The way this forum was purged from the internet is making me uncomfortable. I never used Parler, and I really don't care about the fact that it's gone. But the way that a handful of private companies effectively decides who gets to reach an audience and who doesn't is deeply troubling. We're increasingly becoming a world where what is and isn't allowed in the public sphere is controlled by a handful of corporate leaders.
I'm not worried about some moustache-twirling plot where tech companies effectively become the illuminati. I'm only slightly worried about politicians using the threat of regulation (e.g. revoking Section 230) to leverage companies into prohibiting things they don't like, or content favorable to opponents. I don't think many politicians would do this - the risk that this manipulation gets discovered and publicized is probably too great.
What I'm most worried about is good-intentioned censorship that further divides and alienates large sections of our society. These bans play directly into the narrative that leftist tech companies are excluding and pushing out conservative voices, and it's having the opposite effect of what is intended. For instance, suppressing allegations of fraud is likely having the opposite effect: it's triggering a reaction along the lines of, "well clearly there's something afoot, otherwise why would these companies be deliberately shutting down talk of fraud?". Who here has ever held a view and was banned from a forum, or told to stop by the forum's authorities, (electronic or otherwise) for that view? Did it make you change said view, or did it make you even more entrenched and suspicious of the authority that issued the ban? That's what I'm most worried about: companies ostracizing certain groups or topics with the intention of curbing extremism, but to the effect of fostering ever greater extremism.
I don’t think the goal of banning these folks is to change the banned person’s mind. It’s to slow down the spread of the banned person’s rhetoric. To your suggestion that folks who witness the ban take place suspecting “there’s something afoot”, while that could be right, I’d bet that’s a much smaller number than the number of folks who would’ve otherwise seen the rhetoric and came around to agreeing with it, if not reinforcing their own.
I agree that the goal is to curb the spread of such views, not so much to change the minds of those who already harbor them. But I still think it's having the opposite effect. The streisand effect is real and likely playing out here.
Thanks to this ban, a lot of people are wondering if the claims of electoral fraud were actually disproven or if evidence of legitimate fraud was suppressed. The bans make it very easy to appeal to uncertainty: you can't find evidence of fraud not because fraud didn't happen but because the evidence of fraud was purged.
How does the ‘purging’ of a social media platform equate to purging evidence of fraud?
If there is evidence of fraud this may be shared but would not solely exist on a social media platform. Unless fraudeurs would openly discuss these matters, of course.
You don't actually know that. Clearly, ISIS didn't need YouTube to spread. It conquered large parts of Syria and was defeated via military means. Plenty of ISIS sympathisers turned up in the west later, but I don't recall reading about many that were radicalised by watching YouTube. Normally they'd either been to Syria, or it was local mosques.
I can honestly say that with what little time I have, and limited access to info, I can't really convincingly dispel the feeling that there was fraud from people. I've seen State responses, I've talked to people. I follow up on both sides takes on things. These last few days though have started to convince me that there is a huge problem, way bigger even than election fraud, and it's the sheer rapidity that agenda's can get rolled out by platforms, or handily shutdown. People recognize that. It encourages them to then spread info the old fashion way, and well...
You might have a pandemic going on which helps isolating people from each other, but the lines are still open. I think GP is definitely right. This is half tge reason why I felt the only thing to do that would make sense was a full public accounting of every facet of every suspected voting process. Audits, machines, software, configurations, datasets, all of it.
There is no way you hold it tight to your chest and come out of it with everyone unified to move forward, and no offence, but I don't trust anyone on Earth with the technology for successful mass management of unruly populations. A pity that quality doesn't appear more universal as evidenced by current events.
I don't think that's the goal. I think the goal for those companies is to not lose business over this. This is the free market at its best. Market pressure has made the math pretty simple: if N customers won't do business with my company because we do business with Abhorrent Co and the potential revenue loss from losing those N companies is greater than the revenue I generate from Abhorrent Co, then drop Abhorrent Co.
If any of those companies felt the ethical/moral value of Parler was more valuable than the lost revenue, they wouldn't drop them. Obviously that's not the case.
And not everyone "right of Biden" is being deplatformed, unless you think everyone right of center is on Parler. Parler is a cesspool of hate groups and conspiracy theories, many of them Nazi or Nazi adjacent.
This is not a helpful take when there are actual nazi's - right over there - talking about (and doing) nazi shit.
And the thing about shit is it does splash damage.
