Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down
npr.org
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qhXD-4Kaw5dCEBv0dUM8buygEKg...
Parler hasn't lost the case, just a TRO that demands reinstatement on AWS, but the ruling on the TRO requires the judge to tip their hand about the case, and Parler is going to lose.
I don't think you even need to read the AWS AUP to know that Parler has no real case here. To buy Parler's contract claim, you'd have to believe that Amazon's lawyers are so stupid that they set out a TOS for the world's largest hosting provider that didn't give AWS the right to boot customers, which is something AWS --- really, every hosting provider --- has to do all the time. You almost have to not know anything about the hosting business to think there could be a case here.
But if you need to read a judge laughing Parler's claims off, well, now you can. Real "based" energy in excerpting the AWS AUP in their complaint and clipping it right before the clause that gives AWS the right to terminate service without notice to customers who violate their AUP. The judge, uh, noticed.
(As the judge points out, among the many problems with Parler's restraint of trade argument, there's the fact that AWS doesn't host Twitter's feed.)
Parler failed the first test.
Clearly Parler will suffer irreparable harm here, but they failed by a good margin to meet any of the other tests here.
Judging by how weak their infrastructure was in the first place, getting any kind of resilient hosting in place after all the industry behemoths turned their backs on Parler was clear not a viable option. If you can't get your site to work well with all the best tools, you really have little hope in the wild west.
If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on optimizing the stack to improve efficiency. It's also way more realistic to scale up your infrastructure in the short run until you know you've stabilized at a point where you can purchase and operate dedicated hardware to offset the steep margins cloud providers charge.
On top of it all, their product itself seems off-putting to a large portion of tech workers, which would make hiring talented individuals even harder.
It seems they did not set a sufficient foundation for such a possibility, and got caught unprepared.
My understanding of the scraped data is that some APIs used both sequential keys, and ignored both permissions and their soft delete flag. It’s not clear to me whether or not that API was permanently unauthenticated, or if it failed open once Okta locked them out.
They will pay far more for bandwidth than they ever will for hardware.
Unless you are building your webservice like it's 1998 (And webservices in 1998 sucked), you can't really disentangle from hosted solutions.
Parler is a Russian company so it should be easy to sign up with local providers.
The only surprising things here are a) it took the judge a week to deny this motion, and b) AWS hasn't asked for the case to be transferred to arbitration (given the mandatory arbitration clause in the TOS somewhere).
This was the most surprising angle to me - that the case didn't fail prima facie on this clause alone. I guess at least it serves to really emphasize how bad of a case they brought.
Well, actually, they said that it could pass on irreperable harm, but that was somewhat mitigated by the fact that much (but not all) of the harm could be addressed by money damages.
It did fail the the other 3 elements, and the balancing test in the alternate Ninth Circuit criteria.
This is the winner right here. It's a rather brilliant play, it keeps reminding their users that they exist. If they can find new hosting before they run out of ways to get in the headlines, they stand a good chance of keeping many of their users.
I would expect to see another wild filing after discovery. They'll find a quote from low-level employees from Amazon and Twitter talking to each other, inflate their credentials so they seem like they have authority, and then make a Sherman Act claim out of it.
I'm curious what lawyer would be willing to file these. The judge even takes the time to point out the places where Parler undermines their own case. This seems like it's just sacrificing your legal career; who would hire you after showing up in court and arguing this with a straight face?
> there's the fact that AWS doesn't host Twitter's feed
This is funny (as in, LOL funny) to point out because it makes parler seem completely inept, but it's only technically correct.
They just negotiated a fat contract to host twitter, and that's set to go live in the next few months. Can that really not be considered an endorsement of twitter's content with respect to AWS' ToS? It's not like twitter just signed up for an AWS account like the rest of us do. There was a bidding and negotiation process. Sales teams on both sides worked on that contract. I don't think it's so unreasonable to take the existence of that contract as evidence that AWS reviewed twitter's content and deemed it acceptable content.
Why does this matter? Legally, I don't think it does. I don't see any good reason why AWS shouldn't be allowed to selectively enforce their ToS.
But Parler sought to compete directly with twitter. At the time of account termination, they were growing at a rate of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of users per day, and in a way where it's not hard to imagine it being zero-sum (twitter users terminating their accounts and going to parler).
I don't think the case would succeed, but I do think that parler can make an interesting case about AWS picking a winner and damaging a loser.
Parler made this specific allegation under the Sherman Act. It was rejected because "Parler...proffered only faint and factually inaccurate speculation in support of a Sherman Act violation. AWS, in contrast...submitted sworn testimony disputing Parler’s allegations." That said, Parler "has not yet had an opportunity to conduct discovery," so maybe there's a bombshell text somewhere.
Well, tried to. They didn't do a good job of it at all. What they actually alleged (relevant towards this theory) was:
* There was set to a mass exodus of Twitter users to Parler
* AWS also hosts Twitter
... They didn't even allege that AWS conspire with Twitter. Sure, they don't have any evidence of that conspiracy without discovery, but they didn't even allege a fact that could be proven with discovery.
These two facts are supposed to sustain the theory that AWS had no other reason to kick off Parler other than a conspiracy to keep Twitter the dominant platform. Despite the complaint itself opening up by alleging that AWS kicked off Parler because Parler espouses conservative views and later conceding that Parler knew that its content violated AWS's terms, albeit Parler was attempting to rectify it.
There's another issue with Parler's claims that I haven't seen anyone else bring up: if Parler was expecting the influx of Twitter users as a result of Twitter banning Trump, how would kicking off Parler keep these users on Twitter or otherwise buttress Twitter's dominance?
No, the second of those is not a fact. Twitter does use AWS for some things, but the actual service is not hosted on AWS.
And that's pretty much the end of it. As the judge rightly points out in today's filing, all of Parler's talk about Twitter is just a bunch of hot air.
That could change if this lawsuit proceeds, and discovery reveals evidence of conspiracy. But that is all highly speculative at this point, and I would not be surprised if a company as lawyered up as Amazon has taken steps to make it all but impossible for such a thing to occur.
This case may not succeed but I can see it being re-used as part of a larger antitrust lawsuit. Though I doubt a democrat DOJ will actively drive such a lawsuit against big tech.
Well, first off, it's not necessarily the case that AWS's contract with Twitter is the same as AWS's contract with Parler.
But more importantly, whether or not a company chooses to enforce violations of contracts with third parties has no bearing on whether it can enforce violation of contract against you. The best you can argue is I think equitable estoppel: by not enforcing it on others, maybe they gave you a reasonable impression that your conduct wasn't violating. But AWS has a clause that says effectively "we don't waive any rights by not enforcing terms against you", and furthermore, AWS and Parler were already in communication about Parler's issues complying with the terms, which destroys any equitable estoppel claim.
What happened to Parler is not routine when you exclude all of the cases of blatant abuse of the service.
There are religious web hosts that will terminate you for not following their Statement of Faith, so I don't think Amazon would have any issues in requiring its customers to have a particular stance on gay marriage in the very unlikely event it wanted to.
Parler was widely distributing violent content from major leaders (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution) in a movement that reality showed was a real and not theoretical threat (c.f. the mob chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" in the rotunda).
I really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship. Parler had been around for years, uncensored. Almost all it's major accounts had history on Twitter for years before that (often having been kicked off for similarly violent content, btw).
If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it?
It's motivated reasoning. It's how you can get to the conclusion that Amazon cutting ties with Parler is unacceptable.
I don't necessarily think all people who follow this line came up with it spontaneously. I'm sure there's a lot of propaganda to this effect swirling in conservative media, pushed and promoted by bad faith actors for various short term partisan ends. I'm pretty sure that's why the specious comparisons between BLM and the capitol attack became so widespread.
Now that's motivated reasoning. You are choosing to dehumanize those who disagree with you, because that's more comfortable than acknowledging that they might have a legitimate grievance somewhere beneath all the ruckus around the election results.
It's logical to conclude that there will be blowback from a coordinated campaign to shut down the largest platform favored by "the other side".
What now? I pretty explicitly humanized them, and even shifted the blame a way from them. Personally, I think a lot of them are being shamelessly used and exploited.
> It's logical to conclude that there will be blowback from a coordinated campaign to shut down the largest platform favored by "the other side".
Not really. The largest platform favored by "the other side" (which I'm assuming is conservatives/Republicans) was and is Facebook.
Parler was only favored by a much smaller, radicalized subset of conservatives, mainly those who wanted to spread false claims of election fraud (because, IIRC, it only got popular in response to Twitter putting warning labels on such claims, which offended this radicalize subset). I'm totally fine with any blowback from such people, since their cause of championing lies needs to be utterly defeated, for the good of the country.
This patronizing belief that "those" people need to be protected from manipulation is used as more fuel on the fire. Thus the cycle of radicalization is amplified. Any victory gained by force will create the will within the defeated to build an opposing force.
Instead we have to look for the underlying causes (e.g. opioid epidemic, loss of opportunities, counterproductive cultural aversion to education, etc.) that drive people to rally together under the first cause that promises to help them, and address those.
Parler seems to have been caught completely unaware that there was a risk of AWS cancelling their service, so presumably there wasn't any serious attempt by Amazon to seek corrective measures. It seems unlikely there was even an attempt to understand Parler's moderation process, because having those conversations and raising/addressing concerns takes time.
It is clear that the process to remove Parler wasn't slow and deliberative. The question in my mind is whether it was explicitly political, implicitly political or if someone powerful in AWS was just panicking. None of the 3 situations bode well for anyone trying to use AWS as infrastructure for communication. Which is a number of their major customers.
1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
That is an interesting exhibit, thanks. It has swayed me on the time-frame, I'm not sure it changes my basic view - the AWS rep is talking about literally 3 posts in mid November, one of which seems to have 450 views in 5 days if the eye icon means what I think. From politely raising 3 horrible posts to extinguishing a business in a month and a half still leaves me questioning if the TOS was enforced politically.
While you are working though this the customer is used as a platform to organize an attack on the government of the the country you are based in. 5 people died as a result and there is every indication that if the attack had gone the way the attackers wanted it to that more would be dead including the Vice President of the United States.
Suddenly the cost calculation changes. It has become evident over the several months of negotiation that the customer has 0 intention of coming into compliance. The speech they are hosting has already resulted in a very large and very visible terrorist act. They have ceased to be profit center and become a liability. What do you do?
But, as chalst argues, there are interpretations where they were acting reasonably.
"This site we host was just used to plan a violent revolution. It's more trouble than it's worth, let's dump them."
