those with different political views.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...

It's funny how the same group of people who say things like "government should get out of the way of business" cry foul as soon as those unregulated businesses do something they don't like.

How is this a show of monopolistic force?

Its like a a half dozen interdependently owned companies each choosing on their own to not associate with Parler.

If you piss off everyone at the same time and everyone decides to not do business with you, thats not a monopoly issue.

How do HN readers, who I presume would generally support safe harbor provisions for free speech, common carrier rules etc, not find it deeply alarming that this is happening? Even if Parler hosted straight up illegal content, surely the proportional response is to block those accounts, not the entire platform? If no, why aren't we deplatforming Twitter or Facebook next?

> "That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country. If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor."

I'm not buying the premise of this argument. If anything, Parler, a social network, was a (diminutive) competitor to Facebook and Twitter. Amazon, Google and Apple do not come to mind as companies standing to gain by destroying it.

The author seems to have an axe to grind against companies he perceives as monopolies and is stretching the facts to support his world view.

There is a lot of misinformation in this thread.

Read the letter [AWS sent them][1]. This isn't AWS punishing a corporation for having different political views, this is AWS not taking on the risk that their infra contributes to violent acts.

[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

A big reason this is happening IMO is due to the inaction of the government. I don't want companies to bring down sites, however the government seemingly actively refuses to take action. There is precedent for limiting free speech in the case of violence apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action And it seems like there is some correlation with communications being had on Parler and the insurrection on January 6th.

It is unclear how this could be enforced in the internet domain, but maybe the website could have huge fines levied against it or criminal charges levied against the founders (so not the posters) if its possible to prove violent intent. Its also not a very slippery slope. We have hate crime laws, but they are notoriously hard to prove. I imagine violent intent on the internet will be similarly hard to prove and only be applied to the extremely obvious cases.

Its also a bit weird. Nobody made a huge deal about PornHub (from what I can tell) being forced to take down tons of content due to Visa, because guess what. Its hard to disagree that the source of a lot of content on PornHub is troubling and very likely illegal. This isn't that much different from what Amazon and other companies are doing to Parler. The intent of a lot of posters (even if its a minority) seems to be to incite violence. Parler actively didn't try to monitor the content and boom, it got taken down. I imagine if PornHub didn't make a good faith attempt to remove a lot of content, we'd have seen Amazon (or whoever hosts PornHub).

America (and my own country the UK) really need to have a serious reckoning with a whole mess of things: Fake news, Populism, weak leadership, short termism, lack of compromise and partisanship, the rise of extremism, censorship and cancel-culture, demographics vs democracy issues, racism, over-zealous anti-racism, and win-at-all-cost politicians to name but a few.

But it isn't ready or willing to even start.

Until then, it's hard to really care about any of this. I don't like censorship or big companies deciding what's acceptable. But someone has to, and no one else is willing to oppose some of the worst people and events we've had in generations.

OK. This guys an idiot. Just like the developers of Parler are.

If you rely completely on third party vendors and don’t understand and know their TOS then you only have yourself to blame.

But calling Amazon a monopoly of the cloud is ridiculous. They could use A litany of other providers. Oracle, 1to1, Microsoft, linode, digital ocean, vulture. The list is almost endless.

Diversity of hosting is key to uptime and scaling.

Also, with a little bit of work, they could deploy open stack on their own servers in a matter of hours to days if they weren’t complete noobs.

Does AWS monopolize cloud services?

The complaint Parler filed in its lawsuit against AWS cites 30% market share. It also mentions they've been unable to find another hosting company, though it doesn't go into why. The antitrust claim wasn't that AWS cut them off. That was the breach of contract claim. The antitrust claim was based on allegations that AWS and Twitter just did a multi-year cloud deal, and conspired to shut Parler down. Section 1 anticompetitive conduct claim. IIRC, the relevant market was microblogging, not cloud infra.

The Nadler Committee report Glenn cites puts AWS at 24% of US spend and "close to half" of global spend on cloud services. US courts don't typically find "market power" below 50% in the relevant market. The concept of abusing "dominant position", mentioned over and over in the report, comes from European competition law, not US antitrust law.

Anecdotally, I use cloud services and I don't use AWS at all anymore. As an attorney who advises on terms of service for cloud services, I'd also expect every major cloud platform has broad "acceptable use" or similar terms that let them refuse or terminate customers that cause more problems---law enforcement requests, law suits, marketing crises---than they're worth.

A number of my cloud clients rack their own iron. Others intentionally seek out providers and services with permissive or aligned activist reputations. Those services often cost more, both because they're smaller and because they deal with more warrants, lawsuits, DMCA takedowns, &c. &c. &c. I personally prefer to patronize smaller, upstart providers. Which is only possible if you don't bite the hooks---k8s, vendor-specific APIs, and so on.

I still don't know what to think about this.

On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here.

On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?

Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. But in the absence of political will for these laws, what should be done? I think we are better off without Parler, but how can we do that in an even handed and consistent way?

So he goes on and on [0] about how great Parler is/was. But what I've seen reported is that:

  . You were shadow banned until the right users voted you up
  . To get more privileges, you had to scan photo ID
  . Influencers were being paid to post "organic" material without disclosing it https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/how-parler-app-plans-to-make-money.html 

https://twitter.com/donk_enby has a series of posts based on what she found as she downloaded all of Parler.

So it was constructed as an echo chamber where people were being paid to push products.

[0]"In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants."

This sounds a lot like Fox News claim of being "Fair and Balanced". You might think their point of view is fair but there's no way that it's balanced.

While I generally disagree with Greenwald, he makes a good point here:

> So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?

You ban people from Twitter they go to Parler, you destroy Parler they go somewhere else where no opposite point of view will ever be herd and no dialog can ever happen. This is how you create domestic isis. Is there a patriot act 2.0 already in the making to guard US from this self made media sponsored disaster?

Does anybody know a place where moderate conservative can have adult conversations? No Q-Anon nonsense. No white supremacy. No baseless accusations against political opponents. A place where people carefully consider their positions, post research from reputable sources, and avoid the absolute nuttery that infests all of the conservative spaces on Reddit, Parler, Facebook, Twitter, etc...?

One of the reasons moderate Republicans are going the way of the Dodo is they have no place to form a community. It seems like every time someone starts one the entire place immediately veers off into whackjob city.

Would Twitter/FB have lived up to these standards early on?

It seems like any new social platform could be pretty easily crushed under these standards. So the only way we will see a new social media platform is if they build their own data centers, and can grow without having an app.

And maybe they need their own browser, maybe client hardware like phones and tablets?

It seems unlikely that a startup would succeed under these conditions. So we better be happy with our current overlords (and whatever humans happen to be in charge of those companies in the future).

This is what happens if you build a platform on somebody else's platform: you're subject to their whims. Any and all people who make their living off of YouTube understands this, and they intentionally diversify so they have options if their primary platform becomes unavailable.