When cesspools like twitter and facebook finally give up their add revenue from the flies circling said shit and the turds have to go live in a latrine maybe _just_maybe_ someone should be asking "Are we the baddies?".
Furthermore when someone does try to start cleaning up this shit, and it's always a terrible nasty thankless job, and you're inconvenienced because you're standing too close maybe the question shouldn't be "what about my rights?" But "why the hell am I here in the first place?"
there are actual nazis, muslim extremists, antifa types, and all sorts encouraging violence on Twitter and facebook right now. right now you can go and find propaganda pages from the world's most repressive and violent regimes, like Saudi Arabia, for example.
When Uganda banned Twitter/Facebook for election interference, all of a sudden "free speech" rights matter to these platforms and they find it unjust.
you could argue the majority of the protest at DC was organized on major platforms over Parler. So why are we de-platforming major players through our ISPs? Why isn't verizon or comcast blocking Facebook or Twitter. Go get your own series of tubes.
Parler, like Twitter, has a team of people who work to remove posts in violation of the rules.
A political situation and some token examples are being exploited to take out a competitor.
And it just so happens that the Dems are going to chair all the Congressional committees that over see Silicon Valley, you're going to have a Dem house, senate and POTUS.
This right here is being taken advantage of to take an an entire wing of a debate and to tilt poltical power. And the populace is cheering it on.
Just like they cheered on the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.
It's a common bi-partisan tactic to blame the whole for the actions of the fringe and use that as a wedge. It's like how my Trumper father rags on PETA when he wants to complain about environmentalism. This is the same crap. Except at a far larger level, far more cynical an far more corrupt.
We're losing our ability for free speech, people -LEFTISTS of all people - are celebrating a handful of tech monopolies, acting in unison as some kind of cabal, led by a singular political party in this country - this is the merging of capital and state that you see in fascist societies, all the while shouting the loudest about anti-fascism.
Just like the Koch brothers shouting about liberty and freedom, things tend to not mean what people claim they mean.
And you're all a bunch of suckers for buying this horsepucky, hook, line and sinker.
I'm a Bernie (except on this issue), AOC, Nader loving social democrat. But "my side" is selling it's proverbial sole to the devil b/c "winning" means more than any foundational values that should apply to us all.
We're no longer agreeing on a even playing field. Democracy is up for grabs by both sides if it means one of them stands a chance at winning. And both sides only happen to see this destructive behavior in the other and never in the mirror.
> The way this forum was purged from the internet is making me uncomfortable. I never used Parler, and I really don't care about the fact that it's gone. But the way that a handful of private companies effectively decides who gets to reach an audience and who doesn't is deeply troubling. We're increasingly becoming a world where what is and isn't allowed in the public sphere is controlled by a handful of corporate leaders.
Historically, for a forum with nationwide reach, you were nevertheless reliant on periodicals and newspapers and their editors, or running your own publishing.
If there was a will, there's still a way: sites like The Pirate Bay, Library Genesis, and WikiLeaks still find a way to stay up; and they definitely run their own servers though of course there's more that's needed. That kind of effort is what one must be prepared for. It can likely find friendly vendors if willing to look beyond US companies.
If sedition and insurrection are being planned, advocated, and organised on your site and you continuously claim it's no big deal, you might find yourself with legal and national security concerns and pressures, and not merely business partner TOU/AUP prroblems.
>The way this forum was purged from the internet is making me uncomfortable.
Parler's app was pulled from apple, google, and their hosting at AWS got pulled. Under the 'reasoning' that people are violating rules on their platform.
That doesnt really make sense. Whereas if you look at it from a 'big tech censorship' point of view. That's what's happening. Very clear that's what's happening.
Could you show me where on that wiki page they show any of his scandals? Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, Fast and Furious, Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server, Obamagate, etc?
Kind of interesting how Obama's wiki page doesnt list ANY of his scandals. Whereas trump's page was clearly not written by any republican.
nazis should not have platforms and private enterprise is well within its rights to decide that this time they will side against the fascists instead of making the completion of the holocaust more efficient, like they did last time.
i understand the form of this argument, but parler was literally a place where the primary purpose was to discuss how to rid america of people like me. i don’t know why my existence is up for negotiation in society.
whatever parler’s initial intent it became primarily a place for disaffected right wing radicalization up to and including advocating the eradication of my family from the earth.