Is this what you mean by "bias"?
Bias in this case works both ways. It makes some ignore the evidence that was already present. Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. This was about getting rid of a high risk client who had made clear that they will not be changing their high risk behavior. There is no reason AWS needs to share in that risk after giving them the opportunity to change.
If I became convinced the expulsion had nothing to do with Jan 6 and was part of a standard process of review that AWS conducted for all their customers then that'd be sufficient.
There were, generously, a few hundred people involved in the Capitol storming. It isn't obvious how organised they were organised since they lacked guns and riots sometimes start spontaneously from protests. AWS didn't have time to work out who they were, what they were trying to achieve, how they were organising, what there motivations were or what was going to happen next. Using that as a trigger to ban Parler - when they could easily have been organising on Facebook or in person - would be strong evidence of political bias.
> Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt.
I don't mind if AWS is biased, but part of the fun of kibitzing is assessing whether decisions are good or bad. AWS making decisions on bias rather than rational thought process would be bad. People who use evidence and can think in a consistent manner have a big advantage.
Twitter made the mistake of trying to rationalise their bias, giving us a memorial of them trying to rationalise "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." as a call to violence. It is a legitimate concern that the same sort of evidence-free thinking could take root in AWS's leadership - they might easily be drawing their leadership from similar pools of people to Twitter since the big tech companies are acting in the same direction at the same time.
Whoosh. The entire point of the evidence that exists is that Jan 6'th dramatically changed the risk calculation. Without Jan 6'th I can imagine that Parler might still be online. But if you ignore Jan 6'th and it's impacts you ignore a large part of the calculation going on for a business. Jan 6'th took Parler from hypothetically risky to proven risky.
You keep attempting to dodge or downplay those events but they happened and they had a very dramatic impact on the political landscape.
BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid.
A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives.
> BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid.
No argument on that particular point, but it is a decent reason not to try and use a certain infrastructure provider for communication tools or artistic content. Most people are looking for a dumb pipe when they pick an infrastructure provider, not a back-seat moderator with a twitchy trigger finger.
The more interesting question is why Parler were willing to risk being shut down in this way. I see two possibilities: either they did not have a realistic understanding of their situation, or they preferred to have Amazon pull the plug rather than being responsible for unpopular moderation of their users.
Some humans who run a biz serving other humans stood up and announced "you and you camp Auschwitz shirt friends are odious, we don't want that stank on us".
Is it political ? Maybe. Or maybe they are simply decent humans calling out some pieces of shit.
Other times and places in history people haven't stood up to the evil. In some, they did.
Amazon is fighting the good fight here. Facebook has been an open collaborator. Amazon drew a line in the sand and said " we are on this side, hope you join us"
Amazon was late, but ended up on the right side of history. Evil needs to be told that the rest of us think they are wrong. They can't figure it out on their own.
Read Amazon's reply to the case. They warned Parler for Weeks that posts were a massive violation of their TOS and Parler did exactly jack shit.
Finally they were kicked off.
Because the same content exists on Facebook and Twitter (for the same reason: moderation is hard) but nobody is trying to disconnect them.
> If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it?
They didn't. Twitter locked out the New York Post for reporting on the Hunter Biden story before the election.
What this appears to be about now is that the backlash from that sort of behavior was enough to cause a right-leaning social media site to become popular, and it continuing to grow in popularity would prevent them from doing similar things going forward.
Parler hoped to do moderation on a volunteer basis.
The two services simply aren't comparable.
You can run a service like Parler on all-volunteer (or, like Gab, no-volunteer) moderation. You just can't do it on Amazon's infrastructure. Plenty of companies that aren't organizing mass shootings or insurrections manage just fine without AWS, for a variety of reasons --- some of which even include cost savings.
The constant comparisons between Facebook and Parler are talking points, and insulting to our intelligence. We know better than to buy into this stuff.
Which appears to be less effective -- paid moderators aren't members of individual communities -- with the result that most of the planning of the riot happened on Facebook.
> Parler hoped to do moderation on a volunteer basis.
So does Reddit, doesn't it? Moderator of a sub is the creator, a user? And it seems to be less bad than Twitter and Facebook.
The reason people compare to Facebook and Twitter instead of Reddit is because they're worse.
> You can run a service like Parler on all-volunteer (or, like Gab, no-volunteer) moderation. You just can't do it on Amazon's infrastructure.
What happens if you can't do it on anybody's infrastructure who has the capacity to host a site that size?
But you're changing the subject.
Reddit would have killed the toxic sub and been done with it. Parler couldn't, because they were the toxic sub.
They were adding six digit numbers of users a day. Was a temporary backlog that unreasonable?
> Reddit bans whole subs when they get too out of hand to moderate, while Parler effectively is one of those banned subs.
Reddit (per Wikipedia) has 330 million users and 138,000 subs. Parler had 10 million users, equivalent to more than 4000 subs, not one.
And I think that's the root of it. "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.
That's about 1/3 the size of /r/askreddit, and comparable to /r/politics. Your approach to the math here is silly for a variety of reasons (users can be members of multiple subs, membership isn't split evenly among all subreddits, there's a long tail of subs with 1 or 2 members, etc.) Parler was equivalent to a mid to large subreddit. It would have been around the 50th largest.
/r/politics, for comparison, has a moderation team of ~60, most of whom have years of experience moderating the subreddit, and is assisted by a number of bots (automoderator, as well as some /r/politics specific bots) developed and tuned over the years to help. They also have direct lines to the admins (most major subreddits do) for when they need more official assistance. The sub also has a fairly well understood set of rules, and users who are willing to report offending content.
Parler had none of those things. I've had the pleasure of moderating a (much, much!) smaller community. I once encountered a situation where it got viral for a very controversial reason. I and the rest of my moderation team was unable to keep up with the quantity of content being posted, so we did something very simple: we locked the subreddit temporarily, preventing anyone without a history in the community from participating.
I stand by that decision having been the responsible thing to do. I can understand why, for profit reasons, Parler didn't want to do the same thing, but it would have been the responsible thing to do.
> "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.
I've yet to see any evidence that this was the case. "Saving it" in the way Amazon wanted seems to be entirely anthitetical to the approaches Parler was willing to take. Even now, the best approach Parler has been able to come up with is to use some AWS ML scanner to detect bad content.
But Parler _didn't even try_ any of these less drastic measures. They could have properly moderated, or if that's not possible because they were growing so fast they could have limited posts from new users, or added moderation bots, or could have blanket-banned the most problematic subgroups. They didn't do these things.
They did have restrictions on new users. People accused them of suppressing leftists by doing this.
> But Parler _didn't even try_ any of these less drastic measures.
Prior to the riot their failure was no greater than that of Facebook. Parler (but not Facebook) was forced offline almost immediately after it before being given any meaningful opportunity to do anything different in response.
It's also not obvious that their existing measures wouldn't have been as effective as alternatives once their user base stabilized and the backlog was cleared.
IIRC, Parler billed itself as an unmoderated "free speech" space [1]. IIRC, what little moderation it had was done by unpaid volunteer moderators, which in this case is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/parler-apple-g...: "Over the past several months, Parler has become one of the fastest-growing apps in the United States. Millions of President Trump’s supporters have flocked to it as Facebook and Twitter increasingly cracked down on posts that spread misinformation and incited violence, including muzzling Mr. Trump by removing his accounts this past week. By Saturday morning, Apple listed Parler as the No. 1 free app for its iPhones."
Funny you should bring those news stories up, because they are often focused on how understaffed these efforts are. On a moderator to 100k user ratio, Facebook and Parler had effectively the same (0).
Just because Facebook pays a few hundred people to suffer ongoing psychological trauma doesn’t mean they are doing anything more than paying lip service to the complaints.
Well the fact that the riots were organized on Facebook for the month leading up to it certainly looks inconsistent.
> If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it?
You mean until right after the elections that took away all of the Republican power to regulate tech? Seems like a great time to do it.
That's misleading. While there was definitely unacceptable activity that slipped through Facebook's moderation, they were making attempts to stop it.
IIRC, a lot of the organization activity on Facebook acted as a funnel to places like Parler. E.g. a protest event on Facebook, calculated to comply with its policies, which linked to Parler or Gab where more illicit planning could take place.
This is one of the cases where technically correct is actually the best kind of correct, because it goes directly to Parler’s claim that Twitter is a similar situated entity hosted on AWS being treated differently.
> They just negotiated a fat contract to host twitter, and that’s set to go live in the next few months. Can that really not be considered an endorsement of twitter’s content with respect to AWS’ ToS?
Um, no?
(1) Because if Twitter is under the standard TOS, they’ll be subject to the same reactive enforcement and quick cancellation as anyone else. Bringing someone on on those terms simply means you have the same trust as you’d extend to a random member of the public that they won’t break your TOS.
(2) Since they just “negotiated a fat contract”, they may or may not even be under the same TOS as are offered to people who just want to pick up hosting without negotiation. Which would be even farther from an endorsement of their content adhering to the general TOS.
> I do think that parler can make an interesting case about AWS picking a winner and damaging a loser.
Its possible that they could do so in the abstract, but they have made an argument along those lines, and its pretty clear that that concrete argument, as opposed to any hypothetical one they could have made, was, in the context of the particular evidence they’ve profferred to support it, unconvincing to the judge.
After that there is a major divergence between the type of content they host, moderation processes, and documented outcomes of moderation (eg: people espousing left-wing views being banned from Parler) that show the real difference between the two products and why one was booted and the other wasn’t.
Twitter content isn't on AWS now though, and there's no way to know what Twitter has agreed to remove in the move over to AWS, so essentially this argument says that Parler should be allowed to stay on AWS because it's possible that AWS might host similar content in the future. That argument obviously doesn't work. A business can't be judged on what might happen in the future.
You don’t have to be perfect at content moderation. You do, however, need to be very responsive to the hosting provider. If they contact you about a piece of content in violation of the AUP, you better take it down ASAP.
Ultimately I think that is the core distinction between Parler and Twitter. Twitter has a professional moderation program that is responsive; Parler was not responsive, according to Amazon (and I’m sure they have the receipts).
[citation required] This is an absurd claim.
They provide context for a lay audience, and while their language isn't simple, it is understandable to a non-native speaker like me.
Is this usual? or is it that for such cases with high publicity, the courts select judges that are know as good writers?
There’s an extensive body of specialized knowledge and terminology in the law, and a lot of that comes through making short-hand out of bits of decisions or enactments for the convenience of having brevity in reference, but with decisions clarity, both of results and reasoning, is a pretty big goal.