Outside of that, though, I couldn't care less that fascist organization platforms are being tanked. Free speech as an abstract principle has been used as cover for fascism in the U.S. for the better part of the past half century.

Is it good that unelected people have this much power? No. Did they do the right thing here? Yes

Here is the most important paragraph in the article. Can anyone confirm or refute the part about Parler's TOS and moderation?

It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.

A monopoly is composed of “one” entity. It’s in the name. This is not a fair characterization of what happened.

Ya why would AWS have any reason to stop providing service to a customer who didn’t follow their terms of service and took pride in a festering a community of terrorists who are now making credible threats to attack aws and recently tried to overthrow the US government in a violent coup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745908

The mental gymnastics of the people defending Parler on here are wild. If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.

Think of this analogy: Almost every driver in the US breaks traffic laws every time they drive. They speed, cross a line, don't come to a complete stop at stop signs, etc. Imagine that there was a company in charge of doling out violations, and only conservative drivers were having their licenses revoked.

Every platform has people who violate the TOS, and by that standard, they all should be deplatformed. But that is not happening. You cannot say with any level of proof that Parler was worse at moderating content than any of the other social platforms

> how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

From the start, this stood out to me as a very faulty premise. How exactly was Parler, a social media site, a competitor to Amazon, Google, or Apple? It would be different if this were Facebook, but we're talking about ecosystems/infrastructure vs a single app/website.

Also how can the power of three separate companies be a monopoly? The argument seems to be that Silicon Valley is itself a monopoly, except Silicon Valley is only a geographic location.

The left has been censored and deleted enough times from social media and regular media, that this is a cause for concern. Any laws which restruc freedom of speech could come back to haunt us.

> Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler.

Presumably, this was of the first 13 people to be charged in US District Court (when about 40 others were charged in D.C. Superior Court). And maybe it's true of those 13, though “a Parler executive told me...none appear” seems to be below the threshold of factual information that a responsible journalist would rest any conclusion on besides “that’s what Parler is advancing as a PR position”.

But clearly there were plenty of people there with active Parler accounts, even if they haven't yet been arrested: https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/?utm_s...

This article deliberately creates a narrative that portrays Google, Amazon, and Apple as alarming monopolistic roles, which has nothing to do with their decisions to remove Parler. The main concern here is national security, instead of showing off their regulation power (which is an aspect these tech giants always try to conceal).

The narrative in the article such as "how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor" looks absurd to me. The competitors of parler Is Facebook, Twitter, i.e. social media platforms, NOT Google, Amazon, and Apple.

It feels like the author deliberately misused these kinds of association to trigger irrelevant focus.

I feel like you have the right to free speech. You don't have a right to a platform though. If you want to spread your hate person to person go for it. We're not going to broadcast your nonsense to the world.

How this cesspool got built is a metaphor for the wingnuts who used it.

Most of us here know - if you want a resilient, censorship-free service, you can still: buy your own physical servers, rent data centre space (or a garage), buy multiple transit pipes to ensure traffic can get to them from a variety of places. You can move your servers around if you have to and keep your sovereignty despite everything else changing. It's how the internet was designed! Amazon, Google, Apple and most other private companies can go whistle if they want you offline.

Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom, internet patriots!

Instead they built everything on top of the conveniences and goodwill of a single US company, with no backup plan. Hardly living in the wild west - and that's this mob down to a tee. Rich, well-connected dorks who desperately need the society they organise to tear down - why be surprised when the society hits back in such a tiny way as terminating their AWS account?

If this is censorship, I'm a bowl of noodle soup.

This is the beginning of the end for America. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with what someone says, a free society depends on freedom of expression. It's the first right in the Bill of Rights for a good reason. Layers and layers of legal loopholes make politically biased corporate censorship perfectly legal. I weep for those whose livelihood depends on social media and e-commerce, because they now must live in fear of having their lives destroyed for expressing an opinion. Or for no reason at all.

Parler was providing material support to terrorists. Not cutting off Parler would also be providing material support to terrorists.

This Administration publicly announced a policy of maximum prosecution of offenses connected in any way to domestic civil unrest, in general (now, at the top this was obviously, though not on its face, politically targeted at their opponents, but the career prosecutors called on to execute the policy are perhaps less likely to apply it narrowly in that way), and, in specific, both the D.C. AG and the US Attorney for the District of Columbia have separately indicated that they will be actively pursuing all connections out from the attack on the Capitol, including incitement, in the DC AG’s case explictly including that which may have been committed by the sitting President’s inner circle, and, though charges would need to be held until after he leaves office, the President himself.

There's a reason people are fleeing from any material connection to the terrorists or anyone seen to have a connection who isn't themselves actively cutting ties with them.

Ben Thompson provides a more nuanced analysis, including useful background for engaging with a lot of the questions posed in the threads here: https://stratechery.com/2021/internet-3-0-and-the-beginning-...

People complain that this violates free speech rights but what about the rights of those at AWS, Twitter, etc? They have the right not to do business or associate with these people.

There is no "right to be broadcast" or "right to be published" in the right to free speech. You have the right to say it, but you don't have the right to force others to listen, read or see it - nor are publishers or conduits required to broadcast or transmit it.

Your online "self" does not exist. There is no such thing as a right to free speech in an online sense as there is no shared utility that must accept all speech. Every step of the way is owned by a business - be it your ISP (which is not a utility - at least at the moment), a platform provider, or content publisher, or web infrastructure provider. All of them can and do have Terms of Use that any user must comply with in order to use their service. Unless/until that changes, any discussion of "right" to free speech online is patently ridiculous.

I used to be a fan of Greenwald, but after seeing his failure to condemn the Rs (and Russia), got very disillusioned.

Also, he is propagating lies:

https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457?s=2...

It's called a boycott. It's not a "monopolistic force" when they're many different companies ranging from lawyers and accountants to cloud providers and app stores.

Boycott: "withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest."

Parler destroyed itself by hosting illegal content while having the fact that it doesn't moderate anything as a core part of it's advertising.

If Apple and Google can do whatever they want on their platform (where they have a combined 99.8% market share in the US), then what's to stop AT&T/Verizon/CenturyLink/Comcast from doing whatever they want on their platform, the internet?

What all these companies (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Visa etc...) did was textbook market coordination [1]. Nothing illegal or crazy about it, it happens all the time on different levels.

What people should be griping about is that they put so much faith and trust into private organizations that are not the commons or public services and have no obligation to anyone beyond the contract that they enter into (ToS etc...).

[1] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/economics-2/market-coord...

Finally someone gets it: "No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians."

I for one excited about the decentralized tools that will be developed and adopted as a result of Silicon Valley's censorship.

Is Substack becoming the Parler of journalism in a way? It seems to be attracting "overton window" challengers from both sides, but I wonder if it's going to devolve into a cesspool in it's own way.

What happened to glenn greenwald?

I considered him a respected journalist, but this article doesn't seem like it's either balanced or fact-checked.