I think at least some of the discomfort you (and I) are feeling with this is due to the fact that these private companies made exceptions to their terms of use for so long, that now that they suddenly enforce them, it feels capricious. They should have banned Trump for violating their terms years ago, but they gave him a pass and now they’ve revoked that pass. As long as there are unambiguous rules that are evenly enforced regardless of what political position you happen to hold, I have no problem with it.
Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments to HN, and please don't use this site for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do those things, regardless of which ideology they're for or against.
The idea here is thoughtful conversation on topics of intellectual curiosity. Please stick to that.
I don't really blame the companies doing the bans. In fact, if I were in their position I'd probably do the same thing. The pressure to do something would probably outweigh my suspicions that the bans are ultimately counterproductive.
If I were to place blame on something, it'd have to be the increasing conflation of hosting content with approving or agreeing with said content. E.G. Facebook gets decried as a conservative echo chamber by left leaning people who point at right wing content they find offensive or extreme. And then it gets decried as a leftist echo chamber by right leaning people who see left wing content on the platform they find extreme and objectionable. In reality people should see that Facebook is a platform, and the content on Facebook is made up of individual people's views. It's a mirror of society. If we see something we don't like we should talk to the people we see in the mirror, not ask the mirror to hide them.
As the owner of a company, I am more and more afraid to be dependant on Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. because everyday on HN there is a new example proving that they can destroy your business if you are not aligned with their view, their interest or someone in their evaluation team.
I use electricity, water, phone, etc. and I have never been afraid to be cut off by these companies as long as I pay the bills and respect the law.
PS: I am referring to none political cases (especially with app stores) that have been happening the last years.
>PS: I am referring to none political cases (especially with app stores) that have been happening the last years.
It's just plain reliability to worry about your single points of failure. You can be the most unobjectionable, vanilla and milquetoast organization. It's still desirable to avoid the situation where a single irreplaceable vendor can bottleneck you.
I think there has been a bit of hesitation to acknowledge it when there's so little friction to getting on desirable platforms. The risk doesn't feel as real.
I think there are actually two issues here: the incidence of violence and use of a "Content Killswitch". By a content killswitch, I mean that concerted action by 3 companies to basicaly scrub the entire internet of source materia in 24-48 hours and leave only articles giving their spin on the events.
I remember the same thing happened when that stupid "Plandemic" movie came out earlier last year. Even while I had no sympathy at all for the point of view in the movie, I at least wanted to view it to make up my own mind and discuss its flaws with the family members who had recommended it to me. But it was almost impossible to find, and that was only within a day or so of it going viral.
While I have no sympathy for the viewpoint censored in both cases, the ability to kill content this broadly and quickly is an extremely powerful tool. All you have to do is imagine if your particular political boogeyman with their finger on that button.
I think this argument works better as a question about decentralization: those three companies didn’t “scrub the entire Internet” — they simply chose not to provide free hosting and promotion for it on their own servers. If the authors had registered plandemic.com they’d be easy to find, but then they’d have to pay out of pocket for hosting.
I think this is something a lot of us older people forget: if you experienced the internet back when there were thousands of hosting companies and people ran their own servers for everything, this seems weird since there was always another place for anyone substantially less odious than stormfr*nt. After the 2010s, though, an awful lot of people got out of that way of thinking and there are now entire businesses which only have Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube accounts. I find these “victims” detestable but it definitely doesn’t make me happy that Facebook, Google, and Apple have a huge degree of control over what the average internet user sees even if there are tons of sites which they don’t control.
Their sacks of money are so heavy they cause all content and services to fall into their gravity well, which is where it gets scrubbed. Decentralization is stalling in the face of the economy of scale.
The fact that this has never happened before except when literal incitement of violence was being carried out (google for screenshots) and not being stopped, shows there's no reason to worry this will happen to you.
Did Plandemic have literal incitement of violence? That was what OP was talking about. I see a typical Anti-Vac propaganda movie, but the Wikipedia page and news articles didn't seem to mention any calls to violence...
I am very concerned about the ease and speed with which they have been deplatformed. I am not a big fan of Parler, but I am a very big fan of free speech, and if the various actors who have driven them out of business can act this quickly in this well-coordinated, what else could they decide to censor?
The issue is that these platforms have grown to monopolistic or duopolistic size, NOT that a private company has the right to sever a business relationship.
It wasn't quickly. Parler has been around for two years, and the kind of material that got them finally kicked out of places has been there from near the beginning. Parler's lack of moderation of user content has been in violation of Apple and Google's rules for all that time.
