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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

IANAL and I'm not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but I do think the case is more interesting than just AWS booting a malicious customer (with regards to their TOS).

> 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.

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> This is funny (as in, LOL funny) to point out because it makes parler seem completely inept, but it’s only technically correct.

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.

> 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.

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.

Moreover, as I'm fond of pointing out: Amazon bounces people off AWS all the time, just like every hosting provider; abuse is a basic fact of life in hosting. Amazon will have no trouble establishing that what it did with Parler is routine, and that nobody could reasonably have an expectation that the AUP was merely performative.

For technology abuse (e.g. spamming, botnets, etc), legal reasons (cp, pii dumps, etc), or for not liking the content being hosted?

What happened to Parler is not routine when you exclude all of the cases of blatant abuse of the service.

Yes it is. It's right there in the AWS AUP. "Content that is defamatory, obscene, abusive, invasive of privacy, or otherwise objectionable". Other providers have even stricter AUPs, for instance against otherwise-lawful pornographic content.

The guy/girl above talks about it being routine, why are you citing AUP? You'd have to show they have done this before, frequently.

Is putting something like "otherwise objectionable" as a reason to terminate contract legal? Can AWS terminate contract with a website owner who supports, say, gay marriages, because there is someone in Amazon who considers this to be "objectionable"?

'Otherwise objectionable' is meant to be a catchall, but isn't really the one Amazon is relying on, since much of the content Parler stated it didn't want to remove is also unambiguously abusive and defamatory. The words itself are the same as Section 230, except in this instance Amazon is saying it is willing to consider its clients responsible for their user generated content.

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.

> or for not liking the content being hosted?

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?

> I really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship.

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.

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

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".

> 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.

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.

Claiming that anyone who disagrees with your conclusions didn't come to their opinions on their own, but through propaganda, implies that they can't think for themselves but you can. That is at best belittling, if not dehumanizing. It fails to acknowledge that, bizarre as what's happening on the right is, the same rhetoric and reasoning w.r.t. propaganda applies to anyone. Believing those with whom you disagree to be brainwashed, as seems to be so popular on all sides these days, will fully prevent ever healing the rifts between groups.

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.

It isn't motivated reasoning, it is profound scepticism around how Amazon could have (1) identified the risk Parler was breaching their TOS (2) confirmed their suspicious and (3) ejected them from AWS in the time-frame that actually happened.

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.

AWS drew attention to the violation of the TOS in mid November and provided extensive documentation of the kind of content they regarded as unacceptable in mid December [1]. You seem unaware of the most basic facts of the case.

1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...

I am unaware, I'm not planning on reading the case details until after a month or two has passed. Best to get a little hindsight.

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.

Let's game plan for a moment. You are a hosting provider. One of your customers is violating your TOS and posting content that is objectionable. They are potentially big and growing customer so you are giving them time to respond while you try to weight the cost and benefit of enforcement at this time.

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?

What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased. I do suspect AWS was thinking that - which is why I'm not ruling out political bias. Even if that interpretation of the Capitol riot somehow, miraculously, turns out to be correct there hasn't been time to prove it with evidence.

But, as chalst argues, there are interpretations where they were acting reasonably.

> What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased.

"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"?

No, the bias is assuming that is true and acting on it without sufficient evidence.

What do you consider sufficient evidence here? There were multiple documented posts on Parler that have been documented running up to the events on Jan 6'th that show people organizing and preparing for it. The evidence was present before the decision by AWS. I know folks who were collecting that events weeks before the event and predicting violence based on what they were seeing. The evidence for it is only increasing now but there more than sufficient evidence on the day of the event to indicate that Parler was going to be a liability to anyone hosting them.

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.

> What do you consider sufficient evidence here?

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.

> 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.

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.

Yeah, you're going to find that most people are very much biased against enabling a violent coup on the government that is being really good to them. 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.

The bias isn't in the response, it is in the faulty interpretation:

  A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives.

Not only was this an unsupported at the time, but unless something really flashy happens it is only going to become more obviously wrong. 1 violent riot in 2021 compares not so badly to the widespread peaceful arson and looting in 2020 that was brushed off as routine political expression.

> 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 most likely explanation for Amazon changing its approach is that the issue was taken over from risk-averse managers who hoped Parler would do the right thing by closure-hungry executives who were not willing to wait and were willing to risk a lawsuit and conservative backlash.

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.

Why is it "being enforced politically" or not important ? You are worried about it being "fair" ?

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.

> 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.

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.

> I really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship.

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.

Facebook and Twitter spend a cubic fuckton of money on moderation, at a scale significant enough that there are, annually, news cycles about the psychic toll Facebook moderation takes on the army of people Facebook pays to do it.

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.

> Facebook and Twitter spend a cubic fuckton of money on moderation, at a scale significant enough that there are, annually, news cycles about the psychic toll Facebook moderation takes on the army of people Facebook pays to do it.

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 bans whole subs when they get too out of hand to moderate, while Parler effectively is one of those banned subs. Amazon presented a record of months of complaints about specific pieces of violent content on Parler, to which Parler not only didn't respond, but in fact waved off by saying they had a backlog of tens of thousands of similar pieces of content.

Reddit would have killed the toxic sub and been done with it. Parler couldn't, because they were the toxic sub.

> Amazon presented a record of months of complaints about specific pieces of violent content on Parler, to which Parler not only didn't respond, but in fact waved off by saying they had a backlog of tens of thousands of similar pieces of content.

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.

> Parler had 10 million users, equivalent to more than 4000 subs, not one.

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.

> 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.

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 could have limited posts from new users

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.

> 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.

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."

> a scale significant enough that there are, annually, news cycles about the psychic toll Facebook moderation takes on the army of people Facebook pays to do it.

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.

2.8B mau & 15000 moderators is .5 per 100k for facebook.

Right, do you realize how insufficient that is? 1 person in charge of the speech, photos, and videos of 200k people.

> really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship.

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.

> Well the fact that the riots were organized on Facebook for the month leading up to it certainly looks inconsistent.

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.

Facebook is so large that their moderator to user ratio is the same approximation as the moderator to user ratio of Parler. Parler was just more honest about not being able to realistically moderate people.

I’m not a lawyer either but I’ve dealt with AUP enforcement.

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).

> 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.

> Parler made this specific allegation under the Sherman Act.

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?

> These two facts...

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.

For clarification: I'm detailing what Parler alleged as a fact (see ¶15 of the original Complaint for where Parler alleges this). My point is that if Parler's alleged facts are all true (which is not the same as saying they're all true!), that does not sustain its antitrust claims.

All fair, but I think it still bears calling out. Repeating a claim that's well-known to be bunk, and using the unqualified word "fact" to describe it, will sow a lot of confusion. Especially when discussing a case that already rests at the center of a great big gyre of misinformation and misconception.

Banks were just as well lawyered up and that didn't prevent damning communications in 2008.

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.

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.

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.

>At the time of account termination, they were growing at a rate of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of users per day

[citation required] This is an absurd claim.

AWS also a a very large contract with another Twitter competitor: Pinterest

In what way is Pinterest a Twitter competitor?

Social media companies that compete for engagement (eye ball time) to sell to advertisers.

I don't buy this argument at all. That's such a broad definition. By that logic every single business that sells any type of product or service is a competitor since they all compete for consumers money.

Twitter and Parler are not comparable offerings. The only similarity is being in the vague space of “social media” or “microblogging”.

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.

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