Parler decided not to buy their own hardware and rent their own rack space. Plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.
What does this even mean? Text has to be stored in some physical location, or set of locations.
Your comment is short sighted and shows a possibly too eager willingness to accept the media and big tech narrative at completely face value. What if you are wrong?
At one point saying “We shouldn’t own slaves”, or “the Indian has rights to the land they live on”, or “women should be allowed to vote”, or “no taxation without representation” were all insurrectionist comments.
How do you propose we only stop “the wrong” insurrections? We should probably ask you first.
Uh, I don't know what you think "insurrectionist" means, but those are definitely not what it means. Actually, one of those comments was actually the law of the land at the time, as adjudicated by the Supreme Court--it was merely a popular politician who said that the Supreme Court had no actual power to enforce its will against him and did it anyways.
In the interest of pedantry, it's worth pointing out that the anti-slavery comments weren't the ones made by the insurrectionists, and even in the states that seceded, the unwillingness of Northerners to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act was arguably the more pressing threat, since it is highly unlikely that the federal government would have been enable to effect mandatory abolition on unwilling states but removing any codes enforcing the return of runaway slaves would have been well within its remit. That said, there was one notable abolitionist who provides half the cases in US history of people tried for treason against an individual state.
If he wasn't cynically cashing in, then he's not a very deep thinker either.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/27/parlers-f...
They literally welcomed pro-saudi comment farms to their service as well:
“The nationalist movement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made it known that big tech is censoring them at rates we have never experienced in the United States,” Parler wrote in a post on its own account on the site. “Let us welcome them as we all fight for our rights together.”
Reminder: Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, ordered the assassination of a US journalist not that long ago. So, in a sense, Parler is really the social network of choice for dictators and extremists.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-saudi-politics/un...
https://www.reuters.com/article/parler-funding-mercer/social...
That said I don't know much about these particular people.
AOC could be considered fairly 'far left' she's not exactly a radical.
To the OP's point, I think Parler was trying to legit be an alternative where they didn't have Jack Dorsey in charge, but I'm doubtful if they were actually looking for the holocaust denying crowd.
I suggest probably their comfort zone would have been 'Fox News'.
However, traditionally, the terms "far-right" and "far-left" have been reserved for people who believe violent government coup is a legitimate means to an end.
And lately, people have taken to calling more moderate conservatives "far-right" and "nazis" as a way to delegitimize their opinions, and make them sound beyond-the-pale.
Where I'm from, "far-left" and "far-right" means "people who think violence is a legitimate means to enact their ideology."
So that includes Nazis, the KKK, and communist revolutionaries. It does not include Rebecca Mercer or Breitbart.
Check out this data: [1]. Breitbart is only a smidge more conservative than Fox News, and Fox News is the #1 watched cable news channel in the country. That is called "mainstream." Presumably, the "far-right" would be "far" beyond the mainstream.
[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2...
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.
That just shows how dangerous the "if you're not against us, you're with us" mentality can be.
GoDaddy kicked off AR15.com with no reason at all, they were fine with the content... until the moment they weren’t.
The problem has always been a TOS that is selectively and interpretively enforced. It’s just popular this week.
> I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.
ffs no joke! I was embarrassed for what Expensify did, and if my company used that service we would have dropped them in a hot second. IDK why “we’ll stfu and do our job” isn’t the default anymore.
Are you saying that staying silent is the answer once you have people organizing to take down the government? How will your business operate once the government is down?
There has to have some limits somewhere. Yes we don't want everything to be political but obviously, there is a line somewhere, wouldn't you agree?
I think its possible to think of a world where dc simply goes on vacation and the rest of the country is just fine.
Let's dispatch with the second one first. Even if you bulldozed the entire city of DC and everyone who works there was permanently relocated to the North Pole by Santa Claus to make toys for little children forever, there would still be a government because there is a constitutional process for electing or hiring some other people to do it.
So what should platforms do about this? That's too narrow a question. It's what should society do about this? Step one, arrest the people breaking the law. Violence and calls for violence are illegal. At which point it's not clear that we even need a step two, because then the relevant people are in jail.
I know the US has the biggest prison population in the world, but you can't keep these people in prison for life. They will be released from jail at some point and start spreading their ideology again.
I hate to pull a godwin, but "let's throw the insurrectionists in jail and that's the end of that" hasn't worked out well historically. Let's just hope none of them writes a book while doing their time.
I think murdering a police officer is a capital offense. You don't get back out of jail after that one.
But even for the people committing less violence than that, and who in turn eventually get released, they only stay released if they stay non-violent. Otherwise they're right back to jail.
> I hate to pull a godwin, but "let's throw the insurrectionists in jail and that's the end of that" hasn't worked out well historically. Let's just hope none of them writes a book while doing their time.
So now we're abandoning even the premise of free speech?