I bet if someone had started a service similar to Parler but non-political, where people posted massive amounts of death threats and hate speech but directed at people for non-political reasons and that service utterly failed to moderate, Apple and Google and the rest would not have given them two years. They would have been gone in a week.
Similar kinds of censorship have, realistically, been going on for quite a while. IMO it's the monopolies which are now making it more of a concern. Deal with the anti-trust problem and everyone wins.
When several vendors drop the same customer at the same time, and there are no state attorneys general bringing legal actions (and thus no grounds to assert illegal activity), then it seems like conspiracy to destroy a business, and a likely cause of action for tortious interference and possibly a RICO violation.
That's too generous. Even if these these businesses "conspired" to do this, that's still not a conspiracy in a legal sense, which is about an agreement to commit an actual crime. As it's not a crime to end business relationships with an entity (which btw almost certainly has been in violation of TOS), no amount of prior coordination would make this a conspiracy. It's not illegal to conspire to do something that's otherwise perfectly legal.
Besides the obvious correlation to an external event, I think another major factor here is the rolling stone effect - "x, y, and z removed $(abhorrent content), why didn't you?". No-one wants to be left holding this hot potato.
I believe a conspiracy (in the legal sense) requires communication - peer pressure doesn't.
Appreciate that response. I was referring to conspiracy to commit tortious interference civilly. And you're right, RICO or similar in a criminal case would require a much higher standard of proof.
When the hills are on fire, it's not a conspiracy when everyone starts fighting fire to protect their homes. One of the pernicious aspects of conspiracy theories is that, when pressed for evidence or presented with evidence contrary to their beliefs, those arguing for the conspiracy fall back to another level of conspiracy.
Conspiracy is a legal term and used here in a context unrelated to conspiracy theories, but to your point: what if all of the hills start on fire at the same time?
@grzm, sorry can't reply to you. I agree, there can be a strong case to be made that it's just a coincidence and they all moved on the same external event just because they were all meaning to anyway. It also seems like a case could be made that it wasn't a coincidence as well. I doubt we'll ever know, since I don't think Parler will ever take any action in this direction.
That's user actions (admin results in "dead"), though HN may be tuned more sensitively, particularly for a highly-active green (new) account. Prior history may be associated. Recent days (and months) have been fraught.
There's a contact email in the FAQ. You can request action, though that doesn't seem overly justified here. Guidelines are also worth aa review.
Discussing voting is strongly discouraged.
Emotion runs high on political threads. It's useful to carefully consider what you write, how much evidence you present, plausible alternatives, and tone.
For future reference, when that happens just do one of these:
1. Wait a few minutes. HN does not allow immediate replies to new comments. This is the preferred solution.
2. Click the timestamp on the comment to get that comment on a separate page. On that view you can reply even if the comment is in the "no replies yet" window from #1. (I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature).
They tend to do that. It's not hard to see the events of January 6 as a conflagration that caught a lot of attention and people looking for sources of water (to bend this analogy to well beyond usefulness).
Edit to add: if you're going to argue legal conspiracy, you're going to have to provide evidence that isn't circumstantial. Russell's Teapot, and all that.
How far should this go? Should banks refuse to service employees? Grocery stores? Gas stations? They are private businesses, they have no reason to tolerate people who are thinking the wrong way.
In general I think we all should be free to associate or do business with whoever we choose. That should be the default position. There may have to be some exceptions where available options are limited for crucial services. I’m trying to avoid using the word Monopoly because it’s bandied about so much inappropriately, but some services are so essential and providers are so limited that we should probably expect them to be provided to anyone making a legal request for access.
Those are specific circumstances though and I don’t think any of these - law firms, internet hosting, etc reach that threshold.
AWS is one service. YouTube is one service. Twitter is one service.
Yes, they are big services - in most cases, the biggest service among their competitors.
They have stakeholders and financial incentives to not be associated with - or worse, seen as condoning - deeply unpopular or controversial political positions.
Why is it so easy to understand when it's a baker refusing to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding or a Christian-owned company refusing to provide birth control for their employees?
There's two questions which we should distinguish:
1. Should there be a bright-line rule - either enforced by government or strong social pressure - about whether people must engage in business with other people, and on what grounds they may discriminate?
2. Should there be a social norm that businesses should try to serve all customers where possible, for the good of customers?