> the courts select judges that are know as good writers?
These aren't generally written solely by the judge. The judge's clerk will often draft some or all of it, which the judge can then edit or sign off on. The judge may also consult it with other people or judge's if they want or need to.
I absolutely agree with you. This is as true now as it has ever been, since the earliest days of purely commercial httpd hosting operations in like, 1994 or thereabouts.
Long before the existence of individual virtual machines that anyone with a credit card could rent, hosting companies and colocation/datacenter type places have regularly declined to do business with customers they perceive as toxic, and have ended hosting relationships with customers they no longer wanted.
They haven't released the actual contract itself but from what Parler said in their lawsuit, they had a clause in their contract that if AWS wanted to terminate their contract with cause, AWS would have to give Parler 30 days notice to cure the contract breach or get booted. AWS did not do this instead giving them 24 hours.
Edit:
Reading AWS terms does appear to give them the right to terminate. not ashamed to be proven wrong.
As mentioned above, they don’t have to give you 30 days before suspending for violating the AUP.
Now it's possible that the contract has some other wording, or that Amazon will argue that they didn't need to be as formal as Parler thinks. But as this goes through the courts, we will find out more.
Robert Barnes, on the Parler lawsuit https://youtu.be/pAFZw7fGY4A
Viva Frey, a lawyer did a breakdown on the lawsuit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFp5E7akgy8
Robert Barnes, On section 230, and the tech lawsuits https://youtu.be/rD-Zb0nTJw0
Their take on it is that the tech companies have gone too far, and are too arrogant. And now the political climate has shifted. So they will start losing some of these section 230 related cases.
Uncivil Law is a friend of theirs and he goes over the contract here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhWDKx9myI0&t=6187s
He's a conservative lawyer, so he doesn't have a political bias against Parler. They just don't have a case. I think Parler's lawyers misread the contract and thought the 30-day notice applied to termination for cause.
Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand and pretend the risk of de-platforming never existed.
The only way forward in my view is to actually change laws. Anything short of that, is a fool's errand. All this is already settled law and has been litigated previously multiple times. You have to change the law in order to reclassify these entities if you want things to change.
What orgs like Parler keep doing right now is spitting into the wind.
It would have made sense if their belief system (ie, Trump and alt-right moving mountains to make them viable) were in place. Clearly that wasn't the case and they will be a footnote in history.
> Parler wanted to be taken down so that they could fight this legal battle
?
That being said, they did not have the engineering expertise to even make a resilient stack on top of AWS. If you're running a free trial version of Okta to secure your assets in production [1], all of what you're proposing is a distant dream.
If your company gets put on an terrorist list, you'll be removed from US services very quickly.
Gab after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
Don't know if sentiment analysis ML algorithms are powerful enough to do something like this, but there has to be some scientific consensus on the relative hateful content that each site allows right? Or at least some pretty graphs.
If it was the left being censored I would be outraged on their behalf as well.
Edit: Not if, when the left gets censored by big tech, I will stand for freedom of speech with them, but I don't think many conservatives will be left to stand with us.
What about the Summer violence from BLM? Dozens of people died, with Twitter being used as a communications hub to attack specific individuals.
One group is using violence to maintain their power, while the other is using anything they can to make their lives better.
Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and the news media all lean left. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences.
I think all this soft power actually hurts the left in America, because our country's default state is a bit of an echo-chamber. It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.
The Senate and electoral college favor them massively. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to change any laws that might counter their preferences.
Turns out being `apolitical` is kind of a myth.
Your objection really seems to be engagement in culture wars.
Did you accidently respond to the wrong comment?
What the person said was that a chemical manufacturing company should not be "biting their nails" over some random Marijuana decrimininalization speech, that a random candidate is making.
Are they, though?
> the other is largely unaccountable
No the market will hold them to account.
Second, the other is accountable to the same laws as anyone else.
The electoral college does not matter. They go the way their states go as was made quite clear in the last election.
EDIT: Of course it matters how the voting system was designed. The EC votes the way their State votes.
The forefathers intended for states to have some say in the matter. We are a representative democracy. That is how the system was designed.
The key term is "now". After getting about 40m more votes. Be honest. Is that balanced?
To say the Republicans have any kind of advantage right now except for maybe the courts is incorrect.
As another user said: "The Senate is split 50-50, but the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people than the 50 Republicans"
You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.
The United States was designed as a representative democracy on purpose by the forefathers. That is fact.
There are many other representative democracies that do not have any of these "features".
Also, I thought a reply ago, you stated that the left was winning, not losing.
And the argument is that this democracy isn't sufficiently "representative", since it doesn't represent everyone equally. Indeed that's an explicit non-goal.
> You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.
But you can agree that the rules of the game are rigged against one side. You don't get to deny that just because you're winning.
This has nothing to do with Orwell. Im not sure why you bring him up.
The forefathers designed the system this way. I agree with the way it was designed. It prevents big states like California and New York from calling all the shots.
I agree with the forefathers. You do not. Simple.
Because saying "it's a representative democracy" is doublespeak. If you have one person representing tens of millions and another person representing a small city (~150k people), and they have the same vote, it's not meaningfully "representative". Saying "it's a representative democracy" doesn't tell you anything about the fairness of the system.
> I agree with the way it was designed.
Because it favors you. It would be a bad system even if it was the other way around (i.e. it favored the other side).
> It prevents big states like California and New York from calling all the shots.
I'm still to hear a good argument for why it's better for small states to call shots instead.
> I agree with the forefathers. You do not. Simple.
I'm fine with that. They were as fallible as anyone else and could not have foreseen that their system might have flaws. There's no need to deify them and think that everything they did was right.
Similar logic applies to the Senate: regardless of population every state gets two senators. Right-wing senators have received fewer actual votes (by individual voters) than left-wing senators for years, yet in that time right-wing control of the senate has been more common than left-wing control. Right now the split in the Senate is 50-50 (Vice President, a Democrat, breaks the tie) but the total number of votes cast for Democratic senators was much higher than the number cast for Republicans.
You literally have to deny reality when you deny that the electoral college and the senate represent a structural advantage for Republicans right now.
Reality is we are representative democracy. The forefathers deliberately designed it that way.
Reality must line up with your arguments. It does not.
If what you say is true, Trump would most likely be president right now.
Dems own entire cities with the largest population centers. Dems have better organized grassroots. Dems have California and New York, the main stream media.
What advantages you speak of are moot compared to those ones.
We are a representative democracy and we always have been.
The EC was more than a compromise, it was an integral part of a system that prevents too much power being handed to any one institution or demographic. And forcing national candidates to appeal to a multitude of states rather than a handful of cities has a moderating effect.
If anything, what's outdated about the EC is we need more checks on the political influence that is centralized in cities because the founders didn't anticipate urbanization.
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1352293847385124864
If voting in this country wasn't suppressed at the local level by Republican state governments, the federal government would look very different. It would be much more diverse and representative of real Americans, not just white male Americans.
Plenty of conservatives left on Twitter.
If Valve bans me from Steam for my language is that also violation of my free speech or is it their right to protect their platform?
Why? That's a serious question.
The reason liability protections exist for information services is because information services can't exist without them. It's not possible for an information service provider to be strictly liable for what their users post while having anything like a reasonable quality of service or cost. Think 10 hour moderation queues to post on Instagram, which costs $15/month, and requires using your driver's license or other photo ID to sign up so they can forward libel suits to you.
Requiring strict liability on the part of information service providers will likely drastically reduce the amount of free speech. Because they're going to aggressively take down/reject anything that has the slightest possibility of them getting sued. They won't suddenly morph into the town square because an unmoderated Internet town square is a filthy, ugly place that repels users and advertisers and hurts the bottom line.
I would propose that moderation decisions be logged and reviewable on demand (at the plantiff's cost) in front of a reputable arbitrator of the platform's choice.
What part of Section 230 do you think had any bearing on the issue being discussed?
That makes no sense, since the entire, explicit purpose of Section 230 was to free platforms from preexisting disincentives si that they could be free to “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” without incurring liability that would otherwise attend such editorial control.
You are literally suggesting that the price of Section 230 protection ought to be not doing the things to which Section 230 protection applies in the first place.
Also, I think it's wrong, in any cases, to think of Section 230 as a special grant of liability protection, any more than the preexisting different liability of distributors from that of publishers is a special grant. It's a recognition that online media enables models that would not be practical with the media for which the traditional liability roles for content developed, and that venues for content which wasn't pre-screened in detail but over which largely reactive editorial control was exercised was all of technically and economically practical on the internet, inconsistent with the premises of the classic publisher vs. distributor liability analysis, and already, at the time the Act was considered, starting to be stifled by application of the traditional publisher vs. distributor rules. We don't force bookstores to be neutral platforms to be free of publisher liability, because we recognize that bookstores aren't naturally going to be pre-screening content at the detailed level print publishers will, and it doesn't make sense to stifle them by forcing them to. 230 is the same idea, just for a business activity that didn't exist when the common law of liability was evolving.
You do realize both ABC and CNN literally went live and said they won't air his speech, right?
The electoral college was decided by about 40k votes this time, and about 80k votes last time. The popular vote margin was in the millions. That should tell you something about how far the EC is from reality.
The 50 senators who represent semi-conservative states represent the same number of states as the 50 who represent more liberal states.
I'm aware of that. And that structure favors one side more than another. This is not a controversial statement - the numbers (y'know, facts and logic) back that up.
States are lines on a map. In the current setup they have more influence than the actual people living in those states. Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?
Saying this doesn't make them less important, it just shows a childish attitude. Local and State governments and representation are important parts of the Republic.
Dollars are just numbers in a database. Will you give me all your money? Or is it only certain "made-up" things that are important to you?
> Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?
Yes, and straight up popular vote leads to the same thing. That's why we have a system that is a combination of popular vote and state vote.
* The People are represented by the House.
* The States are represented by the Senate.
* Both are represented by the President.
Seems like a well-balanced system to me.
So that you can understand how your contribution is being consumed by others: when I came to that sentence fragment I stopped reading and down-voted your post. The remainder of your contribution might have been insightful... but I'll never know.
* electoral districts are represented by the House [0]
* states are represented by the Senate
* who represents the people as a whole (if anyone) ?
* who or what does the President represent?
Why? What even is a state, if not its people? What even is a local or state government, if not the people in the city or state? Can you even have a state or a state government if there are no people in the state?
What's special about the state or state government specifically that it should get its representation separate from the people it governs? Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it represented?