Has there been something going on with him? is he alright?

Questions like "do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech" are getting ahead of the game.

First, why was it that these supposedly too-powerful tech giants could be intimidated into allowing activity that was clearly against ToS to go on for years before they grew a pair?

"Free speech" in privately owned spaces is a difficult problem. i would settle for even handed enforcement of ToS and a more transparent ToS appeal process.

I see a lot of people saying that Parler was only used to promote hate.

How where they able to determine this?

"free speech" is like the power of pardon. In that until toxic individuals insisted on testing its most extreme boundaries it was allowed to remain, in theory, nearly unlimited.

"Free Speech" is a great thing when it's used with wisdom and solid judgment. It can be a vehicle for insight, innovation, and new ways to think about the world. This reflects the constructive uses of "free speech"

If you look at the other side of the coin you have these eruptions of toxic individualism. The power of "free speech" isn't used for constructive reasons. Instead it's a show of force. I am going to say this and there is nothing you can do to stop me. This has continued even as we see real material setbacks manifest because of this capricious use of "free speech"

Returning for a moment to the power of the pardon. It's likely we will see that power reigned in. It was never scrutinized before because the wielders of that power always used it responsibly and judiciously. I think we're going to have to turn the same scrutiny to speech on the internet. In the end you can point the fingers at the selfish few that ruined a good thing for the rest of us.

The author uses the word "united" liberally, implying there was some kind of collusion between Amazon, Apple and Google. I would imagine it was quite the opposite, they each would have independently banned/limited Parler regardless of what the other company did. Parler also doesn't compete with any of those companies. It competes with Facebook and Twitter. So where's the anti-competitive conduct?

This take strikes my as a bit absurd. You have to take a pretty all-encompassing view of 'tech' for it to make sense. Apple success on the shoulders of a wide app developer ecosystem, not on the narrower set of other tech titans. Google, via Android, is in a similar spot. And AWS is even further afield.

Two names not included in the de-platforming accusations here are Facebook and Twitter. If anybody of the tech titans were to benefit from this cynical take on the actions against Parler, it was them.

SV is not one entity, and each of the five listed above has very different goals for themselves, so I'm pretty skeptical of this conspiratorial perspective.

I understand the sense that these things are monopolistic, but of course there are real alternatives. They are harder, and more expensive, but the cost is borne by the transgressor of pretty reasonable common norms (don't tolerate promotion of violence).

Parler gets to join Stormfront and all the torrent sites on the lower decks not because Apple, Google and Amazon are knocking out nascent competition, but because those sites violate reasonable, privately set and moderated rules.

Is Parler content, or a service? If the former, then taking it down seems reasonable. If the latter, horrifying.

Of course it's both, like all social media.

The content is horrible now, but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that it would have broadened quite a bit. It was a likely home not just for political extremists, but also quite acceptable content that's being deplatformed elsewhere, like firearms-related content.

When it comes to baking cakes for gay weddings or offering birth control in health insurance plans the far-right considers the discretion of a business to determine how it is run inviolable.

When it’s their own interests at stake for the same reason, suddenly it’s unconscionable that a private company should exercise such unilateral control.

Funny how that works.

Legally they have the right to refuse service but ethically they owe the public. However "Free Speech" does not entitle people to Freely Lie. As we have seen the wrong words from the right person can cause the loss of life. The police officer did not deserve to die to further the political ambitions of a few morally/ethically bankrupt individuals.

Parler can recreate itself on another platform if they wish. Gab is still up. It is just as disgusting. The Constitution only guarantees that Congress shall pass no laws prohibiting free speech. The last time I checked Amazon or Twitter cannot pass legislation.

Free speech is prevented by the use of force. We held an election. The results where not what some people liked. They tried to cancel the people's voice. That is the real speech suppression here.

In business, the customer is getting value from the economies of scale of the business, while the business collects their margin to further grow those economies of scale. If the customer is reducing the value for other customers, then they are breaking the virtuous cycle of the business. This is unstable and will result in either the customer or the business being hurt. If the business is hurt, all of its customers are hurt to some degree because the cost will be passed onto them. This is a matter of consumer protection. Bad actors who reduce the value of other customers should not be tolerated. Simply sharing vendors with Parler had costs for other companies and reduced the value from doing business with the vendor.

If a site did nothing but post links to copyrighted/ pirated songs, it would get banned. We know this because we've seen it happen over and over.

If a site posted links to houses where people were on vacation and discussed best ways to break into them. It would get banned. Nobody would complain.

Why is it that a site which is essentially built to allow people to discuss violent crimes against people is supposed to be tolerated? We should tolerate it because it's discussing violent crimes against politicians? I don't even think it's limited to that regardless.

Parler was created so people could discuss things which were banned on other sites for being too violent and had too much hate speech. It's unofficial charter is based on supporting criminal activities.

I don't understand why people are acting like this is free speech when so many similar crime-based sites are not tolerated.

"Freedom of the press belongs primarily to him who owns one."

--A.J. Liebling, quoted from memory.

Next will be DNS, then encryption. If you’re more than 25 old you already know this.

Many comments here mentioned free speech though constitution only stipulates that congress should make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Surely a person is within his rights to reject such protest happening in his own backyard when it comes to the right to assembly. Why can't Apple, a private company, forbid an app from its own appstore? It is a matter of monopoly, if Apple, Google and Facebook alike are acting like market regulators, since they together owns the market itself when it comes to mobile app consumption, which is traditionally something only the government is capable of doing.

This is just a good ole' fashioned reactionary claw back. It's not a show of force. I feel bad for Parler, they got the short end of the stick. But can't have your cake and eat it too.

> That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

I think I heard this point before about it trending to most popular for a fleeting moment. Does anyone have specific dates when that occurred and how long that trend lasted? Where exactly is this information conveyed, in the app stores themselves? Is there some archived location I can go look up to verify the veracity of the claim?

Maybe I'm wrong but this isnt about politics, its about violence to the public. Only when that line was crossed did private companies concluded their terms of service were breached.

It feels like the tech giants are dipping their toes into partisan politics and they don't like the message more than the tactics.

For example, if BLM had occupied the capital does anyone think that BLM would have been removed from the big tech platforms within two days or the response would be remotely similar? Although BLM is a much better cause, there were fringe elements that advocated violence for change that received no widespread tech backlash. Furthermore, there were BLM protests for months in nearly every state capital and Seattle had an occupied portion for weeks with no similar response.

Sure, perhaps in this case BLM is such a better cause than Trump's election shenanigans. However, couldn't someone on the center or right could see this as a problematic precedent? Today it's clear cut, but in the future it could be 'agree with the left or be 'cancelled''?

We just saw the awesome power of Big Tech go from "theoretical" to "wow, they actually did it".

The reasons are not as important as the fact that it happened.

Power doesn't truly exist until it's exercised, because you don't really know how things will play out. Now we do know how it plays out: exactly like we feared.