Our society generally answers 1 with that you must refrain from discriminating on the grounds of deep personal characteristics and no otherwise. You cannot throw someone out of your bar for being black. You can throw them out for being drunk and picking fights. You cannot refuse to hire an employee who needs to take a few breaks a day to pray. You can refuse to hire an employee who needs to take a few breaks a day to hire Fiverrs to do their job for them. You cannot refuse to offer credit cards to ethnic North Koreans living in America. You can (and must!) refuse to offer credit cards to North Korean citizens.
This is a sensible position, because it balances the general right to freedom of association / the government not micromanaging your business transactions with the more specific individual rights to participate in society. I cannot change my race, and (we have decided) it's unreasonable to expect me to change my religion. I can (we have decided) change my competence, and I can certainly change whether I start bar fights.
We could decide otherwise, but I think the existing position has a lot of merit.
Number 2 is a more interesting question, but I think the norm of our society is that it should be answered by the free market. We expect that businesses want to serve as many customers as possible anyway because it's the most profitable. Should they decide that they don't want to serve certain customers, it's generally not the place of either the government or strong social norms to say, we wish to override your decision-making process and tell you what to do (apart from the bright-line rule in question 1). Part of the freedom of a free market is that actors are free to decide what to do on their own, including to make mistakes, and no central planning committee tells them what is best for society. We expect this approach will lead to fewer mistakes and a better society.
Again, I think this position has a lot of merit, and we should figure out why we want to change it.
A community activist in Seattle is organizing against Antifa calling them terrorists for causing violence and hijacking social justice issues such as Black Lives Matter and the homeless issue.
Should that group also be refused by everyone, or does it depend on political ideology?
The business owner in the video has said the Antifa group has retaliated against his business by smashing their windows and causing destruction to other business for sending a letter to the Mayor.
Victoria Beach from the African-American community relations says in the video "if you don't agree with them they're going to attack you in some way, in a group, not one on one. They are cowards and we aren't going to take it".
According to the literal definition they are fascists.
Well, let’s start with: the ones who took over the US Capitol building. And then later we can look at the results, decide if that was enough or not, and act accordingly.
Everyone gets bailouts at some level, hence welfare, stimulus cheques, Medicare and Medicaid in the US. More so over here (Brit).
Financial services get very heavily regulated which imposes huge costs, so it is arguable that imposes a certain level of obligation on government. I think that’s a reasonable case, though I’m not entirely happy with the way it’s been handled in practice. It’s not a perfect world.
I don't think the average person is at risk of starting riots with white supremacists. Parler should be treated the same way as Al Queda. Totally radioactive
Didn't he just post yesterday that there were many vendors lined up offering to host them after AWS kicked them out, and they would rewrite the app and be up and running in a week?
I think both could be true. Yesterday it was just aws, and maybe they had a hosting provider lined up. But then today it became every vendor that they work with which is another level of problem, like having to build their own sms system.
There’s something very ironic about Parler—-which kicks users off its platform for espousing liberal ideology—-whining about being kicked off other platforms.
From their own TOS:
> "Parler may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason or no reason“
Speculation: A coordinated action including of legal services strongly suggests to me that the vendors themselves have pressure applied, most likely being an ongoing federal law enforcement/security operation. The smell of this goes beyond the business community suddenly deciding Parler is an utterly dispicable organisation.
This also raises the question of what heat is now being applied to Parler's backers, notably billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer.
See from November 15, 2020, "Conservatives Flock To Mercer-Funded Parler, Claim Censorship On Facebook And Twitter"
A national security concern would have been easier dealt with by coercing parler directly rather than going to the trouble of coercing each vendor individually. It makes no sense.
And yet they are still online (edit: looks like they'll be online with AWS until 1159 PCT, my mistake)
I am pretty sure that coordinated withdrawal of services like this would amount to Tortious Interference wouldn't it?
Given Parler/Foxx's pentant for exaggeration and playing the victim I'm a little incredulous to be honest.
I don't like censorship or support it. Parler should stay, for all its issues. But that doesn't mean they're the victim of some giant conspiracy either.
It's becoming obvious that the capital was stormed by crazies largely organized on the platform. It's coordinated in a way by companies realizing it's an enormous legal and political liability to have a relationship to them
I think its almost the inverse: if there were 1m comments on Facebook/Twitter about it, they're among 1trn other comments on Facebook/twitter. If there 100k comments on parler, that's 10 times less. But there are only 100k (edit: 250k) comments on parler total and they're often about violently defending trumps "victory".
