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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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