I'm curious what kind of posts would definitely fall into this distinction. I see plenty of really distasteful, vile comments show up on Twitter. And AFAIK inciting violence is illegal. So the area between those seems to me like it would be pretty narrow.
My impression of Parler is more that they only deleted illegal speech of a particularly egregious nature, e.g. child porn.
Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law. For example, when it comes to USA laws, Trump almost definitely did not incite violence. But lots of people would disagree with the statement that he didn't incite violence.
But the statement was "inciting violence is illegal". Which involves the law. That's a different question.
And an impeachment trial is not an Article III court. Nor is it intended to be. It is inherently a political proceeding and not a criminal trial. As such, ethics and morals are certainly at issue and the rules of Article III courts are not relevant.
Nor did the founders intend[0][1] them to be criminal trials. Which is why someone who is impeached and convicted is not immune from criminal prosecution in an Article III court.
Here's a lawyer's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwqAInN9HWI
"President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so."
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolutio...
Impeachment may be shaped like legal process, and the final act may be called a “trial” and supervised by the Cheif Justice, but its a political process, and the difficulty of proving things “in a court of law” is pretty much irrelevant except to the extent that comparisons to a court of law may be provide political rationalizations for actions in the impeachment or trial process.
(IIRC, one version of the bill of impeachment had a second article related to Abuse of Power with regard to the Georgia election call, but that was eliminated in favor of making the issues regarding the call part of the context for the insurrection charge, rather than a separate charge.)
Proving criminal liability is not required[0] in an impeachment trial.
According to the Ars piece, Amazon claims that Parler users were planning violent attacks openly on the site.
That may or may not be true. I guess we'll just have to wait until the archive[0] is fully released.
If it is true, that might be incitement, but it's definitely conspiracy. And since folks died, it's quite possible that at least some folks could be charged with Felony Murder (discussion here[1]).
But we obviously won't know until we can get our greasy little paws on all those messages, photos and videos.
[0] https://threatpost.com/parler-archive-amazon-suspension/1629...
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/felony-murder-and-storming-capit...
Not so for better or worse. Multiple people have been banned from Twitter for calling a human rights litigation troll (and Twitter troll) a man (he is male).
https://nationalpost.com/news/free-speech-activist-lindsay-s...
https://mobile.twitter.com/bindelj/status/118726943929891225...
Calling a male troll “he” is definitely not illegal, yet you can be banned from Twitter for it. It’s not an incitement to violence, it’s not even borderline. Meanwhile that troll can ridicule one of the women in question for having a reproductive abnormality, so go figure. There’s a lot Twitter will ban you for that’s not remotely illegal, the gap is wide.
Before we had all this mess with real identities on the internet, nobody cared about your genitals when you wanted to be addressed with "he/him" or "she/her", they just did it. I wonder how we lost that.
He also engaged in other behaviour so vile I won’t repeat it here https://www.womenarehuman.com/male-transgender-trans-activis...
Do you still think anyone who refuses to pretend-along with this predator/troll and echo his self-image back to him should be banned from Twitter? And do you think the speech is illegal?
The timing seems more likely due to a major public event than a backroom coordination.
But the platforms aren’t being honest about this – they’re claiming that it was about terms of use violations. I’m saying “stop pretending like this argument from the platform makes any sense and let’s have a real discussion about the ramifications of banning groups from a platform when they become political unpopular.”
And the real world violence significantly raised the stakes - both legal and practical.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
Later you say: "My intel may be false"
It's just curious to tell people to not spread false information and then admit you may be spreading false information.
Sounds like you answered your own question. Tech companies were lenient on hosting a questionable community, until members of that community tried to overthrow the government. For all the moderation the Parler admins allegedly did, it was an open secret that it was the hang out spot for right-wing extremists. Yet Parler was allowed to stay afloat until it became clear that doing so became an issue of national security. The riots happened. The cause and effect here are pretty clear. The Parler community did this to itself.
...
> it is not a neutral source of information
Why not?
Scenario. WhatsApp groups begin to be used as gathering places. Open secret. Bomb or explosion or storming of a government building ensures. Question: is it a question of national security to investigate and pressure to censor or eliminate the platform, and if not why not?
Scenario. The bomby extremist-y people on Parler make up .05% of user base. 99.95, while being mostly right-wing, aren't bomby or national security-threatlike. Question: is the tradeoff of punishing the platform by making it disappear, worth it as the only alternative platform to Twitter (which is relied upon by government, health authorities and journalists as the one true place)?
I have no problem with arguments in favor of censorship. I DO have acid reflux when I see the lack of nuance, the strong confidence and wording like "pretty clear."
No, censorship is never pretty clear and always warrants skepticism and conversation.
Arguing as of the two were equal two is lacking even basic attempt at nuance.
Parler was created because that content was booted from twitter, reddit and public facebook discussion. Literally. So acting like Twitter is the same is unfair despite Twitter deficiciencies.
> because anyone who cares an iota about fairness and censorship would prioritize the comparison.
Anyone who cares about fairness and censorship would first look at Parler moderation, then at Twitters one and only then made comparison. Not even looking at Parler and then claiming that "it is totally same and unbiased because that would confirm my pre-existing bias" is opposite of fair and opposite of nuanced.
According to Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit, they were warned for months about their content.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
There is a handy summary of this on Ars Technica as well. That article also says Parler was relying on volunteer moderation to clear their backlog of over 26000 posts.