> But the point is where was most of the planning for violence done?
There are two questions here - impact and optics. You are asking the former, but it’s likely the latter that caused trouble.
A smaller platform with larger percentage of offensive messages will look worse than a larger platform with a small percentage even if the total impact of the large platform is 100 time more.
Sorry, I should have picked better numbers. I'm just saying many of the comments, I won't pretend I know "most" let alone all.
It's too late to stop the violence that's already happened. That's cheap and I don't like it but it's true sadly. There are real questions to be asked why the FBI weren't all over this from day 1. They need to be asked because it's (literally) their job to prevent this.
Im just suggesting really that we make the system work as it's meant to: FBI investigates, people plotting violence are intercepted before they commit it. Even if they are right wing nuts.
Im also pretty convinced parler isn't "responsible" in the sense that if it didn't exist there wouldn't have been violence (that doesn't excuse them for profiting off it). It would have been coordinate on r/TheDonald or via Facebook or twitter or wherever. Parler wasn't even a thing for most of the last 4 years and this has been brewing at least that long in my opinion. That's actually why I would like the idea of prevention. Banning parler gives us all an excuse to go back to sleep till next time and then (again) say "how did this happen?".
You raise a good question about why this wasn't stopped before it happened.
Apparently at least one prominent group made public weeks ago that violence was planned at the Capitol. Specific violence to place members of congress under "citizens arrest". I expect to see congressional hearings about this. It's really hard to fathom they were unprepared if the planning was done right out in the open.
To me, this whole thing stinks of the "bystander effect". That's from twitter/reddit not banning more and earlier, to the FBI and law enforcement failing to investigate, to individual police opening doors or declining to stop criminals literally entering the buildings.
Everyone thought "the next time I'll do something, someone else will catch this in some other office".
I get why, its political and touches on censorship and people rightly hesitate to use power (not the law enforcement side, that's their job). Plus you're making money from ads next to pages of QAnon or Stopthesteal or whatever other BS is there.
But that's just my opinion. As you say, we should have a real investigation with witnesses and experts and actual factz. Congresd is the right place for that to happen imho
I hope something actually comes of this. It would be shameful for it to be buried because its hard and no one wants to be less able to mobalise theirside...
Lawyers routinely represent the worst of our society. That includes literal baby killers, tobacco companies, companies that have catastrophic environmental impact or even mass poisoning.
The idea that lawyers spontaneously decided to quit representing a media business because they finally got sick on that particular day is hard to believe.
I mean you can't run a site with no censorship where people are openly plotting the violent takeover of the us government and/or violent events. It is just a liability issue.
This isn't some kind of censorship issue, that just isn't legal and never has been legal.
The great irony here is Parler DOES engage in loads of censorship (no parody, no Pro-Cannabis comments, no positive antifa comments, I don't think you can even be left wing on there).
So I'm stuck defending a censorous site against censorship!?
I am a weirdo, because a public site like Parler is exactly where I hope insurrection should be planned. Why wasn't the FBI ready to swoop and arrest actual violent people given they were posting their plans in plane view? Why are we relying on AWS to moderate away trumps lies and fix the US Political landscape?
To me, killing parler (for all its shit-ness), is a perfect example of "we have to do something, and this is something".
Does anyone actually think that if Parler had gone offline 4 weeks ago, the events of the last week would have been different? They'd have planned on twitter or Facebook or reddit or wherever.
When can we solve the actual problems here (failure to deal with trump, a poor relationship with the truth for all politicians, law enforcement complete lack of interest in right wing threats, lack of basic security etc)?
Censoring random websites seems like farting in a Jucuzzi, censorship is almost always a way of ignoring actual problems while pretending you are acting. And here we are again.
Sorry, its late here in the UK and I'm ranting. Thanks for reading.
When they stopped filming people streaking on sports fields it stopped happening. When school shooters get tons of media coverage school shootings go up. Same with suicides.
People don't like to think that censorship works, but the truth is that censorship does work a lot of the time.
I can see some argument for that. But It still makes no sense to ban parler. And you now need to filter the content of all media to prevent those people getting publicity elsewhere.
So is that the plan? Keep parler but install censors there AND in every website mod office, newspaper, TV station and radio studio?
That's a lot of work. When we could just put FBI agents on parler and have them prevent crimes with conspiracy charges.
And you still can't actually justify a ban on parler.
