We didn't collude with Twitter to drop Parler, says AWS in court filing | Hacker News Reader

We didn't collude with Twitter to drop Parler, says AWS in court filing

theregister.com

33 pointssamizdis30 comments

I don't think they colluded. It's much more likely that when they see a platform they don't like they wait until someone casts the first stone.

I particularly like the accusation that it is discrimination that they didn't ban Twitter from AWS, despite Twitter not using AWS. Very confused.

Twitter signed an agreement with Amazon last year, but I can't imagine they have much if anything hosted there yet.

The filing also misspells Parler as Parley in at least one place. I noticed a few other typos. So it was written in a hurry and didn't get much review.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/12/22/twitter-and-amazon...

Twitter recently signed a big deal with AWS.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/twitter-taps-aws-for-its-l...

"Parler's Complaint is replete with insinuations that AWS had equal grounds to suspend Twitter's account and thus discriminated against Parler… but AWS does not host Twitter's feed, so of course it could not have suspended access to Twitter's content."

This would be a strange thing to file in a court document if that were the case.

It is wordingsmithing, AWS does not host Twitter feeds, but they will be hosting Twitter timelines...

https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

"Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) has selected AWS to provide global cloud infrastructure to deliver Twitter timelines. Under the multi-year deal, Twitter will leverage AWS’s proven infrastructure and portfolio of services to support delivery of millions of daily Tweets."

That statement is future tense. Is there any indication that Twitter, any of it, was hosted on AWS as of January 7th of this year?

Also twitter takes more active steps to remove direct threats of violence etc. Far from perfect, but much more of a good faith effort than Parler.

Don't know if this an issue of good faith. Twitter has 5000 employees, Parler has maybe a few dozen.

So...why are they trying to run a platform when they don't have the employees or volunteers to actually run it?

Personally I think the idea that people deserve to be in business even if they're not equipped or qualified to do so to be very strange. If you can't provide the product (whether that's quality physical goods or more abstract things like adequate moderation) then you fold and go out of business - that's the understanding of markets that I grew up with.

If the product is a social media site that emphasizes freedom of speech and not scanning your data, it sounds like they were perfectly equipped and qualified to do that.

Did they ever claim to have a well-moderated platform? I think that was the selling point.

It doesn't sound like they were equipped or qualified to do that either, as evidenced by their current outage.

I don't know why people are acting like Parler is the only platform to have ever hosted content considered questionable by the mainstream. The [\d]chans and various porn sites have been around for years.

They seem perfectly capable of moderating comments for being insufficiently conservative. They should be able to moderate violent conspiracies too.

After an extended period of working with them it seems that Amazon decided they weren't making a good faith effort with a sub-par community moderation system. Community moderation of directed hate or specific threats of violence only works if a majority of the community believes that content shouldn't be there, and that concept is antithetical to Parler's philosophy. Pretty much by definition of the crowd it attracts, the crowd is going to be unwilling to flag or delete posts. Heck, from what I've read about their user on-boarding process, people basically start out partly shadow-banned and have to have enough comment green-lit in order to become full member. This means, given the high (and somewhat extreme) conservative population there, there's a built-in filter that selects for additional and ever-more extreme views. Again, antithetical to community moderation.

Regardless of the above, small staff is not a sufficient excuse. Plenty of businesses have hurdles they have to jump over in order to operate legally. If you don't have the staff for it, you don't have what it takes to operate in that industry. Considering that countless other forums large & small manage this task though, it doesn't seem a high barrier of entry.

Of course, it was all just a coincidence

Turns out trying to overthrow the government is quite the coincidence

It's almost like there was a unmissable event that occurred that both companies responded to.

That’s a very charitable interpretation. Too charitable if you asked me. Much more likely that everyone saw Facebook ban Trump then piled on after them, no longer afraid of the blow back. Still not collusion though.

Except I don't think they all would have piled on if not for that unmissable event

Fair. Both things happening were likely necessary.

The world is not divided into collusion and coincidence.

If I’m standing near someone and a bomb goes off on one side of us and we both run away in the same direction, there is no coordination, collusion, or common endeavor needed to motivate that similar action.

It’s also not at all “coincidence”.

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