If people are engaged in violence you put them in jail. If people are non-violently saying dumb things and you don't agree with them, you say your thing too.
I am of the opinion that we should prevent violent insurrection rather than waiting for it to happen and then responding with jail time.
> So now we're abandoning even the premise of free speech?
Where did I say that? I'm not saying we should prevent all book publishing, but you do understand what historical precedence I was referring to right?
> If people are engaged in violence you put them in jail. If people are non-violently saying dumb things and you don't agree with them, you say your thing too.
If the dumb thing they're saying is that all politicians are satan worshipers and pedophiles, then it doesn't matter what "thing" I have to say to them.
Responding with jail time is how you prevent it, through deterrence.
> I'm not saying we should prevent all book publishing, but you do understand what historical precedence I was referring to right?
Presumably the unconstitutional Son of Sam laws?
> If the dumb thing they're saying is that all politicians are satan worshipers and pedophiles, then it doesn't matter what "thing" I have to say to them.
I disagree. There are still things you can say and do to black pill the crazies.
Now, sometimes the only thing you can do to convince them is to do something, because just saying "no you're wrong" isn't much of an argument. Whereas, say, arresting and prosecuting everyone involved with Jeffrey Epstein would satisfy a lot more people that there isn't a vast international conspiracy of pedophile Satanist cannibals, as compared to the presumably truer situation in which a lot of powerful people were involved a major statutory rape and prostitution debacle and yet thus far have escaped prosecution.
I am not, I am referring to a historical example where a bunch of insurrectionists were thrown in jail and it was not an effective deterrent.
> Whereas, say, arresting and prosecuting everyone involved with Jeffrey Epstein would satisfy a lot more people
You really think that arresting and prosecuting Trump, among others, would satisfy the people who stormed the capitol to keep him in power?
Which is true but its also important to not jump the gun so people can give coherent arguments for/against currents events.
Take Amazon for example, there is significant internal pressure to run the company based on a specific set of (for lack of a better word) progressive values but at the same time there is also a big part of the company that is customer focused and puts themselves in their shoes to try and deliver results and the politics of the day is just noise to them. Who will win in a few years time ? Can't say and the future is still unwritten.
No, not no reason at all: "In response to content complaints on the ar15.com website, our team investigated and discovered content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence. As a result, we informed the site yesterday that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another registrar, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy told the Washington Examiner.
FWIW, ar15.com is hosted on AWS. GoDaddy was just the domain registrar. I gather ar15.com was temporarily removed from the GTLD name servers because they didn't move to a new registrar quickly enough.
I can only imagine how many of these emails per day Cloudflare's support team is deleting.
They planned poorly, that’s their fault.
What’s that?
sudo apt install postfix
Configure DMARC and SPF and you’re fine.
Parler just didn’t care.
I figured it out. Pirate Bay figured it out. Any company that genuinely cares about eliminating SPOFs has figured it out.
Over this last week, I've talked to people who have un-ironically argued that companies should not be allowed to moderate content... even if that content is illegal!
It's like a whole section of the population is just learning for the first time that the internet is real life and it's not the wild-west it was in the 90s.
I don't think they would care if Facebook and Twitter were each 1/10 the size of what they are today -- they'd still be billionaires and the companies would still be mind-boggling huge. They only care that the companies are much larger than competitors.
>Dorsey underscored in his tweets a need for a new “open decentralized standard for social media”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/13/trump-twi...
> Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.
Similar to how every mainstream comedian is persecuted and telling "unfiltered" jokes that they supposedly aren't allowed to anymore, and they'll totally get into trouble for it later.
All well known recent deplatforming cases were done on a flimsy grounds for off-platform activities. They are very hard to defend.
This is an intellectually dishonest take at best. I won't speculate on the other end of the spectrum.
I for one am disgusted at how servile about censorship readers of HN have been lately just because it was their percieved enemy who was being attacked, without understanding that this will be applied to $notenemy later. I've frequently complained about the state of "too many MBAs and not enough hackers" here but fuck the last few months really brought that out. Starting to wish I knew if there is a hn where the more anti-authoritarian types hung out.
1. Fire up servers in Russia.
2. Learn rsync.
3. Profit.
Facebook and Twitter couldn't exist on AWS, unless Amazon chooses to enforce their rules very selectively. There is a ton of hate speech on Facebook, which is not censored, moderated and which clearly violate all sort of rule. Much of it is due to the language of the users not necessarily being English, or another major language. However, regardless of the language, the content can still easily be in violation of an AWS terms of service (and often Facebooks own).
If Facebook had been an AWS, Azure or GCP customer, they would have been shutdown long ago... Well they wouldn't, because the rules wouldn't really apply to them. I honestly don't care about Parler, Amazon has every right to shut of their service, they decide what customers they want on their platform. What I do care about, is that terms of service, rules for allowed speech is applied fairly and equally.