Note that the alternative would be forcing private companies to do business with a party they do not want to do business with. That has its own set of issues.
You're right and it does. But we do already do that with (other) utilities: the power company can't cut off the supply to the local KKK office as long as they're operating legally and they pay their bills.
This is the price we pay for an open society. Freedom means freedom for morons as well as for us. I wish there were an easier answer, but I wouldn't even trust myself with the power to decide who is allowed to speak and who isn't, so I won't trust Amazon Web Services PR department. So no one gets the job and sometimes that stinks.
* declaring pretty much any company (including cloud computing platforms and maybe the Apple app store and few others) a utility IF they have this sort of market breaking power.
* creating a lower tier than full "utility" status where a company does not have market breaking power but where they do have excess power.
I'm not convinced AWS has market breaking power because parler could get another provider. But getting and moving to another provider on ~24h notice is pretty market breaking. So maybe AWS (and other sub-utilities or whatever you want to call them) can cut you off BUT they need to give you 28 days notice and arrange for transfer of data and continuity of service. To me this is like if you're out of lease, your landlord still has to give you notice, they can't just turn up at 9am and tell you you need to be out by 5.
I don't think those are too onerous as requirements. And I do think that many companies (Google for search and ads, Visa/Mastercard) have gotten just as "infrastructural" as power/water/phone companies were back when the original push to utility status occurred. There should be a push to balance that.
That's power that reaches across our society without any check or balance or democratic input.
In fairness, Google etc have been pretty good at NOT abusing that power. But why wait for an abuse.
Ironically that's what parlar should teach us: be a bit more proactive about your problems, don't wait for a seige of the senate chamber.
What do you think? Have I gone off the deep end? :)
Fyi, this isn't just about parlar and controversial content etc. YouTube bans educational channels pretty much at random and no one does anything about it until there is a twitter storm. That's not right. Apple thinks it has a right to ban tumblr because nipples. Also, wrong imho. If Apple want be the main app provider (via app store for non-jail-broken users), they need to play fair not favourites.
> Why wasn't the FBI ready to swoop and arrest actual violent people given they were posting their plans in plane view?
I assume because the vast majority of such posts were and are fantasies masquerading as plans, and there aren't the resources to set up stings for each such "plan".
That sure is pithy, but it doesn't make any sense unless you're suggesting that there was only one public plan for what people were going to do on the 6th, right? While I haven't looked for them, I would be very surprised if that was the case.
Yeah, sorry, pithy is me being snarky really. That was cheap of me and I apologise.
Actually that is what I'm saying. Was the average insurrectionist more planning than that in this case?
I know some bombs were found, leaving them out this seems like a mob with guns. They coordinated the date and location and just winged it from there it seems.
If someone has a complex plan, you can't be sure they'll go through with it till they've taken significant action.
If the plan is "meet in Washington on Tuesday, bring a gun so we can shoot democrats,see you there" then it seems you can arrest that plotter as soon as he has a gun and a plane ticket.
I think so many people either have public profiles or wore ID or literally spelt their name out to reporters, they can't have been actual planning, prepared criminals.
I picked the above up, it seems like 2 people Brough zip ties to take prisoners. 2 more were in possession of firearms when arrested. That's the level of planning with these people, most of them seem to have just turned up.
I'm not at all saying that excuses their actions. Quite the opposite: it brings the bar for actual conspiracy down when the crime is simple.
Some people on the right (and a very few on the left) would view being armed as the natural state of free people. Especially when discussing suggestions from righties, it seems like "bring your firearm" is right next to "don't forget your keys".
I think that's one of the issues that really worries me about all this: the cultures of the left and right are different enough that the left views behavior the right considers normal to be violently deviate, and then the right (at least on my own social feeds) reacts as though the left is targeting them personally.
My best argument that no insurrection was intended by those present is that the bombs (or bomb-making materials, or whatever) that were found weren't used, even though the mob had control of the Capitol building. Indeed, even though a significant percentage of the rioters were likely armed (see above), the only shots fired were by Capitol police. More than anything else, that confirms for me that the mob didn't arrive with the intention of taking the Capitol, or insurrection, or anything like it. They had the materials available to make things much, much worse, and instead they acted like tourists. Why? Clearly (I think!), because there was no intent by 99+% of them to do anything but show up and support legislators in finding the courage to dissent from what the Trumpists believe to be fraud.
