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Comment by pocw | Hacker News Reader

Huh, it's almost like no provider in America is cool with your platform being used to plan an insurrection. Or open calls for violence against and murder of elected officials.

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Parler didn’t even have an events section, it was also fairly difficult to discover content and from what I saw very corporate-like (ie moderated well, mundane posts, etc).

Twitter or Facebook on the other hand, ive seen people call out to riot and burn down cities. Literally, there was a Facebook event to riot in my town (person who planned it was arrested). It led to millions in damages, and I feared for my life.

I was surprised parler got de-platforms because it was the most mundane option TBH.

Apart from the lobbying power of Facebook Twitter size company, it is pretty hard to deplatform them.

On a purely technical level Facebook runs their own infra. They would be hard to deplatform. The only people who are probably capable of doing that is the l3 type service providers. Even there Facebook , google own investments in undersea cables.

Also the size of their deal value to the vendor makes a huge difference. Amazon's revenue impact from parler would not even be a rounding number in their annual report. The impact of loosing fb for many vendors could kill them .

This is true.

Apple can't get rid of Facebook or Google Maps, no matter how much they hate them, but they can easily get rid of pesky startups while claiming to be standing on principles.

Not much of a moral victory there, though! (even if you believe they were right to do so, which I do not.)

Pre-Fortnite-sage I wouldn’t have been so sure, but they had 116m users at that point and were still banned. Obviously that’s still an order of magnitude smaller, but…

Also Fortnite is not utility application it lot easier to ban a game. It is much harder for say Google Maps, while we can discuss the "utility" of the Facebook app, even with facebook main, plenty of people use it as critical communication tool.

Like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Parler was a scapegoat to deflect attention from the rest of this category of software.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all had moderation (whether its effective is another debate).

It's hardly an apples-to-apples co.parison with Parler.

So did Parler. And whether it was effective was another debate as you said. But upon my causal visits to Parler I did not encounter a single call for violence. It seemed like it was as exceedingly rare as anywhere else.

>whether its effective is another debate

Why?

For one thing, they have agreements between whoever provides them service, and if they have not been taken down, it means their business partners feel that they uphold their end of the bargain. Or they run their own infra so they only answer to themselves.

Parler had moderation too. The difference is that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter's moderation lean left, and Parler's leaned right.

I feel like you may have a right-skewed view of this issue. If you look at it globally it may be different, and I don't know where you're from. Here in the United States (where all four sites are headquartered) sites like Facebook/Twitter are moderated somewhat right leaning for their role in aiding right-leaning former president Donald Trump in 2016. He lost their support later due to his abuse of power but that's a bit out of scope of a HN comment.

Parler was well outside the norm and was given amole opportunity to change.

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

Hard to see why it matters if they are elected officials.

Same reason it matters if they're cops.

Search for you will be more aggressive.

Your prosecution will be more aggressive.

Your punishment will be more harsh.

Because it was an attack against democracy itself. They weren’t attacking individuals, but the role those individuals hold.

Suspect there are hosting providers in other countries.

except, Twitter?

On the one hand, Google deplatformed Parler by blocking their app from the Play Store, and on the other hand it continues to be "cool with" 3rd-party content on Youtube which is "openly calling for violence against and murder of elected officials".

https://youtu.be/jRLH8E_CpP0?t=205

For the record, I'm absolutely fine with Google deciding what content stays and what content goes when it comes to their hosting infrastructure. But in so doing, they need to retain legal culpability for the content that remains.

That is not what "openly calling" means.

Fair enough. But can we at least agree that the line between the 2 examples is so fine that the monologue comedian on a satirical TV program had to run his joke by his lawyer's lawyer in order to make sure he was standing on the right side of it?

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