An unsypathetic "victim" to experiment on with their overwhelming strength. Now it's just a matter of who is next and when. It's OK, that victim might be evil also.

Uhhh, no. If you know you are going to be attracting users with some extreme views, make sure you have a strategy to scale up your moderation tools and staff, or at least APPEAR to be doing it. Their "oh, it's just too hard to moderate" argument is pretty pathetic. Even Youtube, in the make or break moment with copyright holders, struck a deal with Viacom so that they may survive. That's how you build a "tech" company.

> That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country

It became the most downloaded app _because_ Apple gave them the 1 day ultimatum to start moderating their content. Only then more people heard of the app and downloaded it before it’s off the store.

From the piece: > It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque.

It is the same to me as saying “it is true one can find sexually explicit images of children on a dark net pedo site”. Parler was made to harbour the kind of content which is getting purged by any platform caring about not appearing as a Daily Stormer outpost.

Al Queda Media has issued a statement in support of Parler, wishing them success in their campaign to destroy the United States.

If this is a call to regulate the internet then it is now a utility and must be treated as such. That would essentially have to ask big tech to be broken up. The model we have now does not treat the internet and its platforms as a utility. I am not sure if we can even do a middle ground. It is either one or the other.

We have discussed this in my workplace (a bank) to reconsider lifting our k8s and shifting it to a cloud provider from our data centres. I imagine this is a conversation many other companies re going to have specially when those companies are outside of USA and using US companies services.

How Silicon Valley, fearing prosecution under 18 U.S. Code § 2383, dropped Parler like radioactive waste.

Looks like there is already a replacement for Parler:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... of-monopolistic/comments

Is it ok to say that anything I can put on a placard and walk around a city displaying without getting arrested or breaking any law should be considered acceptable free speech on the internet? Just trying to separate the medium from the message.

Honest Question. At what point do service providers like AWS become utilities? Should they?

Why aren't Google, Apple, AWS free to dissociate themselves from trouble brewing?

Was it really monopolistic?

server hosting isn’t a monopoly, everyone has access to the web on their phone even when app stores drop apps

they may have had problems getting managed services on the big providers but there are many many other options

Whack-a-mole. Users will move to decentralized platforms or other providers in no time. In the past 72 hours alone, more than 25 million new users from around the world joined Telegram, an app built by Russians.

The whole free speech debate boils down to this, Do you think we have enough freedoms, do you think that every civil liberty is now afforded to everyone. The Civil Rights Movement in the 60s was considered hateful and violent at one point, without free speech they would have been driven into the sea. Gay and Trans rights were once considered not valid speech as well. Without Unregulated and uncontrolled speech. All of these things could have been labeled as hateful speech, hateful to white people or hateful to the traditional family unit. Any talk about limiting speech by the government or social media only dictates that we have enough freedoms and liberties and anything new that comes up is fair game to be labeled as "hate speech"

While I understand the motive for the article, should service provider companies really have to be egalitarian? What happened to the likes of "No shoes, no shirt, no service"?

Once again, if you have alternate beliefs. You are banned from the public square.

Free speech is dead in America. The only speech allowed, is the one the left allows. Long live fascism.

Prove me wrong.

Also: how Silicon Valley makes companies like Parler possible.

Or, "How Parler outsourced nearly every critical aspect of its business, incurring massive risk in pursuit of maximizing profits." This is the risk of the modern, ultra-lean online enterprise. Parler got kicked off for knowingly providing a communications platform for terrorists. But other businesses that ride along on the backs of FAANG, like the business equivalent of remora eels, have been similarly affected by factors out of their control like changing search algorithms and shifting app store policies. It's a risk of running a business on top of someone else's business.

Just another confused person wondering why they just don't own their entire stack? If you ain't a rose don't plant yourself in a garden.

It's time for red states to create their own country and the rest of the US should be renamed to something like Censored States of America (CSU).

Redline the hell out of your contract or follow the standard "Don't be a problem for us" rules. It's really not that hard.

I was a big fan of Glenn Greenwald starting in the W administration. What went wrong with him?

The worst is that most of his current criticisms have considerable truth, which he destroys with his focus on bad examples.

Yes, it is a bad thing that FAANG have too much power, but removing Parler, a racist hate site where people blatantly plan violent crimes, is the world's most terrible example.

There isn't going to be _any_ model of an internet we want to have where sites which encourage violence will be acceptable. So what's his problem?

The speculated anticompetitive behavior wouldn't be described as monopolistic, it'd be horizontal conduct. Tsk tsk, Greenwald.

> In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them.

Sure, Parler isn't going to serve you a custom feed with that data, but what are they doing with it? They collect an insane amount of PII to create an account, when compared with alternatives Reddit and Twitter.

On another note, this whole article is written in bad faith:

- The AppStore screen shot shows Parler at the top of the social media list on Jan 8th, when it was trending because the impending ban, but the image is intended to show Parler as a more popular app. Bad Faith.

- The claim that there was a united attack is unsubstantiated, and, in order with Occam's Razor, it is far more believable that these companies banned their support of Parler as a response to violations of ToS from those companies than any sort of conspiracy.

- In referencing the Congressional report on anti-competitive practices, the article seeks to conflate the actions taken against Parler with anti-competitive behavior. This doesn't come close to being anti-competitive. ToS were violated, and private companies have to right to not host whatever they want, and the right to moderate it however they want.

- The article seeks to conflate the actions of some mega corporations with _all_ liberals, claiming all liberals cheered for this. That is also unsubstantiated mudslinging.

- The article overall seeks to conflate freedom of speech with access to private platforms and mass audiences. This is not the reality. Parler itself may have promoted itself as a free-speech platform, but that was only true if you agreed with the common opinion on the platform, and anyone who promoted dissenting ideas there were banned.

The whole article is a bad-faith farce, and should be treated as such. Ignore it.

There are real points to be made about how the behavior of these companies might impact discourse, whether they have too much power, and more. However, this bad faith argument is a distraction from meaningful discourse.

No one sheds a tear for Parlor, but lets also be clear about this, the social media companies just showed a token of conscience and it doesn't mean anything. They still didn't boot people like Cruz, Hawley and Gaetz and the numerous others still inciting the insurrection. I am sure they will not boot these lawmakers as they will face retaliation if they do. I don't trust the change of heart they are showing.

this shouldnt be flagged - I think it is a bad blog post by Greenwald, but it is good fodder for discussion

> With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler

Just to be clear, it's possible to detest silicon valley monopoly power while celebrating the deplatforming of Parler in particular.

Antitrust is one concern, the risk of losing democracy to political violence during a transition of power is a separate concern.

was it RMS who warned us about "cloud" anything? right again.

Parler is now on a different host, so maybe not completely destroyed

> So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.

This is a serious question: Was there a bastion of nuanced discussion and debate occurring on Parler? Almost everything I've ever seen has been amplification of disinformation. I am sure some nuanced discussions were there, but Glenn it making it seem like it was a minor part of the service or perhaps mirrored how common it might be on Twitter and other platforms? Is that what he's trying to imply?