Or they were completely hands off? Which is it? Goalpost one or two?
You wrote that Amazon warned Parler about their content, but that's not what your link shows. It shows that Amazon asked a question about policies regarding specific posts, and Parler answered with their policies.
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/read-amazons-letter-to-...
Also note that it wasn't removed. I'm not even going to repeat that post here, but absolutely no platform would keep this online if reported, so "very similar terms of service to other content companies" as someone up this thread claimed isn't exactly true.
That’s a filter bubble style of moderation and poor compared to Facebook/Twitter’s efforts for moderation.
The CEO also made it sound like they ignore context and instead only respond to direct threats of violence, allowing vague remarks on platform.
> In January 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Parler had increased its moderation team to 600 people, and began paying them. They also had begun hiring full-time employees to moderate the service.
It may be that Parler did too little too late, but I find it concerning that most mainstream news outlets are failing to report this.
Chance's are, they're probably not paying people to ban political content, since they can get their users to do that for free.
Source? That’s the exact opposite of everything I’ve seen, including the CEO’s own public messages.
But having based its entire marketing around its terms of service being unlike other providers, with a particular emphasis on its greater level of tolerance for certain forms of political extremism, with predictable consequences for the community, it's obviously not in a position to use the "but we're no different from Twitter" defence
Note that "free speech" in the US is far from absolute. And there is some speech that, if Parler (or anyone else) doesn't remove it, they can be subject to criminal (e.g., child porn, setting up drug deals, etc.) and/or civil (copyright violations) litigation.
As such, anyone who claims they don't moderate is probably lying, unless they want to go to jail, get sued into oblivion or both.
as per articles linked below, you are wrong:
"Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
You have not provided any evidence to back up your claims, however.
Facebook moderates content only when it draws too much attention, but either way Facebook profits off said content as their algorithms promote it (because said content generates "engagement").
It's hard to say exactly what they moderate or how.
If you write in a less spoken language Facebook struggle to moderate you. Unless you’re trying to sell animals, because they spot that in seconds.
Facebook is happy to let bad content stay and profit off it unless said content carries a risk of bringing bad PR; I'm assuming this is the case with the "selling animals" thing because some animal rights groups escalated the issue to the media, and it is now the case with anything Trump- or election-related (not that I'm defending said content, but pointing out that its removal is for PR reasons as opposed to Facebook actually caring about democracy or discouraging violence).
However, it's clear they aren't acting in good faith and aren't actually interested in moderating bad content. Cybercrime-related Facebook groups which don't even attempt to conceal themselves are commonplace on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-... despite detecting them being trivial based on a simple keyword match.
does it really? "tries but fails to moderate extremism at massive scale" doesn't seem better than "makes no effort to moderate at much smaller scale". I guess the first leaves some potential for improvement in the future, but I don't expect a whole lot from facebook.
edit: I am not advocating for or against facebook being so large. What I am saying is there is a clear distinction between facebook and e.g. parler in terms of moderation.
"Just make it" is no longer as convincing a non-sequitor as it used to be.
The lesson the business world should take from this is: invest in your engineers.
Twitter had 30 engineers at one point, they weren’t deplatformed before becoming a better product.
Second, they've already found a new host (https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956315632/after-booted-by-big...), yet they announced they'll still likely go offline because that host can't provide all the engineering talent Parler relied on. They just need built up their teams and do the work to develop their internal infrastructure. They don't need to become a billion dollar company to do that.
I guess in this particular case, Gab vs Parler. Access to capital isn’t enough. Companies also need good legal advice, scale strategy and testing. Etc.
A teachable moment.
I think we might be seeing the start of a total division of society along political sides.
I think the main reason these big social media and tech companies devote so many resources to moderation is their leaders are tired of being called into televised political hearings that sole purpose seem to be political grandstanding of self righteous politicians.
At $20 per hour, approximately 400,000.
As a side note: as long as they (FB, YT, ...) can not moderate properly and automatically, they have not solved scale. They might have figured out making money but scale regarding social networks? - I do not grant them that achievement.
The "terms of use violations" or whatever BS they're referencing for booting Parler doesn't even enter into it, the action is based at least 99% on cost/benefit to the platform, not some sanitary inflexible set of rules.
Dorsey showed Twitter's rules mean nothing. Trump violates rules: "oh well he's an exception because he's a head of state [and he's the best thing that ever happened to engagement!]." Trump is losing power & allies are fleeing him: "sure he's still a head of state but this is the exception to the exception, so we're booting him [plus the tides just turned against him and dumping him is more palatable]." Soon we'll have the exception to the exception to the exception.
So let's not play dumb and assert that this is about some fixed set of rules, the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along based on "who is in power at the moment, what speech is unpopular at the moment" and above all "what will this cost us in dollars."
And the minute your speech is unpopular (I'm looking at you, anarchists, communists, and libertarians), out the door you go.
I think that's exactly what makes this such a complex issue. It's unprecedented. Never in the past have social media companies been suddenly used as an outlet for national leaders.
> the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along
Again, to the above point, this is obviously the case. There's no fixed set of rules to perfectly mediate this situation and appease everybody. It's going to be a bit fluid.
At some level, for these type of issues, intent doesn’t really matter, only results. I am sure big oil companies do t intend to cause global warming, however they put profits ahead of any concern for pollution. Same with Facebook. I am sure they don’t intend to be harmful and toxic, but at some level they put profits ahead of any concern for pollution.