Comment by nicoffeine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoffeine | Hacker News Reader

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Twitter and Facebook regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content. Parler did not.

Sure, corporations will turn a blind eye to a lot for a little more profit, but this does not extend to supporting a platform full of people trying to violently overthrow the government.

Just think about this for a second: every major provider shut down seditious media shortly after what happened on 1/6. When's the last time Apple, Google, Amazon, Shopify, etc., agreed on anything in the same day?

They are not going to risk the lawsuits and possible market share loss to competitors unless they have an iron clad insurance policy. In my opinion, the only thing that offers that kind of policy is a very clear signal from law enforcement.

Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal. Whatever it was, it was scary enough to move every single cloud provider in the same direction within hours of each other. Despite this kind of coordination being more evidence for monopolistic behavior, they all came to the same conclusion: create space between us and anything related to the 1/6 sedition. Now.

> Twitter and Facebook regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content. Parler did not.

https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec...

> Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal.

Do you have any evidence for this at all?

There are several other alternative explanations for them doing this. There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.

And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.

Also, you can tell that everything is broken when doing something anti-competitive makes it more likely for you to win an antitrust case against you.

Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content. There are plenty of articles saying they didn't censor violent right-wing content, but you'll have to read them to figure that out.

> There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.

So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.

> And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.

There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.

> Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content.

It says this:

> Judging from the posts announcing that they've been booted, at least some of the banned Parler users seem to have signed up for the service precisely to test the limits of the app's so-called "freedom of speech" policy.

I read this to mean that people showed up to purposely troll hard enough to get banned so they could claim they got banned, and then they were. Your claim was that they don't "regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content."

> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior.

Even if there was outside pressure, you're still speculating that it was from law enforcement rather than the political branches.

How are you even sure this is the first time this has happened? Certainly it's the most high profile, but tech companies have been quietly disappearing "undesirables" for years.

> There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.

Not if they get ground into dust by competitors just as they're hitting the exponential growth stage.

> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.

Why is the businesses and politicians aligning a significant thing for you? It should be terrifying.

Also no outside pressure? A small group of employees pushed this for the entire lot. That’s outside pressure.

I have speculated here that these moves were prompted by disclosures from law enforcement

They aren’t risking market share loss to competitors because they are ganging up together to kill their competitors.

Parler is not a competitor to any of Amazon, Apple or Google, the three companies involved.

Yet they host the competitors and give them a distinct advantage. How am I supposed to get the Parler app now that it’s banned?

Is this a serious question? The APK is widely available, but it's pointless given the server is down.

Are Android phones the only ones that exist? Is it even the most popular phone in the US? Is this a serious statement?

If you want to whine about Apple's App Store policies, join the queue. The surprise, really, is that they took that long.

I will. In the past I have advocated for them maintaining their own interests. Now I will join the group asking for them to open their phones up. By gov force if necessary because they attempted to control speech.

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