Silicon Valley does not control the Internet though. I get that headlines like this make for good clickbait, but it's not like Parler can no longer exist on the Internet.

Parler can go buy some servers, hook them up to the internet, and come back online.

America is so blinded by their love of free speech they fail to see that most countries operate quite well with modest limits on speech. If American style free speech were so great the country would not be tearing itself apart as we speak.

The discussion here focuses on the free speech aspect of online platforms as applied to private companies. This seems like a topic where a political solution is called for, as there seems to be enough opinion on both sides to warrant an examination of the current laws. Certainly many people seem to feel that somehow these social media platforms now represent a type of public platform.

I wonder if the united States at this point is capable of that discussion? In a healthy democratic political process as applied to this issue, there probably needs to be input from both the free speech side and the societal protection side, and some compromise legal solution reached.

If Biden follows through on his rhetoric that seems possible, but that seems like a big if, with political power apparently firmly in Democratic hands for the next couple of years at least.

Shunning is a perfectly valid means of social expression.

This is so stupid. Silicon Valley is not a company or a federation, so the charge of "monopolistic force" is false. It's just a hub of innovation. Parler is a terrorist network.

I detest click-bait

Can anyone provide a link to all of these reprehensible things that Parler refused to take down?

I know this may be difficult to do currently, with the site brought offline, but still.

What a backwards ass situation we've found ourselves in.

Imagine the flip side. Imagine if a bunch of "conservatives" from Mississippi started a web hosting company 10 years ago and then an anti-fascist social media platform sprouted up on their infrastructure. Imagine people on this platform started posting about how black lives matter on the platform.

Imagine what the "conservative" reaction would be.

You take a platform for violent extremists off of _private_ servers hosted by a _private_ company on the West Coast and everyone flips their lid. "Conservatives" have no shame.

"That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. "

Oh that's rich. There are good reasons to be alarmed by the power these tech giants hold over people's ability to communicate with one another, and Greenwald even talks about a few. But these are weasel words. These are cynical words which are desperately attempting to distract from the gravity of events that precipitated the tech giants' actions.

Difficult to entertain bad faith arguments like these.

a big issue is being missed.

Apple, while accusing Parler of not monitoring what it users send, technically is guilty of the same, when users send SMS messages to each other to bomb a place.

Now that Apple is enforcing tenants on its platform such as de-platforming Parler, it should also be held responsible for the actions of any other app ( left or right wing), since it has stepped up to do that.

If this is not acceptable, all talk of free speech is really hogwash.

Im glad it's gone. It was a vile cesspool of miss-information, hate and violent fantasies.

Whats next - havens for kiddy porn?

Didn’t Parler find a new host?

There's an interesting debate to be had about all of this, but this Glenn Greenwald article ain't it.

Good. I have no tolerance for the "Gravy Seals" planning attacks using platforms like Parler.

I'm more concerned about the app store bans than AWS ban.

The app stores are true monopolies that as gatekeepers to users loading apps on phones (particularly so in apple's case). There isn't really any alternative to them.

In contrast, a hosting solution can be swapped out for another hosting solution. While non-trivial (especially if you are using a bunch of AWS specific services), there are viable solutions.

Parler has already found a new hosting solution with epik. [1]

Given that anyone can host a website (potentially even by buying their own bare metal hardware and procuring IP addresses), then one always has the ability to disseminate one's ideas. The "public square" equivalent is simply having your content online as it is available for all to read / consume.

That does not entitle you to speech on other people's platforms. That is the equivalent of saying you should have the right to go into a private venue, hosting a private event, and espouse your ideas.

I've long thought that we should reinterpret campaign finance law from this perspective. Specifically, that because the internet enables anyone to get their ideas published and accessible, then we should remove the ability of political campaigns to buy ANY advertisements. Having the right to speak should not be expanded to having the right to BUY eyeballs / impressions. You should be able to speak all you want, freely, on the internet. But all traffic should be earned, organic traffic from folks actually wanting to listen to you.

The ability to use targeted advertising to target specific messages to specific political segments seems disingenuous. It allows the politician to choose their voter instead of the voter to choose to listen to their politician. It is like digital gerrymandering.

Given that a politician can easily host videos, content, etc that can literally be consumed by the entire planet with relative ease (not to belittle the complexity of youtube), free speech exists fundamentally in the foundation of the internet / web.

Attacks on those fundamental components of the internet are concerning though. For example, SciHub having its domain names revoked and thus being unable to have DNS properly route to their servers is of grave concern. But the recent developments of NextDNS and similar decentralized DNS solutions are promising [2].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-moves-to-epik-domain-...

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/pirated-academic-sci-hub-handshake

There’s absolutely nothing “monopolistic” about any of this.

Greenwald is a conspiratorial loon.

Banning Parler will be discussed in business schools for years. This was a huge mistake by SV.

might as well add sendgrid, digitalocean, twilio, etc to that list.

I've seen a lot of people say Parler was intentionally designed to host morally objectionable content and that they refused to moderate it. Many arguments supporting the de-platforming of Parler hinge on those assertions.

I have not seen any evidence backing up those claims, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you're aware of any such evidence, could you please post it? I'd honestly just like to understand the situation better.

In the absence of such evidence, I see two plausible explanations:

1.) Parler was a small-scale operation (30 employees from what I've heard) who built a social media platform intended to appeal to pro-Trump conservatives by tolerating a higher degree of free speech compared to the likes of established social media platforms. It became very popular very quickly and speech on the platform became increasingly violent. Parler's relatively small team was unable to keep up with moderating so much content, which enabled a lot of extremist calls for violence to propagate. Since they could not keep up with AWS's requests to moderate their platform and it was facing public scrutiy after events at the capitol, AWS pulled the plug.

2.) Parler was intended as a platform for violent, pro-Trump extremists and used "free speech" as a week justification to not moderate their platform. It became very popular very quickly and speech on the platform became increasingly violent. Parler still refused to moderate the platform even after events at the capitol, so AWS pulled the plug.

AWS is not necessarily in the wrong in either case. However, the optics for Parler looks very different between the scenarios.

Parler isn't destroyed. They're in the process of migrating to Epik and will be back online. Epik is also who hosts Gab, InfoWars, and other similar right wing sites.

They signed a contract with AWS and didn't live up to it, so AWS cancelled it. That's how free markets work.

The pattern of evidence is consistent with Parler being part of Russia's disinfo/anti-democracy attack on the US, along with their asset Trump himself. I cant prove this 100% but is the wise way to bet, given the total context.

This is what polarizing actions do, they force people to choose sides. And as the American right coalesces into two camps, pro-Trump and everyone else, the left is forced to harden around it's majority mindset. And that mindset includes, platforms and megaphones aren't free. The people that built Silicon Valley are liberals, and until called on to protect those liberal values, they'll allow (and make money from) everybody else.