Moreover, if this was really and actually true, why was the 17th Amendment passed? Why aren't senators still chosen by state legislatures, or nominated by governors and confirmed by legislatures? Why does the state get represented twice (Senate and EC) but the people only get represented once? Isn't that an imbalance?
> Seems like a well-balanced system to me.
Because it favors your side. You'd be singing a different tune if it was the other way around.
Amendments, like the 17th, are one way to change that union, with the consent of those members of it -- but if you push too far there won't be a union any more, because a portion of those states will walk away from a union no longer defined as they define it.
As the lopsidedness of representation grows ever more pronounced, it increases the probability that federal law and policy will diverge significantly from the views of the majority of the nation. This will likely increase disenchantment with the federal government even further, which is just as great a danger to the union. Surely you agree that this situation isn't ideal either, even if the Constitution says it's supposed to be like that?
If the people don't want things to be that way, they can pass amendments to change it.
If you don't want to call that a "referenda", I think you're incorrect, but it doesn't really matter.
It doesn't have to be people voting directly. It shouldn't be.
The United States is a union of states. The people have representation at the federal level, and the state level.
> Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it represented?
No. The people of the state are the state, not the government of the state. Again, the state gets representation because we are a union of states. And local governments get representation at the state level. There are many concerns of a people, and we have people representing those concerns at different levels of government, from local to state to federal. Otherwise we could just have a single person represent everyone.
> Why does the state get represented twice (Senate and EC) but the people only get represented once? Isn't that an imbalance?
The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC). The EC is the House + Senate. So no, it's not an imbalance.
> Because it favors your side. You'd be singing a different tune if it was the other way around.
I don't have a side. I vote for policies that I agree with, which has changed over time. Party support of certain issues has changed over time as well.
I am pretty tired, however, of people crying about foundational aspects of my country because they lost an election. I think the increasing concentration of power in the federal government is a bad idea.
It's more a genuine concern that continuing on this path will result in a federal government whose policies don't reflect the views of the vast majority of the nation. You can already see this on issues such as cannabis.
> The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that the EC adequately represents the people, since it takes the Senate numbers into account.
The state level representation of the senate is very arbitrary
We can do that all day to no real effect.
[0] year,dem_candidate,dem_votes,gop_candidate,gop_votes
1992,Bill Clinton,44909806,George H. W. Bush,39104550
1996,Bill Clinton,47401185,Bob Dole,39197469
2000,Al Gore,50999897,George W. Bush,50456002
2004,John Kerry,59028444,George W. Bush,62040610
2008,Barack Obama,69498516,John McCain,59948323
2012,Barack Obama,65915795,Mitt Romney,60933504
2016,Hillary Clinton,65853514,Donald Trump,62984828
2020,Joe Biden,81268867,Donald Trump,74216747
This is all pointless anyway for a union of states. Germany is underpowered compared to Luxembourg in the EU by design -- the same is true in the US. Should California ever go back to being conservative, as it was until Clinton, it will disadvantage Republicans just the same.
I think we're operating on different definitions of "favored". The definition I'm using (and which most of the English-speaking world uses) is "have a fundamental advantage". He won the electoral college narrowly. He won the popular vote handsomely. That's a sign of a thumb on the scale in a pretty fundamental way.
He didn't though. He won 57% of the electoral vote and 51% of the popular vote.
"Favor" only matters to extent it helps a candidate get over 270 EV.
I believe it is because to be break out successful in any medium that demands an array of skill you must not discriminate against people: The company must not have or create a forum for a culture of exclusion.
That is to say, it should not matter if a person is gay if they are skilled in acting, coding or teaching. They are welcomed for their talent.
However, these “right leaning” groups typically are at best on the back foot of accepting the reality of diversity. And are often financially backed by people who seek to make laws that restrict the freedom of others to protect some existing homogeneous power structure.
So lack of traction in these industries is because you can’t constrict the talent pool to fit a narrow idea of what a completely equally protected human is and expect to get enough talent to be very successful.
This 2004 article includes discussion of the benefits of acceptance: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/02/26/the-case-for-ga...
I don't think American news media or academia or Silicon Valley skews left. It skews ... urban and educated? Silicon Valley seems libertarian-ish, news and media seems like they do in every other country. From here it doesn't even look like the US has organised, left-wing political actors.
citation needed.
Silicon Valley is a monument to capitalism and most if not all entrepreneurs lean libertarian.
As for the news media, as an example, Fox News has the highest viewership in the US. And for the others, ever thought about why you're not seeing a lot of coverage about unions/worker rights/worker strikes? Don't mistake anti-Trump rhetoric with 'left leaning'..
So I'm not sure we're you're getting your 'data' from.
> As for the news media, as an example, Fox News has the highest viewership in the US.
Yes one channel is different than every other, of course viewership is concentrated there -- all the lefty viewers are spread out over the remaining channels.
If the other news channels aren't "left-wing" then Fox isn't "right-wing", and everything is meaningless. There isn't a large population of commies or nazis in the US, despite what the media would have you believe. Both parties are pretty near the center, with some individual outliers.
But MSNBC viewers self-identify as Democrat at the rate of 95%, NYT as 91%, NPR at 87%, CNN at 79%.
You need to compare aggregate numbers if you're trying to be fair.
The source for the above is Pew Research Center, Sept 12, 2020, published in this Tweet: https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1304908656543178752
Saying 'all media is left leaning' is factually false.
The reality of the US is: 33.7% of Americans didn't even vote in 2020, 34% voted "left", 31% voted "right" (the rest of the votes went to third party candidates). Those who voted on the right are further subdivided into even smaller groups. One of those smaller groups on the political right side includes extremists who attacked the capitol.
Distaste for Parler, due to the actions of some of those extremists who were using it actually crossed political boundaries: folks who didn't vote, folks on the "left" and even folks on the "right". The shunning of Parler isn't about "soft power" on the left its about the fact that a small group of people managed to do something so reprehensible that a LOT more than just 50% of people felt that association with them was tainting.
actual bonafide leftists have very little real political power in ths u.s afaik...
Hollywood (the industry funded by the US Military to put pro-military-industrial-state advertisements into movies) is not "left leaning" in any meaningful way. "News Media" all lean either slight-right (MSNBC, NPR) to hard-right (Fox News, NYT, WSJ). Silicon Valley is primarily driven by right-leaning "libertarian" conservative types (at both big corps and small startups). Democrats are largely all conservative (in that, Democrats of 2021 mostly all hold identical views to what Republicans used to hold in the year 1998)
We do have a few centrist politicians and groups (Bernie Sanders / AOC+Squad, etc), and a few centrist movements (rights for LGBTQ+, or "Defund the Police", for example, is largely politically-centrist initiatives).
But I'm not aware of even a single left-leaning politician in any federal elected office. For example, no elected federal politician is advocating for the nationalization of all private corporations, or elimination of all for-profit entities, or for a complete cap on individual wealth, or for giving Hawaii back to the aboriginal Hawaiians, or anything like that, that could be considered a full-left position. (But meanwhile, on the right, there is a meaningful ultra-far-right political movement arguing that we should ignore replace democratically-elected officials with dicatorships, for example. And that group has elected members sitting in the House + Senate today)
No one advocates a monarchy either, but that doesn't mean no one is "right-leaning".
so, given this, that NPR is right-leaning, and bernie/AOC are 'centrist', am I correct in your assessment that basically just about only bolshevism counts as 'left'?
> NPR is right-leaning
Yes.
> bernie/AOC are 'centrist'
Yes. Though I would describe Sanders as left-of-centre (apart from her stance on the environment, Ocasio-Cortez is quite the centrist).
> am I correct in your assessment that basically just about only bolshevism counts as 'left'?
No. There is an entire range of actual leftist politics and economics that Americans tend to utterly refuse to engage with in good faith - the Cold War really did a number on that country's collective sense of a political spectrum. Left/right are instead essentially reduced to only being about social issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights, with some lip service paid to the environment.
"Imperialist capitalism, but make the marginal tax rate somewhat higher and appoint more minorities" is not leftism.
This is not technically true. (1) politics is a spectrum (2) the US is generally left leaning as a whole, but the largest demographic designation of people in the US is generally considered moderate.
> This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences.
The population of the US leans left - those outlets are simply a reflection of that. It's absurd to think that all of these elite people who run those companies get together and conspire to keep left ideas alive. If you know anything about the Democratic party you would know they are horrible at creating a coordinated strategy. To think that same party is somehow regurgitating a coordinated theme through commercial means while at the same time having an uncoordinated government strategy is absurd.
> It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.
I agree with this but not for your aforementioned reasons. Those echo-chambers exist because communication is no longer at the town square but on social media and messaging apps.
Silicon Valley is right-wing on economics and defense of monopoly, and left when you talk about race and gender equity in the board room.
You can see echoes of this on HN where many people support restrictions of speech if they come from a private platform ("laissez-faire" approach to private property), but still call for a shut down of hate speech and a correction of "misinformation".
The Democrats' cultural mores center around postmodernist principles of "language makes reality" "there are power imbalances" "the power imbalances intersect around race and gender" and finally "correcting how we talk about these topics will help the marginalized." ... But, we're reminded, Twitter and AWS and Facebook are private property, and you should read and follow the TOS ("laissez-faire").
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/2024-republican-prim... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/fact-check-marjorie-... https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/01/21/conspiracy-th...
To believe that Parler would have been viable on AWS to begin with, they had to actively avoid reading the AWS terms of service. And, I mean, I'm sure they didn't, just like they apparently didn't authorize anonymous HTTP requests for their users assets. The whole effort seems clownish and performative.
In that light, I think I object to the notion of a "digital death sentence". They chose an incompatible provider for the services that they needed, and suffered the consequences. Gab, a service that is objectively far worse than Parler, appears to be doing just fine; in fact, they went through something similar to this after the Tree of Life shooting was planned on their service, and Parler had to have not paid any attention whatsoever to what happened to their most important competitor to have believed they had a chance on AWS.
Not necessarily because I enjoy having this speech hosted, but because isolating and pushing out so called "deplorables" is escalating the current American political conflicts to serious violence.
As I said in my other comment, when the disenfranchised can't speak, they get violent. If you disagree with these people, say that to them. Cutting them off from the mainstream public squares like Twitter and Facebook just creates a new generation of radicals.
Silicon Valley used to stand for freedom of speech for a reason.
That doesn't seem to be working in a post-truth world. Not sure what the solution is, but this isn't nearly enough.
Can you provide references that back up this claim?
Bear in mind that the deplatforming began after January 6th of this year, so any escalating violence which may have occurred on or before that point is not evidence of your claim. And after the events of the 6th I imagine it’d be difficult to compose a compelling argument that not deplatforming prevents violence.
