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Comment by lesstenseflow | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of space between "what violates the law" (or explicit ios/play store Terms of Use for that matter) and "what will get you kicked off twitter" and I believe Parler operated in that space. Users could post stuff that would get them booted off twitter, but that was legal speech. This was fine with iOS & play store & AWS until they all simultaneously and independently (wink wink) realized it violated their terms of use. Unless we grant that this had nothing to do with newly discovered terms of use violations, it was crushing Parler in reaction to a change in the political winds (read: this is what happened).

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>This was fine with iOS & play store & AWS until they all simultaneously and independently (wink wink) realized it violated their terms of use.

The timing seems more likely due to a major public event than a backroom coordination.

I agree. There are people on here seeming to argue that parler was booted “because of TOS violations” which they clearly were not. The winds changed direction and it became expedient to boot them, TOS rules don’t enter into the equation.

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.”

They are not dishonest, this is just bad faith argument. Platforms were not passive regarding Parler for long time trying to make them comply with TOS. It is not true that they would ignore issue before.

And the real world violence significantly raised the stakes - both legal and practical.

> Users could post stuff that would get them booted off twitter, but that was legal speech

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.

> And AFAIK inciting violence is illegal.

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.

Sure, it's up to interpretation, but I think we're fooling ourselves a bit to say he didn't incite violence. People raided the capitol on his behalf. His rhetoric must have had something to do with that.

I think morally he did. And he should be impeached for both that and his inaction in response to that.

But the statement was "inciting violence is illegal". Which involves the law. That's a different question.

>I think morally he did. And he should be impeached for both that and his inaction in response to that.

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.

[0] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed65.asp

[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed66.asp

Parent is actually right, it is unlikely that Trump's speech met the legal standard for inciting violence. However most legal scholars agree that impeachment does not depend on having been convicted of a crime.

Here's a lawyer's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwqAInN9HWI

“Everyone” collectively knowing someone incited violence unequivocally is very different than proving, in a court of law, that said person incited violence. As another commented, it’s actually really difficult to do because you must prove intent and state of mind. It’s part of why I’m surprised that’s the only charge on the impeachment, despite there being a potentially more clear cut issue, legal wise, that happened the weekend before (call with Georgia election officials).

That actually is referenced in the full text of the impeachment resolution[1]:

"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...

> “Everyone” collectively knowing someone incited violence unequivocally is very different than proving, in a court of law, that said person incited violence. As another commented, it’s actually really difficult to do because you must prove intent and state of mind. It’s part of why I’m surprised that’s the only charge on the impeachment, despite there being a potentially more clear cut issue, legal wise, that happened the weekend before (call with Georgia election officials).

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.)

>Everyone” collectively knowing someone incited violence unequivocally is very different than proving, in a court of law,

Proving criminal liability is not required[0] in an impeachment trial.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786125

Yeah, I agree that usually it wouldn’t matter as impeachment trials are not held to the same standards, but a senator could argue a similar angle though. It only takes one charge to convict, so I don’t understand why one wouldn’t one more options, not less.

>Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law.

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...

Parler claimed they were intentionally not going to get into the game of defining "hate speech". We see how hard that is in the context of Twitter and Facebook. There are laws on the books in some countries criminalizing as "hate speech" the voicing of opinions that many reasonable people would consider simple truth, political or moral beliefs, mild skepticism of power, or disputing of facts/interpretations. In the US there is no definition of "hate speech" that is currently consistent with existing law. We already have laws to criminalize certain speech acts and a body of law to support them. If someone knows what "hate speech" is and can define it in a policy that isn't used to silence political opinion, then they are in rarefied company. Many people's opinions are noxious to others, of course. But who gets to decide which are which? Apple? Amazon? Twitter? Facebook? The 2020 US Congress? The 2022 Congress? The President of Russia? The CCP? The loudest keyboard activists and their online mobs? Those who are celebrating this aren't thinking it through, or have other agendas.

> pretty narrow

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.

No, she is female.

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.

I encourage you to familiarize yourself with this case before commenting that nobody should care about the subject being male. He went around booking bikini-waxing sessions (often in-home) from various women who provide this highly intimate service to women, then brought human rights complaints against them when they refused to wax his (male) genitals or allow him to come undress in their homes. This fellow’s sex very much mattered in this case, and people shouldn’t be forced to pretend it doesn’t as he goes around harassing and bringing frivolous suits against women. The courts ultimately agreed https://nationalpost.com/news/trans-activist-jessica-yaniv-f...

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?

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