If the finger-quote conservatives want their own platform with which they can plot the downfall of American democracy unrestricted, they're going to need their own infrastructure and their own apps and, it's starting to look like soon, their own banks and financial industries to handle their money.

You have ANY idea how hard it is to get a bank to overlook a pecuniary interest for a moral one? Apparently you have to erect a gallows on the Capitol lawn.

How about "How Parler Destroyed Itself"?

hOW sILICON vALLEY gave rise to Parler by talking about it until everyone knew the name of some obscure app for racists

The whole debate has been framed in terms of free speech. Which is misleading. Because, technically, any corporation are free to impose their policies, as long as they abide by the laws of the state. The debate should be pivoted to tech concentration and monopoly. This has been argued by Elizabeth Warren during her presidential run. However, the same people who are complaining about tech's supposed censor of free speech, where vehemently against Warren's plan for tech break up

First off, I like Glenn Greenwald very much as a journalist.

Remember that he and Laura Poitras helped Edward Snowden disclose to the world what he did, in 2013.

In other words, as a journalist, he does, or should command a huge amount of respect from the HN community.

He has my respect.

Now, with that as a background, let's talk about this article.

It's an important article, and yes, broadly speaking, the claims that are made are true.

But the problem I have with this article (and not with Glenn Greenwald personally, who again, is a great journalist!) is that it's a little bit too broad...

To give you an understanding of this, let's say that in the future, I ran an online service with an App Store, like Apple or Google.

OK, so now, for whatever reason, the Parler App is removed from the App Store that I run.

But, to tell me (and the newsreader) that it was an act of Tech Tyranny, of Monopolistic Force -- is not good enough.

You see, I believe in several things:

1) Strong Logging

2) Chain Of Command

3) Chain Of Custody

But most importantly, the "5 Whys":

4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

In other words, I'd like (as a member of the public) an "organizational backtrace", starting with the engineer who physically removed the App from the app store, moving from there to his manager that ordered it, and moving from there up levels of management.

In other words, WHO ordered WHAT, WHEN, and WHY.

In other words, don't start with the highest level effect, the silencing of free speech, start with the lowest level effect -- the physical removal of the App from the App Store by the engineer that did it.

From that point, use the 5 WHYS to work backward, something like, "OK, this engineer did this because he was ordered to by his manager", so WHY did the manager do it?, "Because he was ordered to by his manager", etc.

But now the question arises -- Who was at the highest level of management at that company that gave that order?

And now we ask WHY again... so we need to talk to him, and find out exactly WHY (what socio-political-moral-ethic-legal-or-whatever pressure was applied to him, and how?)

See, answer all of those questions, and THEN you have the true story!

But all this being said, I do love Glenn Greenwald!

I use to have an immense respect for Glen Greenwald and follow his writing regularly, but Greenwald's tone has changed drastically recently. I'm not sure why, but he seems to have a rather myopic view of the left. It's a sudden departure from the writing he was known for during the days of The Intercept and Salon.com. I am honestly even starting to question the honesty of his writing, even.

An example for this article:

> including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them.

He says this but fails to mention that the same people who were the founders of Cambridge Analytica also were the founder of Parler

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201116/01141545710/what-...

Furthermore there seems to be little, if any, mention of the fact that the Mercers who were major funders for the Trump organization were also using the data obtained from Cambridge Analytica to target political advertising.

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/595338116/what-did-cambridge-...

I know this is beyond the scope of the article that Greenwald was writing but having read his writing for years I have to wonder why it wasn't mentioned? It's not something that would typical go without mention in writing from earlier in his career.

I am not one to typically hedge on the side of removing "free speech" from people, but Parler represented a clear and present threat to American democracy. The ties to the Trump organization and it's funders were innumerable. Why does Greenwald have an agenda to foment discord regarding this? His writing lately, the twitter screeds that he has gone on against the left, and his staunch denial of the Russian interference in the 2016 election makes me question if he hasn't been compromised in some way.

All people, regardless of their worldview, left- and right-wing, should be aware that they are in the same boat on this.

Has anybody here actually READ the first amendment? Nobody is blocking anyone's free speech.

Facebook, Twitter, etc are PRIVATE property. They are legally ALLOWED to set terms of use on their property - whatever those terms may be. If anyone breaks those rules they can then be throw out!

Trump, and company can peddling their LIES wherever it is allowed, like on FAUX news :-). His free speech STILL exists over there.

The stupidest possible take on things always seems to rise to the top of social media.

First, I fully agree that the entire mobile ecosystem is walled-garden first. That should be addressed to a greater degree than sideloading apps on android. Second, the idea that this is 'monopolistic' seems deeply silly. Parler isn't offline because Amazon, the only provider of web services, told them to get off the internet. It's offline because Amazon and most of their specialized service providers (twilio, etc) kicked them off as well as all of those service providers' competitors. This is not an example of monopolistic power. It's an example of an entire industry choosing to reject a company they find odious. This is very similar to what happened with Stormfront some years ago[1].

Still, this is troubling. I feel like it's reasonable to see Parler as acting in bad faith. It seems to me like they knowingly fostered an environment that would lead to militants using the service to plan attacks. I think they protest too much.

I also think that hosting truly "free" speech in an ethical way is enormously, obviously difficult. Threats are genuinely hard to evaluate and must be taken seriously. Mass communication has been at the center of all the modern genocides (and early forms of communication were key to the older ones). I think this is the discussion we should be having - what is the "right" way to create a space where people are save to speak? How could Parler have existed to allow people to speak their minds while preventing the platform from providing aid to violent hate groups? I suspect it's impossible to allow people to speak freely about their belief that other people are not human without fomenting violence but it's clear that not everyone agrees with that and I think we need to talk about it.

P.s. Quite sad to see that Greenwald has descended into red-faced sputtering grievance-listing. I agree that the moral case for shutting down Parler and shutting down Facebook is the same. I think both should be shut down for fomenting and planning violence. We can reopen both of them when we figure out how to more effectively stop their use in violence. I didn't even need ten paragraphs to say it.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/stormfront-has-been-kic...

Curious if you feel torn supporting the US highway infrastructure? It can clearly be used for to traffic drugs, humans, blackmarket weapons, etc. It can be used to flee justice, evade police, abets vehicular manslaughter, etc. The list goes on and on. Is it even controversial to support the highway system as is? Do we loose sleep over it?

I feel like we've all been a bit brainwashed by the government in our notion that "free speech" must have limits. I very much doubt that that is true. I think the speech part should always be 100% free. Of course any crimes that derive from it are and will always been fully enforceable. I just question whether or not the speech itself should be viewed as illegal, or something that should be regulated.

Obviously all of the insidious planning and hatred that presumably occurred on Parler is abhorrent. I think I can hate all of those things without believing that the site should be censored.

eeewwww

Greenwald flushed his whole-ass reputation down the toilet for Trump, much like Giuliani. Ya hate to see it.

Going anonymous here for obvious reasons.