In any case, the only news on the topic that I’ve seen has been that election misinformation on Facebook/Twitter has dropped by 70% since the deplatforming happened on those platforms[1]. That isn’t directly about violence, but presumably will result in less alt-right radicalisation, since their ability to reach new people is reduced. Though obviously it’s much too early to have a good understanding of the long-term impact of actions like this.
Which is why I’m so curious about how you’re making statements like this as if they’re plain facts. I’m super interested to see any references you can provide!
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinfo...
One of the conclusions of a recent purge by Reddit was that it just pushed the banned users into even more radical spaces online[2].
Of course we all know about The Streisand effect, and one article suggests that censorship just draws more attention to the banned content[3]. If we assume that ideas are somehow "contagious" or "infectious"[4] then we're just exposing people to them even more.
> In any case, the only news on the topic that I’ve seen has been that election misinformation on Facebook/Twitter has dropped by 70% since the deplatforming happened on those platforms.
But the deplatforming didn't make those people go away, it pushed them to platforms like Gab and Parler, right-wing echo chambers. This is like an extreme version of a filter bubble. Remember, millions of people supported what happened at the capitol[5], and there is zero hope of de-radicalising people if the left and right aren't talking. If anything, both sides will get more extreme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming#Twitter (see references)
[1]https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...
[2]http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
[3] https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://th...
[4]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00546-3
[5]https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/
You should re-read it. It offers that as a possibility, with terms like "may" and "could have". It does not conclude it did happen; it notes that some users migrated, but that's not at all surprising.
The hardcore folks are likely to always wind up somewhere, but driving them off Reddit likely makes it more difficult to recruit less initially strident users. As the study indicates, "the ban worked for Reddit".
It has the effect of preventing violent content from using adjacent nonviolent content (i.e. baby and pet pictures, nonviolent political advocacy) on the mainstream platforms as a kind of "human shield".
Of course, this is a disappointment for anyone who finds the normalization of violence-provoking content desirable.
The problem is that there already exist plenty of forums on the internet for non mainstream but non violent speech. The only speech seeking a home is the violent speech.
When the white nationalists did not have a platform, was the escalation higher or lower than it is now? Granting them platforms seems like the issue that started the escalation to me.
Amazon can enforce their contracts selectively. The contract isn't a statute; it's an agreement between two parties. Amazon could presumably strike up a side agreement with a customer that overrode the "master" contract. I'm not a lawyer, but stuff like that happens in consulting somewhat regularly, where you have an MSA governing all your projects, and specific contracts for weird projects.
What I've seen is basically some screenshots of some bad posts, which doesn't tell me anything about what was really going on in a very large and complex system.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
Filing: Amazon warned Parler for months about “more than 100” violent threats
[...] Amazon provided "more than 100 additional representative pieces of content" advocating violence on Parler over the following seven weeks, the company said. Another document in the filing (PDF, also with content warning for racial slurs and threats of violence) lays out dozens of examples of posts Amazon reported to Parler, beginning in mid-December. Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama.
Exhibit D (contains racial slurs, etc):
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
I saw a violent insurrection against the US government unfold on live TV, incited by Trump himself, with the goal of overthrowing the results of a fair election, armed sedition justified by disproven lies, which was planned and promoted and published in real time on Parler.
I also saw a map of the GPS data from Parler users who posted live videos and photos of themselves storming the US Capitol and murdering a police officer and attempting to murder Vice President Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
So yeah, there's a lot more evidence than screen snapshots that you're conspicuously ignoring.
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
I have no doubt that some Parler users went into the White House. I haven't seen any evidence that Parler had no moderation. I haven't seen any evidence that Parler was any different than Facebook or Twitter with regard to users planning illegal/violent acts, making violent comments, etc.
The issue is not that someone somwhere posted something bad and Parler merely failed to notice. The issue Amazon claims is that Parler had not done even bare minimum - taking down few dozens of posts that Amazon told them about.
https://uncoverdc.com/2021/01/21/doe-v-twitter-twitter-fails...
Come back to me when AWS drops Twitter's new contract. Then we'll talk about whether or not Twitter has any moderation. We'll discuss whether Twitter is designed specifically to facilitate child trafficking. And every other formulation of this narrative.
From a practical standpoint, your opinion (and mine for that matter, which I haven't expressed for this reason) is irrelevant.
As such, it seems to me that all we can really say is that the judge's refusal to grant the TRO (given the tests[0] applied in deciding such things) while not dismissing the case outright, isn't a positive development for Parler.
Further, the judge's ruling appears to have questioned the legal basis for Parler's claims. That doesn't bode well for them either.
All that said, claiming that one side or the other is factually correct without having all the evidence seems both biased and premature.
I'll wait until the truth comes out. Because in the end, it always does.
There's plenty of reason to be skeptical about lots of things. There's plenty of reasons to dislike mainstream social media companies and the large companies that do business with them. But not everything is a conspiracy.
spoken as if there is just one cloud hosting provider in the world; it's parlers job to take care of their own security and resilience
Let's say I call Jim's taxi every day, I am his client, and one day Jim refuses to serve me, can I sue him or should I just call another taxi?
Parler wasn't dropped for making Amazon look bad. Parler was dropped for repeatedly failing to address blatant terms of service violations.
AWS still hosts the National Enquirer, the magazine that literally tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos. AWS is hardly in the habit of removing sites that make them look bad.
Parler has gained a reputation for being some sort of free-speech platform, but it was anything but. They had heavy-handed moderation that routinely banned people and removed content for not agreeing with the popular sentiment. They made a deliberate choice to continue to leave explicit calls to violence on their website, and they were removed from AWS for it.
Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.
EDIT: to add, this is just his take. There is obviously 2-sides to the story, so hard to know the full truth here.
[0] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...
Either way, without knowing the full picture from both sides (like a court case going through discovering to fully put out the communciations between Amazon and Parler), we don't know the answer. We see that Amazon canceled Parler with little external communication. And we see what Parler is saying. Amazon could share what they communicated with Parler (assuming they legally can), then we could see another side to this story.
It would be nice for this court case to go through discovery, then we'll know who said what and when. But until then, we have very imperfect data and have to weigh it as best we can.
Amazon bring up some examples of posts that concern them. Parler say they will look at the post that constitute actual threats but have a policy of not removing content like the post that's just a long, content free screed of racial abuse. That alone can easily be considered violation of Amazon's conveniently broad AUP.
Amazon appear not to have chosen to terminate or threaten to at the time, presumably on the basis they were getting plenty of money and relatively little grief for hosting them, but it puts a very different perspective on the idea that Parler was caught completely by surprise, and would have cleaned up everything they could if only they'd had more time and resources.
> The first example, as hateful as it is, would not be deemed a violation of our terms of service. Following Nadine Strossen (New York Law School, ACLU), Parler does not ban "hate speech" insofar as it would be protected by the First Amendment.
By the time of the filing, Parler realized this was mistaken on both counts. As noted in the judge’s denial:
> “Parler is not asserting a violation of any First Amendment rights, which exist only against a governmental entity, and not against a private company like AWS. And indeed, Parler has not disputed that at least some of the abusive and violent posts that gave rise to the issues in this case violate AWS’s Acceptable Use Policy.”
Just to underline that first sentence, for end users on Parler, or Twitter, or AWS, “First Amendment rights” are not a thing.
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
“In mid-November 2020, AWS received reports that Parler was hosting content threatening violence, in breach of the agreement. Executive 2 Decl. ¶ 4. On November 17, 2020, seeking to better understand Parler’s approach to content moderation, AWS provided Parler two representative examples, asked whether “this type of content ... violate[s] [Parler’s] policies,” and asked for “more detailed information on [Parler’s] policies and processes for handling and mitigating” such content. Id. & Ex. D. Two days later, Parler responded that it had referred one of the examples to its “regular contact for investigation.” Id. Ex. D. Over the next seven weeks, AWS reported more than 100 additional representative pieces of content advocating violence to Parler’s Chief Policy Officer, including...”
And some emails, from the Exhibits:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
As well, these are just responses, not actually discovery. I'd be interested exact timelines of things and how emails played out within Parler and within Amazon. Amazon's response is just their take on it trying to justify their own actions.
And I wouldn't expect them to do so! They're a tech rep, not a legal rep.
Facebook and Twitter don't own their data centers. If the DCs responded to the same pressure about hosting illegal content, the social media giants would disappear too.
Edit: the downvotes and rate limits are about to push me away from HN for good. This is ridiculous.
My platform is anti-fascism. I'm tired of people on both sides trying to shut down the other side.
Facebook certainly owns quite a few.
https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/facebook-infrastructur...
They lease some, but some are definitely custom built just for them:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/facebook/facebook-plans-...
Not true, they do have own data centers.
Which further underscores the perils of architecture built around a central point of failure once more, so far from what I've heard about Parler makes me think it was a den of mainly boomer aged crack-pot Qanon and Trump supporters.
In a way its a lot like 8chan, which also got censored after the last racist shooting, Hotwheels outright condemned this and went on record from the Philippines where he lives now and said he wished he didn't create the thing as the worst things he could ever imagined came out of there in masse, but he had no choice as a person living the US with a disability and no access to medical care and limited employment opportunities.
With that said, I'm indifferent to Qanon BS, and the latest storming of the Capitol underscores how pervasive the cancer that is social media is in deteriorating the social fabric in the US for so many (mainly disenfranchised, and poorly educated people) which makes me want to blame you FAANG types even more. I'm sure Russia and China have a hand in all of this, but that is to be expected after how the US intelligence agencies have weaponized every technology for nearly the entire last century around the World.
But in the end, people have agency and the choice to not use your algo optimized survielence based apps/platforms and fall trap to these abysmal outcomes. And the truth is so many of you people default to the 'If I didn't do it, someone else would' rationalization.
And as I've come to learn in my time in tech, especially in my (limited) time in Silicon Valley, many of you are immigrants on employer sponsored Visas or 1st generation migrants with family back home who need the money to survive, so I can't hate you as a person if that's your situation. I just want to clarify that I hate the system you operate with a passion because it lures you in with the delusion of prestige tied with bloated salaries for focusing your attention on the most pointless, and in modern times clearly dangerous, use of your collective talents and skills at these places when we have so many more real problems to solve.
What I can say is I just sincerely wish you do something worth redeeming you as a Human being as a side project.
Imagine if the power company, that provides the electricity for those data centers decided to stop working with them, tommorow.
