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Comment by eejit_compiler | Hacker News Reader

This is about web hosting companies not wanting to be associated with a site linked to the Capitol insurrection.

It has nothing to do with any supposed "cancel culture".

Parler wasn’t “linked” to that any more than any other social media company. There’s a lot of misinformation on what Parler was.

Yes it was, the Parler leak revealed it was actually a rioter favorite: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdmm8/developer-makes-inter...

Parler's entire point was being an alt-right platform, whodathunk the far right would be using it?

You clearly never read much about Parler before any of this happened. The founders are most certainly not rioters. They're libertarians who wanted to found a pro-free-speech Twitter.

Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they are bad, evil, or wrong.

But, Parler was not pro-free-speech. It was pro right wing speech of any kind, but if your posts were leftists, they would be deleted and accounts banned.

That’s absolutely untrue. Sounds like you’re not speaking from experience.

Parler was founded with Rebecca Mercers money and kicked left-leaning posts and posters.

> Parler's entire point was being an alt-right platform

I don’t think this is a fair statement. From past interviews, it’s clear that the CEO of Parler and its founding team intended for it to be politically neutral and a destination for those of all ideologies. They may have attracted those on the political right, but that’s because Twitter is by default a bastion for the political left and naturally those seeking alternatives would have a different lean. But I don’t think that’s the same as the entire point being an alt-right platform.

Also, Twitter and Facebook definitely played a role in the riot story, and likely a much bigger role than Parler because of their scale. See https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-federal-authorities-a... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/13/faceboo... for more on that. But of course Apple and Google haven’t taken any actions against Facebook or Twitter. If the argument is that “most content on these services is fine”, that was also true of Parler.

The person who scraped the site pointed out that users started out shadow-banned, and were only unmuted after it was confirmed their posts fit a certain profile. That’s definitely not neutral.

Reference: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506

All your reference shows is all politically-neutral anti-SPAM categories[1]. Compare this with Twitter’s internal moderation tool[2] and their granular suppression capabilities which appear deliberately prone to abuse.

[1] https://nitter.mastodont.cat/pic/media%2FEq_b25LXMAEwtNZ.jpg...

[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/shinj...

This list of “moderators” is pretty damning (if we’re talking about neutrality):

https://gist.github.com/d0nk/ef4e58645d3250851491e4550cb16e2...

As opposed to Twitter which is known for hiring conservative moderators as they strive for neutrality.

I don’t know if the moderation log is in the leaks, but that’s something that you could draw some conclusions from. So far all this is conjecture.

I don’t think this particular conjecture is that sensational and backs up what Amazon has already claimed. This list of moderators overwhelmingly are Republicans/conservatives and some of them make concerning assertions in their bios.

I said it’s conjecture and you don’t disagree. I’ll leave it to you how sensational it is. I have biases but I would have no problem in moderating without them as above else I believe in free speech, so this argument is not very convincing, personally. You might be right, though, I’ve never used Parler, so IDK. But evidence is evidence and that Twitter statement was dishonest.

Twitter is definitely a bastion for the left, that's why Steven Crowder has a blue checkmark.

Every medium wants to reach as many people as possible. So they limit the visibility of what they don't like, but they don't completely get rid of people they don't like since they would no longer reach those groups.

Open basically any media and you'll see three categories:

(1) Opinion pieces.

(2) Attempts at appearing neutral by allowing opposing views, but always together with a commentary provided either by themselves or someone else to clearly provide objections.

(3) Safe easily sharable info. Like cute / funny pictures you can send to your friends which will get people into the site.

Fair enough. But is there any evidence to this? From my point of view, Twitter allows people like Steven Crowder, JK Rowling and Radical Feminists to use their platform to spread hate towards trans people, yet if I go there now and make a post with the word TERF in it I'll be suspended immediately.

Why is that a platform considered biased towards left thinking? Because it put warnings under probably false claims by far right presidents? The fact that it's only happened to Trump and Bolsonaro says more about right wing politics than about Twitter itself.

LOL JK Rowling spreading hate? Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t believe people subscribe to that narrative.

There is no narrative.

> is there any evidence to this

Well yes. The pattern holds true pretty much 100% of the time for most media platforms. Newspapers, reddit, etc.

The second question I think was already addressed.

> Parler's entire point was being an alt-right platform, whodathunk the far right would be using it?

It absolutely was not that at all.

What Parler was, was bad for business. It's not a good look for AWS to be hosting websites with violent content linked to the Capitol insurrection, and apparently doing nothing about it. So they pulled the plug.

The elephant in the room is Facebook. There's lots of evidence they were the most directly responsible [1]. Parler wasn't bad for business but scapegoating it was good PR.

1. https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-fac...

Facebook quite possibly was more responsible because they're more popular. But they also appear to be a actively fighting the misinformation that these groups spread and thrive on.

Whereas Parler is the opposite: they practically celebrate how little they care about undermining democracy with misinformation.

Actually FB let it fester and didn’t do anything about it until recently. Sure, Parler exists to provide this needed freedom of expression to extremists and does not represent what it is but in terms of impact, FB has had a lot more and did nothing about it

appearances can be deceiving

Only bad for business because of political dealings. The AWS name was not associated with Parler.

In my view, the more likely actual reason for the cancelling of Parler, as well as for their seemingly excessive hardware requirements, is that Parler wants a shot at competing with Twitter for real, and has convinced their investors that is possible. The latest chaos must be one of the best free marketing anybody in their line of business could hope for.

If realDonaldTrump moves to Parler, and some popular republicans already have, that would potentially bring in a floodwave of new users, and risking that kind of business opportunity by having underpowered servers would be professional malpractice.

Parler is also likely to face months-long DDOS attacks.

The AWS name wasn't associated with Parler and the Capitol insurrection, but it likely would have been. This is all about getting ahead of the story and limiting any potential brand damage.

It's similar to when Cloudflare booted 8chan, after the latter was linked to the white nationalist terrorist attacks in Christchurch and El Paso.

I don't understand the rationale for your view. Why would slapping down a potential Twitter competitor be any concern of AWS?

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