“ Better preparation against certain types of content could help Amazon avoid legal and public relations risk.
"If (Amazon) can get some of this stuff off proactively before it's discovered and becomes a big news story, there's value in avoiding that reputational damage,"
That said from the article it says they're primarily going to be focused on proactively identifying things like terrorist groups versus sifting through customer data. That doesn't sound too bad but we'll see how it plays out.
What, no, that's insane.
The theory I hear on here often is that they're trying to avoid regulation. I don't know if that's true but whatever they're doing, it's to avoid exposure potential costs. They've calculated that the lost business is worth less than the cost of whatever risks they forsee. Either that or they have some extremely powerful ideologues in control.
F-ck no. It's because they don't want to end up in the news, getting called out for hosting that stuff. From the OP:
> Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech.
Last week there was a Washington Post article about how they were hosting an ISIS website that celebrated the recent Kabul suicide bombing, and earlier this year they were getting flak for hosting Parler. They probably want to prevent that from happening again, or at least have something better to say when they get in the news for it.