Surely, you could recognize the issues with doing this? (Lets ignore common carrier laws for a moment, because it is not relevant to the main thrust of the argument, which is that this would be bad)
Yes. Abuse and copyright violation doesn't get a pass, so why should extremism?
You take calculated risks in these industries when you're using a service provider. Depends on your goals. Sucks to suck.
Isn't that mainly due to their amount of revenue? Are newer services supposed to be shut down because they can't(yet?) compete with Twitter on budget for moderation?
Then you stop chasing growth at all costs or you go under/lose business partnerships/etc. Sounds like the free market to me - I don't get the idea that a business is entitled to existence no matter what, whether or not it can afford to pay labour (or even get enough volunteers) to do its work.
I mean, moderation or no moderation, your overall costs are going to roughly correlate with your number of users. If you can't come up with some kind of revenue stream -- be it subscriptions, advertising, or donations -- your site is going to be a money pit.
Besides, depending on what kind of site you're operating, moderation can sometimes be managed by volunteers. Some high profile sites like 4chan make that work pretty well. But it depends on having dedicated volunteers who can agree to enforce rules, which isn't always easy.
Then you're fucked, because you overextended past your available resources, and you crash and burn.
And keeping National Enquirer doesn't make Amazon "look bad"... you are mixing issues here. National Enquirer itself may not be pro-Amazon, but they'd be that way whereever they are hosted. Their existence on AWS, though, does not impact Amazon one way or the other, because even those who dislike what they publish, aren't generally claiming they should be denied hosting.
Nonsense. Parler was created to host content which Twitter blocked and users which Twitter banned. Not suggesting Twitter was in the clear here, but suggesting Twitter was worse is BS. Parler tolerated much worse content, and on average content on Parler was much more incendiary.
Im with everything your post says, but I’m not even fully convinced this is an issue.
Twitter can argue a good faith effort and point to millions of accounts and posts it has removed–from all political persuasions. It can also point to constant policy changes to address what Amazons policy sees as a very real problem.
parler on the other hand has had its ceo say quite clearly that they have zero intention as a company to even address this problem.
Twitter also hosts lots of content that's way better. Among the highly relevant, when it comes to AWS decision making, AWS evangelists like Jeff Barr and Andy Jassy use Twitter to communicate with customers. AWS itself has a Twitter account for status updates. There's just a ton of stuff on Twitter that is absolutely fine and would be collateral damage were Twitter shut down.
In the realm of taking down providers for copyright violations, the courts recognize a standard of "substantial non-infringing use" as a way to minimize that collateral damage. A provider like YouTube, which had a ton of both legal and illegal content prior to the Google acquisition, was allowed to stay up whereas a provider like Napster was shut down because they found it to be almost entirely copyright violation.
It seems like directly equating Twitter and Parler is a false equivalence. Twitter is a generic platform that some users use for problematic political discussion. Parler is a platform specifically targeted at problematic political discussion. You can't target the problematic stuff and expect the same protection as someone who casts a wider net.
What will we feel if Microsoft and Apple start deciding what kind of contents can be generated and saved in their operating systems? It feels like time is ripe for a cloud provider that simply provides a platform.
The first trouble is that you are opening the doors to all sorts of extremists. Whether they're far left, far right or simply personally unhinged, they are as predatory as spammers. They have no qualms about abusing your good will and s**ing in the punch bowl.
Same thing happened with Gab and Minds, but also smaller bulletin boards I've seen over the years. You set up a free speech site, and next thing you have a bunch of Nazis festooning it with swastikas. They're just like spammers, except they're spamming ideology instead of work from home scams.
The second trouble is that Parler is a competitor to established media corporations, who have a strong incentive to shut them down. That's a reality that every new business needs to face: established firms do not want competition.
All the people running amok provide the established firms with plenty of ammo to tar the upstart's reputation. And while they are biased by their incentives, they feel they are acting justly because they see all the extremist lunatics there. AWS didn't fabricate those incidents on Parler, all those were real posts.
It doesn't make a lot of business sense to say, "we invite everyone in" and then plan on kicking out a lot of users.
There are loads of simpler reasons why lefties thought they were getting booted, especially incompetence on Parler's part.
AWS didn’t see Parler as competition, just a liability.
So far, my take is that websites have less obligation than hosting. It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues - I am leaning more and more to the idea that colos, IaaS and ISPs should be considered common carriers, and that only a court order should get a site booted off the web entirely.
They booted Parler off for violence issues. One may personally disagree about where to draw that blurry line, but I think there's more than enough plausible deniability here. This is not the trigger of a grand slippery slope. If Amazon drops a company purely for non-violent political differences, by all means, lets raise those pitchforks.
Husband: Two glasses of white wine in one night honey? You need to cut back for your health's sake
Wife: But dear, you drink a handle of vodka every night and have refused any attempts at intervention.
Husband: A-ha, classic whataboutism
edit: I'd love to respond to the people below me, but HN has decided that one post an hour is too much (despite having a 10 year old account and 4000+ karma)
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Facebook is free of guilt, but there is evidence that Facebook does at least try to keep their site clean, and for the most part they do. Its certainly possible that Facebook had (in absolute terms) more violence and planning than Parler, but as a percentage of the overall content, it's much smaller.
This doesn't excuse Facebook, they can do better, but it isn't hypocritical to say "the group with 10% violent content that tacitly encourages it isn't okay, while the group with .1% violent content that actively innovates in trying to keep things clean is okay".
Of course, that's only true if FB is actively innovating, and, well, that's questionable (Yann Lecun has made some concerning statements about Facebook's role, or lack thereof, in radicalization).
I will say that my preferred solution to the problem of Facebook (nationalization and open criminal investigations into its leadership) actually raises serious constitutional issues. The Parler case really really doesn’t - it doesn’t even raise good philosophical issues about free speech, just a bunch of dumb arguments.
Some of the specific, concrete planning of violence may have taken place on Facebook. That doesn't appear to have been taking place as much on Parler -- possibly because it was less private -- but there was plenty of generally violent rhetoric on Parler, just less specific. "We should kill this person" (Parler) versus "Let's all meet up with our guns here" (Facebook).
The line genuinely doesn't hold up as especially powerful when its "I did nothing because they self identify as a hate group against people like me"
It baffles me how often violence issues become conflated with speech issues. You are absolutely correct, this is a violence issue.
America has likely the most free speech protections in the world, but fighting words (violence) are not protected. There is a huge amount of precdent to support Amazon's actions here, dating back decades.
Furthermore, just because Facebook did nothing is no reason for Amazon to sit idly by doing nothing. Is the advocation for Amazon to become another bystander? Is the superior situation to have all platforms supporting and enabling insurrection and possible sedition? Get off it. Amazon can make the right choice irrespective of their peers making the worst choice.
Many have pointed out that the storming of the capitol was not too dissimilar to many of the b.l.m. riots which were also often coördinated and featured chants of killing police officers.
And it very much seems that whichever side one be on very much dictates how both are treated with both sides claiming that it is about violence irrespective of speech, but it's quite clear that the tolerance for violence is quite a bit lower when it concern an ideology one does not agree with.
It's not a one side issue. It's not right vs. left. In the case of parler, it's largly Nazi vs. not Nazi, and that's a particularly easy case to judge. Parler does not represent conservative America, even if the extremists at the rally claim otherwise. It represents a mix of violent hate groups and conspiracy theorists. The small proportion of BLM activists that were actively violent do not represent liberal America.
Everyone has a choice. Everyone identifying as conservative can point at the white supremacists in DC and say "Those are my people" or "Those are not my people".
Every man considers the group for which he fights oppressed and the group that fights against him a “hate group”, and every man has cherry picked statistics to show it.
> Everyone has a choice. Everyone identifying as conservative can point at the white supremacists in DC and say "Those are my people" or "Those are not my people".
And the same applies to the the more extreme and violent parts of the b.l.m. movement.
As is usual, and as I criticized, you cherry pick the most violent parts of “the other group” to make your point, while showing the more moderate of your own to front them as the good guys.
I grok free speech. You can't outlaw some speech that is considered immoral because that speech may equate to the future moral high ground. Gay rights, as one example, would never have happened were there a moral gatekeeper on speech. I deeply understand this.
There's a difference. Firstly, much of what you attribute (or what was attributed to BLM by right-wing propaganda) was in fact the anarchist faction and their leader in Seattle (in addition to the police). The anarchist faction (and Nazis at other times) always cause a shitshow during Seattle protests, irrespective of the specific protest. CHAZ/CHOP was truly bizarre, but it was inherently peaceful. People were growing cabbages. This story rings true across America in varying ways and, while there is no doubt that some BLM protesters were violent:
* BLM never committed sedition by invading the federal capitol.
* BLM was protesting against the very perpetrators of the violence and casualties that occurred during the protests: the police and right-wing extremists.
* BLM attempted protest peacefully for the expansion of rights. MAGA violently rioted for the limitation of rights.
The violence during the BLM protests is proof of the BLM claims.
> the tolerance for violence is quite a bit lower when it concern an ideology one does not agree with.
The police literally stood aside for the MAGA seditionists, but opened fire on peaceful BLM protestors due to the threat of a pink umbrella. Yes, this is very true, but likely not in the way you mean to suggest.
And racist speech is protected and has been protected by the American Supreme Court on multiple occasions (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie). Racist violence is not protected and nor is BLM violence.
That seems to be exactly what I meant to suggest with it.
Whom do you think the police agrees with?
Suddenly violence is given more leeway by it.
> And racist speech is protected and has been protected by the American Supreme Court on multiple occasions (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie). Racist violence is not protected and nor is BLM violence.
Speech is simply earlier ruled “violence” by the courts whenever it be speech the court doesn't agree with.
Let’s use an old-fashioned analogy. An ISP is like a post office, and people’s letters should not be meddled with (outside of violent threats or pursuant to a legal criminal investigation). In particular, ISPs are relevant to most individuals and ISPs (should) have respect for individual rights. But large platforms like AWS are more like large-scale mail printing and distribution, and is only really relevant to commercial enterprises. Such companies might choose to work with Sears to distribute catalogs, but decide not to work with Scientologists to distribute propaganda. They can be judicious in their choice of business partners without violating any individual rights - nobody has a right to any commercial partner they want. And in this case, AWS’s freedom of association rights (deciding not to do business with groups that aren’t federally protected, like the racist trolls who run Parler) are much more relevant here.
AWS refusing to do business with Parler is not the same thing as Comcast refusing to allow access to things written by Parler’s users. It is more like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing refusing to put racist screeds in an ebook.