FANGMULA holds tremendous power. No doubt about it. They can make or break any business very easily. This was known in theory and recently we saw this in practice. This doesn't mean that Parler cannot fight this out in court. They likely will. However, all SV companies have very deep pockets and can sustain a very lengthy legal challenge even if they're in the wrong. Small businesses just don't have that kind of cash to fight this out in court.

Some (non-US observers) would say that the incoming administration and SV companies have stifled civil liberties and free speech. In the past, this was the exact reason that US sanctioned (or at the very least criticized) several countries when they would ban certain groups for inflaming racial tensions, spreading hate speech and radicalizing people.

I am in no way a CCP supporter here but imagine if the CCP silenced a bunch of people because they did not agree with them, destroyed a platform where they gathered and then gloated about it, what would the US have to say? What would the world say?

I don't have all the facts here. However, there are accusations that Facebook, Google both facilitated planning of the Capitol riots. There are no consequences for these companies - yet. Just because they "moderate" their platform does not make them better than Parler. More importantly, Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter did not act while Trump supporters were actively spreading misinformation and lies. Trump has been indiscriminately lying and inflaming racial tensions for a long time on Twitter. Why wasn't he suspended before? Lots of Facebook groups, YouTube channel spread lies about many topics, why weren't they removed earlier?

These companies were emboldened when they saw that Trump is leaving office. They are acting opportunistically to drum up the new cycle. I could be totally wrong about this, but its a personal feeling.

It felt like a feeding frenzy starting with Twitter suspending Trump's handle and eventually banning his account permanently. Other companies had to jump in otherwise they would look weak and complicit.

I think Parler should've given a longer notice period to resolve whatever issues they had with moderation. 24 hours is very little notice for anybody to do anything meaningful.

Finally, I am shocked that not a single "civil liberties" supporter came out and criticized these tech companies for being Judges, Juries and Executioners.

These companies need to be treated like utilities because they are. They need to be regulated as such. The amount of monopolistic power that they have shown is unbelievable.

During the US-China trade war, China realized its dependence on US chips and software. The US government could effectively cripple Chinese companies. This was disconcerting in itself as there aren't effective alternatives for many tech related hardware and software.

However, the show of power post Jan 8th by these tech companies was several orders of magnitude worse than the trade war. Europe, Asia and rest of the world are watching and should take note of this event and build their own local competitors otherwise, SV and the US government can effectively control the whole world.

To be honest, I am glad they did. I am sick and tired of these people finding that there are loopholes in which they can hide their hate speech and fascist rhetoric.

I simply don't care. Sure, there's slippery slope arguments and discussions to be had about who gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable speech.

Right now though there's a small group of people looking to cause harm and damage using tools that barely existed 10 years ago and our laws won't keep up. Antisemitism and racism have no place in the world and private companies have no business profiting from its proliferation. Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on.

I will use my limited resources and time on this planet to cry for someone else.

    And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?

This is the single most powerful paragraph that shows the hypocrisy. However, you can't even talk about this openly anymore.

My Chinese peers are saying how much this reminds them of the Cultural Revolution.

Greenwald’s argument hinges on emotion, insinuation, invective, a completely unfounded premise, an absolute absence of evidence, and no consideration of alternative explanations: an overwhelmingly plausible ongoing law enforcement and national security operation, likely under sealed or classified indictments or warrants, in the face of ongoing deadly sedition lead by the President of the United States himself, including against the person of his own vice president and credible threats against the President-Elect and Inauguration.

Such an legal action is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to prove, and I cannot prove it. A key clue for me, however, is the defection not just of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Stripe, and other tech firms, but of Parler’s legal counsel, who would have to be an exceptionally stealth-mode startup to fit Greenwald’s, or other’s, “it’s the tech monopolists” narrative. I’ve tempered my degree of assurance and language (“plausible” rather than “probable”). Time will tell. But a keen and critical mind such as Grenwald’s should at least be weighing the possibility. He instead seems bent only on piking old sworn enemies, with less evidence or coherence than I offer.

This is the crux of Greenwald’s argument. It’s all he’s got:

On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.

I’m no friend of the tech monopolists myself. The power demonstrated here does concern me, greatly. I’ve long railed against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, among other tech monopolists. Largely because as monopolies they are power loci acting through their occupation of a common resource, outside common control, and not serving the common weal. Hell: Facebook, Google (YouTube), Reddit, and Twitter played a massive role in creating the current fascist insurrection in the US, along with even more enthusiastic aid and comfort from traditional media, across the spectrum. Damage that will take decades to repair, if ever.

But, if my hypothesis is correct, the alternative explanation would bet he opposite of this: the state asserting power over and through monopolies in the common interest, in support of democratic principles, for the common weal. And that I can support.

I don’t know that this is the case. I find it curious that I seem to be the only voice suggesting it. Time should tell.

And after this is over, yes, Silicon Valley, in its metonymic sense standing for the US and global tech industry, has to face its monopoly problem, its free speech problem (in both sincere and insincere senses), its surveillance problem (capitalist, state, criminal, rogue actor), its censorship problem, its propaganda problem (mass and computational), its targeted manipulation adtech problem, its trust problem, its identity problem, its truth and disinformation problems, its tax avoidance problem, its political influence problem.

Virtually all of which are inherent aspects of monopoly: “Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly” https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470

But, speaking as a space alien cat myself, Greenwald is so far off base here he’s exited the Galaxy.

I was never a Parler user since I’m not a big fan of social media in general. Also, I’m not a mobile app developer/administrator so forgive me if I sound ignorant.

I’ve only read a few bits and pieces so I have a few questions.

1. Does getting booted off AWS actually mean the end of the service? Somebody sent me some quote about how the software was built to run on bare metal servers, so are they having difficulty getting servers at OVH/Linode/DO/whatever? I know that Amazon is HUGE but it’d be a trip (and HIGHLY worrisome) if they actually dictate who gets to be on the internet as a whole.

2. Again, never dealt with apps. I’ve 100% always dealt with clients using websites, packaged software, email, phone calls etc. Is user behavior and/or mobile browser design such that having a mobile-friendly interface (like mobile.twitter.com) that’s entirely under Parker’s control an untenable way to run the service?

Maybe I’m just old but I’ve grown up as a huge fan of bookmarks and still make heavy use of them today, even on mobile. I don’t install almost anything on my phone unless the app is a huge value add like VR/AR stuff or the Audubon bird guide that I can use offline.

I suppose my overall question is: Is this irreparable? If so, that’s pretty terrifying.

These actions and events are making the case solid that the Internet is a utility, and needs to be regulated as such. It's sad, but inevitable.

Why is this flagged?

Yeesh, Greenwald has become a full on shill for the hard right just because he is so sore against Democrats after the 2016 DNC leaks.

This is like watching someone with dementia slowly morph into a completely different person.

No aspect of what made early journalist Greenwald a champion for democracy is recognizable in this whatsoever.

