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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

That's not correct. Amazon advised them that they were encouraging violence, and had already reached out to them about this issue. They had responded that they would use volunteers to moderate their content, but Amazon (IMO quite reasonably!) saw that they had not moved fast enough, and were skeptical that it would work anyway.

Then the violence erupted in the Capitol, and Amazon's hand was forced. They had been violating Amazon's terms of service, and they did not do enough to resolve the issue, in a timely enough manner. Therefore they no longer got to use the service.

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So it was basically, "hey can you please change this... OOPS too slow LOL. Nope, not our fault, you didn't do shit, canceled!"

C'mon! IT playing dumb is so stupid, they knew it, they knew what company they were going to host. Parler's whole point was to host conservative voices, yet the attitude is to pretend it's a surprise, shrug and then have a stupid reason like they didn't act fast enough. It's not a genuine response, it's an obvious attack and an insult to anyone paying attention.

Actually, it appears they had given them plenty of time to implement proper moderation practices to prevent incitement of violence. Their response was inadequate. They were removed from Amazon.

You seem to imply they only got 24 hours to resolve the issues on their service. That's not accurate.

Incitement of violence isn't measurable. The US had autonomous zones and communication was allegedly through Twitter.

It is a cheap excuse to take blame from the actual perpetrators to inconvenient platforms.

I like unfiltered platforms very much and Parler wasn't that attractive, so I appreciate them being the fall guy. But I also have problems with blatant different weights that are used to measure transgressions.

Isn't it the exact opposite? They were given lots of time to fix this and didn't. Something very bad happened which was partly caused by their inaction.

It seems the timing was more of a cover for what they already had planned, or at least not every chance was given. Small features in large apps take months, and big features easily take a year. It didn't seem in good faith IMHO, granted this isn't just AWS at the moment.

Ok, but that's not an excuse right? If your platform is too immature to be effectively stopping/mitigating child porn from being published, you don't get the chance to say "yeah but it'll take a while to write the code". They always had the option to shut down while they fix the problem.

They had 7 weeks to clean up their act. I'm not sure that qualifies as "oops too slow".

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

This does not read like they wanted to cooperate. 7 weeks is a nothing for a large feature. Apple gave them 24 hours which is a joke, if not an insult. Features are complex in large apps that are social networks (which in fact are dozens of apps under the hood, on the backend and frontend).

If they really wanted them to implement some content moderation, it would have been more time, not to mention a clear specification for the feature changes they want, to prevent the solution from getting rejected again.

Apple didn't give a reasonable timeframe to respond, but that is typical for them. The 7 weeks Amazon gave absolutely is reasonable: if this was a priority for Parler they could have put some effective measure in place.

For contrast, YouTube was knowingly and illegally hosting pirated content for years before Google bought them and developed ContentID, and relied entirely on volunteer moderation (user flags) to detect it. Facebook has up until very recently relied entirely on user flags for moderation. Google web search is theoretically entirely unmoderated. And so on.

Valley firms built their financial success on being content neutral and even turning a blind eye to blatantly illegal content until they found ways to automate enforcement (or not), but are now forbidding competitors from being the same.

I don't recall Google search organizing any marches on the Capitol.

You don't recall Parler doing that either, because they didn't.

Now if you compare apples with apples, can you recall people using Google to research how to do bad things? Sure. Plenty of people who went to prison after police found they'd been searching for stuff like "how to hide a body" or bomb making instructions.

The profits from Parler are a rounding error on Amazon's balance sheet.

AWS is self serve. Anyone can sign up. So, yes, it is unexpected unless you imagine Bezos is negotiating with Parler's CEO.

Parlor did not get thrown out of the bar because of their "conservative voices", they got thrown out because they threatened the other drinkers with knifes, shat on the floor and pissed on the tables while shouting 'Fuck Yea America !'

You imply that all "conservative voices" are raging fuckwits, and while I long resisted that big brush view its becoming harder and harder to do. Especially when self-confessed "conservatives" just assert that yea, that's just the way we talk and act, fuck off if you don't like it. And now the conservative snowflakes scream blue murder when the same rules are applied to them.

Well if they are not all like that... then why censor a whole network? I guess Parler must not be a private company... all other platforms censor their own way not according to American Law, yet other smaller platforms can't do it their way? Sure, they decided to use AWS, that was dumb in hindsight, but still the scale of it and timing is scary. In other words, you can't be a private business and use AWS, they will own you.

If Parler was serious, the owners would have hand-moderated the specific complaints Amazon made. Their response is like a streaming service that responds to a DMCA takedown by saying they plan on making it possible to comply sooner or later rather than immediately yanking the content.

I'm inclined to think the Parler mgt preferred this outcome, where they get to play victim, to actually moderating content and making their users angry.

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