As it stands, we choose centralized websites and platforms to be how we exchange information. They're an essential ingredient in the "common carrier" recipe.
How can your parents share messages without Comcast + Facebook?
You don't even need to conjure "magical disappearance". Social networks often come and go as fads. YikYak, Snapchat, TikTok.
The thesis of what I said is that P2P mechanics are largely invariant of and shielded from business decisions, social mores, etc.
We should consider building more P2P things.
How many teenagers are raving about sending memes over email?
edit: My point isn't to say email isn't an instance of federated/p2p communication, but rather we need more types of communication to be run on P2P rails. Social, forums, media...
Thankfully we do not have that situation. Everything from forestry, wood cutters, sawmills, paper mills, printing presses and distribution is very much decentralized and have a healthy market with plenty of competition. It is so healthy that unless something is actually illegal, no one can stop someone from printing what they want. At most a company can do is create a small inconvenience.
Server hosting is not that healthy but buying your own servers is much easier than producing paper, and the retail side of server hardware is healthy enough that preventing someone from buying servers would not be feasible. AWS does however have a demonstrated market power over companies that is very unhealthy so in my view they sit somewhere between a common carrier style regulated monopoly and a regular large company. If their decision to ban parler would have had minor effect on parler then we would not be having this conversation.
The post office also allows you to keep mail at the post office and in PO boxes, which are regulated roughly the same as mail destined for residences/businesses - I would put anyone who runs a datacenter/servers for other people in the 'PO box provider' category, so I don't think this analogy really works
1. Is it good that a few people at a few large companies can decide what is and isn't acceptable speech in America.
2. Do media companies have the right to end business relationships with companies who they feel violate their contracts and Terms of Service.
The obvious answer to #2 is yes. Otherwise you would be forcing Fox News to run adds calling all Fox News viewers racists, and forcing MSNBC to run adds with racial slurs in them.
There isn't a clear answer to #1.Do these people have a conflict of interest? Who would do a better job? Biden? Trump?
Biden just hired a tonne of ex-big tech staff to work on tech oversight policy, lol.
Sure, but that's not like it's a new issue. And while I'm not suggesting you personally are raising it in bad faith, it's quite striking how much of the discourse - and I use that word in the broadest possible sense - on HN has appeared only after a pro-facist social media site lost its hosting, from folks who don't seem to have been concerned with, or even aggressively in favour of, companies banning "woke politics", or the constrol the Murdoch family exert over discourse in the English speaking world, and so on.
Like sure, there's a legitimate social issue there, but most of the posting here just reinforces Satre.
My guess is that most of the concern you see on HN is from people in the last group that are afraid of what it means for society if a President can be cancelled. Personally, I think that their concern is overblown because Trump wasn't silenced he is just too lazy to take the time to come up with another messaging plan. I assume he is still on Twitter under a fake name hurling insults out at everyone.
I'm sorry for the caps but you and a host of others are forgetting something repeatedly and it's getting fairly annoying:
AMAZON HAS FREE SPEECH RIGHTS TOO.
Just as Parler does, and you do, and I do, and Twitter does, and the various owners and employees of these organizations do, and on and on. It's Free Speech all the way down. And a fundamental aspect of Free Speech isn't just the right to say something, it's necessarily the right to NOT say something, and to NOT provide material support against your will to speech you disagree with. If you or I or anyone else or any general organization decides to NOT provide help to someone else's speech, be it our own direct voice or access to our private property, that's not censorship that is itself Free Speech. They in turn have the right to complain, and to exercise their own freedom of association, and we may change our minds, or not, and others can chime in, and on and on forever. Free Speech is a system not an end goal, a constant churning that hopefully over long enough timescales will give us a better grasp of Truth.
When government uses force, that halts the system, and speech becomes frozen. History and present indicates that the bar for that, though not infinite, should be quite high. Some companies that truly have natural monopolies or exercise quasi-governmental power may fall into that too, particularly if they in some way are significantly making use of government power themselves (limited spectrum allocation for cellular carriers for example, or physical infrastructure companies making use of public rights of way). But social and economic censure is a fundamental aspect of the process of Free Speech. 3rd parties aren't some disembodied Other, they're entities that have the same rights as anyone else by default.
Try reading the whole paragraph (emphasis added):
>particularly if they in some way are significantly making use of government power themselves (limited spectrum allocation for cellular carriers for example
Come on.
>Why should they allow literal Nazis to communicate over their infrastructure?
Because they're making use of a government granted monopoly on a physically limited common. They should in turn operate as common carriers.
Hmm, not always though. I use WiFi 99% of the time, including for voice calling, which isn't using any government-allocated cellular spectrum. So in my case, T-Mobile should be able to filter packets going through their servers and censor undesirable speech, right? Their servers, their ToS, right?
Also their government allocated bands don't change if you use "WiFi 99% of the time" they still have the monopoly.
As for packet filtering, that's Net Neutrality issue, which last time I checked the right was against and successfully allowed it (except for states that brought their own laws to replace it).
Other things are limited too. People's time and attention are limited, and the app stores have a pretty strong duopoly on those.
In theory you could print pamphlets and drop them door to door, but come on.
Sorry dude. You don't believe in free speech. You are contradicting yourself.
And I'm not bitching, I'm discussing.
When it suit these platforms, they claim that the opinions are of their users and not their own, yet when it otherwise suit them, they claim ownership.
Why? Hacker News, or Twitter, can say things for itself, and it can also host other people's opinions. There is no collision there. Twitter has Free Speech rights, and is responsible for, whatever it says itself. Twitter also has the Free Speech right to support, or not, anything it likes since it is in no way quasi-governmental. It doesn't owe anyone a soap box. And there is no reason it should be held liable for what users say, the users who say those things should be held liable.
>When it suit these platforms, they claim that the opinions are of their users and not their own
The law, and common sense as well is clear. Words of their users are not, in fact, theirs. The only thing regular law gives them is protection from not being completely perfect in their attempts at exercising their own Free Speech vs other people on their own property, rather than having to use Common Carrier all-or-nothing. But they could ban whomever they liked regardless.
>yet when it otherwise suit them, they claim ownership.
Specify. They own their own words and their own resources, and necessarily users must offer them at least a limited non-exclusive license for reproduction due to copyright. That is a fair tradeoff offer for what their users gain, and everyone may accept, or not.
Which ones "claim ownership" of other people's words and how? They don't need any ownership for bans, because nobody is entitled to their support.
Nobody is forced to make a wedding cake with a long stream of racist invective like one of the examples Amazon suggested might fall foul of its AUP a month before all the Capitol fallout (and Parler replied that they absolutely wouldn't take down) and I think that's for the best.
But forcing people to make cakes they feel morally icky about sounds like a guaranteed way to get some really ugly, half-assed cakes. Whether we like it or not that they feel that way doesn't seem to matter because an ugly cake that validates me is still an ugly cake.
I don't know the details of the case but I think there is a clear line between refusing to do usual service because somebody is from a protected group. Like a ordinary wedding cake only because the person ordering is gay.
vs
Refusing to create a wedding cake because it is offensive. Like customer asking for a cake in a shape of penis or something offending the artist.
You know, in Masterpiece Cakeshop, people treating them as religious nuts was a factor in why they didn’t have to do that.
Those seem like fundamentally different moral scenarios.
Huh? Why shouldn't I be able to mine bitcoins on AWS? What's the point of paying to use people's computers if I can't use them for what I want? I pay AWS because I have money and they have servers and I want to pay them money in exchange for using their servers. So if I put a bitcoin miner on there running 24/7, I might rack up a huge bill, but why should Amazon care as long as I have the cash?
I'm opposed to the idea that server usage should be morally vetted by the server owner. If something illegal is happening, by all means take it down, but "what you are doing is legal, but we disagree with it so bye bye" is a bad precedent, IMO.
So charge them more or limit their compute? If you are in the business of renting out compute resources then you need to spell out what the terms are. It's like renting out your car and then getting mad when someone drives it 2000 miles in one weekend. You need to spell out: "Yep, it's $50 a day, and you get 100 miles per day. Every mile after that is $1. If you want to drive the car further it's $100 per day" not "It's $50 per day unless we don't like what you are doing then we'll revoke the car arbitrarily"
> It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS
Ok and what was the clause in the ToS they violated? I sure hope it was more specific than the vague arbitrary clause Amazon used to axe Parler.
Businesses (in the US) can refuse service to anyone for essentially any reason besides discrimination. Why should hosting a server for someone be any different. Most services are going to put something generic in their TOS to accomplish this, because they can't enumerate or foresee every way that people might do something undesirable.
Because we are starting to see that infrastructure level of the internet should be more like a public utility if we want to preserve fundamental freedoms. I would hope you would be outraged if T-Mobile listened in on cellular calls and terminated customers who said politically incorrect things even though the customer is using their service and they can do as they please with their customers as long as it isn't discrimination. You would also be outraged if the electric company terminated your power because you were powering a "stop the steal" neon sign in your window. It's time we start treating compute as a utility-like resource just like electricity, water, cellular data, etc.
There is no 'but' as people would have you believe here. But they are Nazis. But I don't agree with them. But they cause riots and violence. There's always a 'but'.
Only a court order should have the power to shut these sites down and that's only if they present a clear and present danger.
This is clearly a cultural cleansing of sorts. I remember other such cultural revolutions. China comes to mind.
When your service is providing a platform for speech, what other issues can there be?
The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with.
Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the next few years.
The true future of free speech is through federated platforms/services similar to how email servers were back 20-25 years ago. People have traded freedom for convenience over the past couple of decades and it shows.
I'd argue the completely other way: people have traded convenience for freedom. The convenience of using the Internet for has massively eroded freedom of speech.
It's been immensely convenient for tens of thousands of people to be able to say any kind of harmful trash on the Internet without suffering any negative consequences and that's what they have been doing for years now, and so now we all pay the price.
The term "freedom of speech" has been appropriated by alt-right and modern Nazi movements and is now associated almost strictly with, which means that it is now feasible to call this freedom a real and actual risk to human life and take real steps towards curbing that freedom in general, even for people who are not abusing it to actively work towards harming other people.
When actual discussions and conversations cannot take place under the guise of pretend harm, real violence happens.
I do wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is just the result of a disenfranchised part of the population who've been shit on and deplatformed for the last 4 years by the establishment (including Orange Man, FWIW).
There is no shortage of women with PTSD from such relationships who've spent the past four years continuously triggered because Trump acted just like an abusive boyfriend or husband, and it was difficult to avoid him on the news or on social media.