It’s full on Republicanized befuddlement.

Lots of "Libertarians" with bad hyprocrisy in constantly bringing up "free speech." Yet the same people cheer for Christian Bakeries that refuse to serve gay couples.

And those people trying to claim these tech companies are "utilities" are insane. There is a 0% chance that any tech company is going to be declared a utility in the next several decades in the US and to think otherwise is totally absurd. So those arguments just hold no water.

The US is being destroyed by the Paradox of Tolerance and Putin/Xi could not be happier. What better possible outcome, short of an actual Civil War, could there be to prove to their people that Democracy is a flawed ideology?

anti trust action is needed against a few big tech firms, but this article for some reason frightens me. I dont understand the perspective and there seem to be contradictory undercurrents. I dont use any social network apps except occasionally browsing my couple of dozen friends feeds on my private Instagram account. I know Insta is not good, but I dont feel particularly threatened by it, since no discussion is ocurring (on my feed), just pictures and videos of music and places people have been, meals they have cooked.

I don't really care if Amazon crushes Parler. I also don't find back-doors, infiltration and R&D relationships with the government alarming or surprising. What matters to me is whether the government itself is corrupt.

I am a globalist and I do hope for more, not less integration between trade blocs. I think it would be beneficial to avoid the supply chain panic that underlies the extreme pursuit of labor cost arbitrage, but not in pursuit of national, but rather regional, balance of power and trade.

Surveillance is not going away. We cannot fight it. What can be combated is the willingness to harm others and the tendency to view others as separate from ourselves and as a danger to our interests.

But these tech firms are not yet absolute monopolies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, all display in my opinion anti-competitive and in some cases anti-consumer behaviour, but I think a new framework is needed to quantify harm in tech antitrust regulation.

I think Facebook is the most egregious offender because, as I have hyperbolically stated before, have constructed what amounds to a genocide machine. So while they are not "anti-consumer" in terms of price, they are anti-peace and stability of the system which hurts all of us. They disrupt the political process and not in a fun way.

Greenwald seems to be inviting pretty draconian anti-trust action, which would certainly be a bit controversial because some libertarians might not like it - ideologically the founders of Parler might be among them. On the other hand he seems to be stroking Parler as being some kind of underdog that is less bad somehow than other social networks. In my view Parler is only different in scale.

Again, Greenwald makes me very uneasy in this article because he comes out hard against "monopoly" but whose side is he on? I feel weird that I agree on paper that antitrust action is needed, but his article feels bought and paid for in some way.

What bothers me about this article is that it tries to present a logical argument that tech monopolies are a problem, wrapped in a political rhetoric about how liberals are authoritarian. It starts off as an interesting perspective but ends up as inflammatory whataboutism that doesn't engage deeply with the issue.

This is a really interesting moment in history to think about censorship, platforms, speech, and monopoly. We can do a lot better than this article.

Multiple companies banding together is not a monopoly. This was a collective effort. You could call it a polyoploy but click-bait gonna click-bait.

They didn't kill Parker though, we did. We made if clear that we wouldn't do business with companies that supported the worst of us. They complied with our demands to force them out of the public sphere and I applaud them for it. As an ex Googler and generally anti FAANG, I don't have many fond words for them but I support this action. For the most part, I even approve of the timeline: let garbage peddling monsters be garbage peddling monsters until they do real damage and then cut them off.

"Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism" you had me up to this point. Liberals don't swoon for this any more than they do for a mandatory curfew to curb coronavirus cases. The powers of SV are a lot and I would hope that out of the ashes of the last four years we get a) a more progressive Conservative party and b) a more diversified collection of service providers, to combat AWS, and the like.

All of these companies, for what it's worth, seems to only use their power when its socially acceptable. For instance, they continue to abide by restrictive Chinese laws for the benefit of money. I'm convinced they will submit to the will of the state in Poland as well, where freedom of speech appears to mean something entirely different.

> The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech.

I'm sorry, but parts of this are not true.

Liberals were banned. [1] That's anti "free speech."

Parler only did a soft delete of data, flagging it as deleted, rather than removing it from servers. [2] That's anti "anti-data collection".

[1] : https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

[2] : https://mashable.com/article/parler-archive-user-posts/

> And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries.

The Biden Administration is getting stuffed with corporate executives and lobbyists of all kinds. If that alleged quote about fascism being the merger of corporate and state power, then congratulations, fascists! You won.

And if that quote is wrong, this situation is still bad, way worse than Trump.

I do think that what they did is setting themselves up for regulation. To shut off a service used by millions overnight is dangerous.

Parler has already has another host, which is proof that Amazon etc. don't have monopolistic force.

Why this post is flagged? HN, If you don't like the post, please ignore it don't enforce censorship with flagging.

Well, that's the last HN article I will knowingly read.

Destroying Parler sets a bad precedent. Who's next? As people cheer for Parler's destruction, consider what happens if the pendulum swings the other way. This isn't even necessarily a free speech issue. Editorial control implies a lot.

All that the valley has done is demonstrate quite clearly they are now too powerful and need tighter regulation. Protections can now be removed.

This wasn't a great idea. But it likely felt good.

Leave it to Glenn Greenwald to, in the face of violence, sedition, and misinformation, care more about some vacuous notion of "free speech" than the health of our Democracy.

This guy used to have a ton of my respect, but honestly he seems like a complete joke recently.

Glenn Greenwald again proving to be a crank.

If Silicon Valley is such an overwhelming monopolistic force, why is 8kun and 4chan up?

No, Parler did a dumb thing by depending so deeply on one hosting provider, and the inevitable bit them.

I have a suggestion to keep these conversations from spiraling into pedantry: let's stop using the phrase "free speech" when referring to these companies (I'm going to use it a few more times here though, for illustration), and instead be descriptive and refer to "a group of people having their ideas and voices silenced at scale." Whether we agree with the people being silenced or not, that's what this is really about, right?

We don't need names to know what something is. A young scientist might think an elderly aboriginal person foolish because the elder has never heard of a "star", but that doesn't mean the elder hasn't seen the sun rise every day of their life.

My point is that we should not be discounting opinions because someone used the wrong word. We're smart enough to read between the lines and see the crux of what is bothering someone. Free speech, as an ideal, doesn't have to refer to any law, but to avoid spiraling into pedantry, I would suggest that we all be more descriptive during the course of these conversations.

Our political representatives are corrupt and generally represent whomever gives them the most money, namely large corporations.

We, the people, are represented through our wallets now by the corporations that control our politicians because social media has unionized us. We're able to use online platforms to leverage companies into giving us what we want socially by threatening them when they step out of line. The companies that led to Parler shutting down were acting on public sentiment as a boon to their brands, thus ultimately reflecting the will of the people.

It's kind of like a single payer system for social justice.

It's weird end run back to representation but I'll take it for now. The radical right is a scourge that, unchecked, will lead to us having no rights at all. They need to be repeatedly smacked down until normalcy is achieved.