If anything, the problem is that they weren't deplatformed early enough.
Edit: Downvoted for facts.
I wonder how that can be avoided.
I dislike the people that support facist, racist beliefs, but I 100% will defend their right to say such things. In my opinion, once you start talking about restricting speech, you get into the grey area - who decides what speech to restrict? Off the top of my head, the most "capable" organizations would be either:
- The companies who run these glorified advertising platforms (which would regulate speech based on "how much money will we lose?"), or
- a Governmental body (which by its nature has a monopoly on violence - "if you say something we don't like, your social credit score goes down and you can't leave the country or we throw you in jail"). I think freedom of speech is a very large part of what makes America distinctive from other countries.
- Alternatively, we could have whoever the loudest complainers are control speech, which would be very reactionary - driven by misinformation or coordinated culture change campaigns(?)
If the people with abhorrent opinions decide to start causing direct physical harm to people in reality - that's when police, government, etc. should step in and penalize them - not social media companies or governments, or the vocal minority determining what people should and shouldn't say.
Here's I think the real issue, we make discussion platforms... people don't want to discuss. They just want to put up and push posters of what they believe.
And we're surprised when things go wrong.
The other day, we talked with family members and all I heard was slogans (the 'energy independent','damn socialists' type ). And it is hard to talk about it, because you have to start by dispelling the slogans and that alone is an hour of deprogramming ( assuming you have receptive audience ). I gave up on that challenge.
And I feel like I failed there, because we DO need to discuss things. We will most assuredly not agree, but need to stop taking our news from one source. Diverse diet is probably the only way to go.
Even if allowing fascists and racists to express their speech actively harms or silences you in turn?
Relevant: https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1031008855210123264/p...
Lat's say they're successful and they can impose their own policies that do not include free speech.
I'm pretty short on free speech now...
It's hard to ignore that.
An issue they would run into in the future.
If YouTube was based on BitTorrent.
If Facebook was based on Diaspora, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, etc.
If Messenger was based on Matrix.
Centralized platforms make ad revenue, form moats, and become big business. Hosting isn't their core competency, so they outsource. Thus AWS.
The web _was_ P2P at the start, but it became centralized because that was more efficient and increased both value and communication. The original social networks (BBS and chat channels, Usenet, etc) _were_ distributed, but it turns out that this made them easy prey for parasitic and toxic actors and all of the available tools to prevent this imposed asymmetric costs on the recipients and did not scale at all.
Distributed systems are easy, but making distributed communication systems not suck is incredibly hard. The Internet is a distributed system that was a lot better before all of you showed up and cast us into the hell of eternal September.
Doesn’t seem to be true in the case of Twitter
https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref...
The idea that parler or gab is somehow "freer" or less censored than any other site seems untrue. They are more tolerant of a certain political identity and less tolerant of another one.
It's just replacing their boogiemen with one of their own design.
So yes -- this is probably how it will go, it's already started.
Look past the religious aspect and you'll see the content on there is much less toxic than on Twitter.
If they cared about free speech, they wouldn't have aligned with any specific ideology.
Isn't the whole problem for Parler that no major providers will host their servers? How would federation help? You need a full P2P layer, fully decentralized, routed over Tor to prevent blocking by ISPs.
Parler's goal is whatever the billionaire Mercer family want it to be; presumably "Twitter for Brietbart readers", since that's another of their media properties.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
And yes, healthy politics is conducted on the basis that human societies are tribal. Democracy is just the "accounting system" for competing tribal concerns.
Universalism, "classical liberalism", etc. is an occasional side effect of "healthy tribalism". It cannot be a political goal, because there are genuine contradictions in the preferences of various groups -- and they cannot be all jointly-realised.
Faux-universalism fails to acknowledge this an ends up preferencing the "natural" distribution of resources, ie., that arising from the most powerful groups (taking, competing) with the weaksest.
I'm not either kind of conservative myself, but I'd much rather deal with the old-school variety, who at their best represent a reasonable chunk of society.
Refusing business based on political ideology is not only allowed but seems to be encouraged!
If you’d like to hear a lawyer read and comment on their complaint, I recommend https://youtu.be/FL7r-Nt5j50
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/27/parlers-f...
But on the other hand Parler’s tech people seem mediocre so who knows if they could manage to not leak AWS ips or headers that would tip off they are using AWS and allow Amazon to figure out which account. Would only take one slip.
If they pay their bills and it wasn’t dead obvious AWS was involved then Amazon might not try hard to find them.
This seems like a perfect use case for a small home server. If they find a revenue stream then they can scale to renting some rack space somewhere. I know its not as easy as clicking a button in AWS but its not totally debilitating.
As far as hosting, it can certainly be done privately, but it requires more work than cloud hosting, as gab learned when they went entirely internally hosted.
Considering how StackeOverflow ran on a small handful of machines to a pretty large scale (and still isn't excessive), I can't see how more than a few machines should be necessary to run a site that serves small texts, even among millions of users.
There is one caveat though and that's media. If media is transcoded, and/or if more than a small fraction of messages contain video - then the service might face using most of its resources towards that. But in that case , if I was running their ops I'd just disable media attachments while figuring out how to run the full service.
Recommended watching.
Has Facebook read Facebook? Has Twitter read Twitter?
The capitalistic profit incentive has largely prevented this kind of behavior up until now but with left leaning oligopolies it starts to edge towards a market failure.
Parlers suit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HFp5E7akgy8
Amazon response: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GB06JtDbtvU
Facebook is used to coordinate literal genocide. [1]
And so AWS everyone is cool with that?
I get that Parler was being used to do something 'violent and bad in the US' and that there was arguably not enough oversight - so they are a 'problem case'.
But the system is a little bit hypocritical, I don't feel it's backed by science or some kind of reasonable application of policy and frankly, I have little trust in the judicial systems ability to sort this out.
While many people are happy 'That Guy' is gone from politics (for now) - we need to wake up to the crude realization that 'regular politics' was never fair or reasonable to begin with and that this issue is going to weaponized by those who think they can do that, and they will use 'Parler and 'President Voldemort' example as cover for whatever it is they want to do.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Jeff Bezos owns news publications, he has a worldview and likes to flaunt it to some extent, moreover, these systems are prone to the possibility of arbitrary, and often political decisions.
Note that historically, rich dudes bought newspapers to attack their political and business rivals. Though I don't think it's entirely like that today, we can't say there isn't some of that going on.
Literally Emamnuel Macron and Angela Merkel have spoken out about the arbitrary 'banning' of groups and individuals, and because there is an 'imminent consideration over here in the US' doesn't abnegate our broader concerns about arbitrary banning.
The EU will likely be acting on it.
Banning the KKK is not something anyone is worried about.
Banning some app because we don't like the extent to which they have moderated their discussions, is a much more slippery slope. Especially in light of other institutions that don't moderate very well either.
If the case could rationally be made that FB and Twitter are in the end, equally problematic in their moderation ... then it's likely they would not get banned from various places - they have money, power, influence and possibly friendly relations with other platforms.
It's a dangerous precedent and the EU leaders are essentially correct to speak out and even more so to act.
This is somewhat amusing to me, as Germany is a country that bans neo-Nazi political parties and makes Holocaust denial a federal crime, whereas both actions are seen as violations of constitutionally-protected free speech in the US.
The concern, I suspect, is more over the scope of power that private broadcast platforms have, to which my retort is to ask what their antitrust regulators have been doing for the past decade.
But also, governments come and go but there is at least some degree of representation of the people.
I have absolutely zero trust in Jeff Bezos to do anything other than what he wants to think he can do or get away with.
I don't fully trust governments either, but at least there are degrees of transparency, courts, etc.
If there are people, plotting violence, even from a Mosque, then you ask them to leave or arrest them, right? That's legit.
Just like if people are attacking Capitol Hill, or even plotting to - you arrest them.
Why? Because it's lawless. Not because 'We don't agree with them'.
Thankfully, there will be laws that have to be adhered to. Courts. Constitutions.
With Jack Dorsey, there's none of that, it's whatever he feels on that day.
It's a little absurd to suggest that totally arbitrary individuals should have the right to arbitrarily control discourse - over the regulations (hopefully few and far between) applied by elected governments, overseen by courts, the constitution etc..
Just like no one should be forced to bake a wedding cake, rent out a car to a <25yo, not refuse a hire based on sex or race, it is also not right for any man to force an equal child of creation to host a website.
Luckily there are federated protocols for social media which can be used by free speech absolutists.
Now I'm not nearly as sympathetic to that argument. Having POTUS45 removed from twitter was basically the chance in a lifetime for Parler, and in that critical 48 hours their hosting provider pulled the rug out from them and their app was removed from BOTH app stores (I have a hard time believing there wasn't some form of coordination here). It seems especially sinister to me, but maybe that's because I'm viewing it outside of a political lens.
2. Democratic party takes over control of the government.
3. Major companies in the tech industry work together to boot a competitor, and political opponent of the Democratic party off the internet.
At what point is this a legit first amendment issue? The government can't just pressure private companies to do things the government can't do and then hide behind the fact that they are private entities, right?
1. Republican party threatens teach industry with heavy regulation if they censor to the degree that the tech industry wishes to.
2. Republican party looses power.
3. Major companies in the tech industry do what they wanted to do the whole time.
At what point is (1) a first amendment issue? The government shouldn't pressure private companies to do things that violate those groups first amendment rights.
No, they'd like to be approachable by the broadest groups possible (or really the broadest set of ad-viewing groups possible). Calls to violence are unappealing to most people. This is the reason unmoderated platforms fail: people don't enjoy spending time on them. To be palatable to normal people, the sites need moderation, which they do, to appeal to users.
> Most of these same platforms pretty much had an anything goes unless it's illegal attitude from the time they were started until a few years ago when they started getting a lot of political blowback and blame for "helping Trump" by not moderating more.
This is completely untrue. Here's one of the first Trump related posts I can find: https://www.fastcompany.com/3054611/when-does-hate-speech-cr..., notably "Though it apparently violated Facebook’s own internal guidelines, Trump’s video was not removed".
They've been, since the beginning, getting blowback for making exceptions for politicians instead of evenhandedly applying their policies. What you've seen over the past 5 years is simply the platforms growing in influence (and thus controversy).
The act of not moderating trump when he violated existing policies was an attempt to appear neutral to conservative users, while actually biasing to more loosely moderate a particular conservative. I can only hope platforms have learned from their mistakes.
It seems like Twitter's free speech has been limited for the past 4 years, and they've only been able enforce their policies once trump stopped having power