I think widespread suppression of information about this planned protest would've mattered, but I don't think it was justified before the events at the capitol. Now I think it is a clear and easily foreseeable risk to allow this to continue.
I'm all for arresting anyone who plans specific violence. Before/after the events at the capital, I don't care. Go arrest them. Banning one site just moves them to another and gives them a persecution complex. 12months in prison for conspiracy to commit public disorder is a much better deterant for future planned insurrections.
So we should be referring everyone making idle threats on the internet to law enforcement? That seems unrealistic and honestly way more totalitarian than just moderation and censorship.
I also don't think law enforcement has the bandwidth to deal with it.
Then when they get 50 referrals from r/knitting and 50mil from parlar, law enforcement can raise an eyebrow, investigate and prevent these things.
To me, that seems fair and effective.
The alternative is that we ban parlar. But only after the violence. And we know that banning parlar won't prevent this from happening, we're just moving the problem.
Why bother? Keep parler, by now every second account should an FBI agent. It's even better than twitter/reddit/facebook: all the noise is gone, it's just the crazies planning violence...
Parler is broken by design and it was predictable that it would get to this point, one way or another.
The platform would have had to be designed as decentralised system in first place, since (especially for things like this) it's the only way to survive in the long run.
Yea all of this had already happened to gab with gab pivoting to activitypub a year or so ago to get around App Store bans. That the CEO didn’t plan for this is really a failure of leadership at Parler.
I read this as: every vendor was pretty quiet until the final outcome becaome known and it was safe to "bravely come forward with the decision" that will benifit said vendors in discussions with the current political powers
I believe that in AWS's statement they said that they would help them retain their data. I'm sure it just means that after midnight their S3 and RDS services are going read only until they're done taking their data out. Maybe make a final backup of their databases and put it in a bucket.
I'd be a bit more disturbed if AWS was going to remove read access after midnight.
Private companies just want to act in their best interest. Call it what you will, no one wants to be associated with them; and as such they get removed.
I was just pointing out that these very powerful companies, some are claimed to be monopolies are acting in unison which can be argued seems like cartel behavior.
There's a big reason they act in unison now though.
They're responding to a single national security threat event and possible consequencial liabilities. So it is not a random time do be doing this. There has previously been legitimate concern about extremism, and from this event seems only to accellerate until mitigated. People should enjoy free speech, but how these platforms work, the side-effects of algos and what kinds of conversations is facilitated do matter.
That is a good reason why we need to support such businesses not in the US. There is no way a European based company would ban them on such a short notice over some minor thing happening in the US. It isn't like US based companies ban much in Europe, it is just local politics driving these decisions.
The problem is that they don’t have many benefactors. Rich right wingers don’t throw money into a toxic hole.
Ironically, if they did have moderation so it was just a Twitter with /r/conservative people and not the_donald people, it might be successful. BUT, if it was - it wouldn’t be necessary in the first place! Those people can just use Twitter!
Twitter’s moderation is so permissive that the only thing left outside is going to be toxic.
And then what? Get sued into the ground by the family of the slain capitol cop, and the subsequent people that are killed by the "patriots" openly plotting violence on parler?
"our lawyers all ditched us"
That pretty much should tell you this is not a free speech issue... your service is just a shit business no one wants to be associated with. BYEE
> "They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day."
If everybody else is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.
Said the church to the scientist. Said the mob to the witch.
Be careful about where this goes. This one doesn't affect you and I, but the next one might. It certainly will when it gets to HN or Signal. But then it'll be too late.
And all of that except for the "kill blacks" and calls for violence would be perfectly fine on Reddit on /r/conservative. Most of it would also be fine on Twitter or Facebook, except that some of the conspiracy stuff might get a misinformation warning and/or a fact check link.
That's why sites like Parler, Gab, and Voat end up as cesspools. Those who don't feel the need to post racism and calls to violence can just stay on the mainstream services, getting both their political discussion and their non-political discussion in one convenient place.
Voat tried to have the non-political stuff too, but it just ended up with racism there too. For example, in /v/movies people complaining that the "Call of the Wild" cast included a black actor, and going off about how it was the Jews in Hollywood behind this for nefarious reasons.
Hate speech, discriminatory speech and defamation, lots of speech is criminal. It depends on context and intent, for which misguided tolerance for bullying we're now witnessing. For especially bad cults, ie. Germany banned Nazi symbols and speech.
Policy is made in a context, not just blind ideology.
If they know of criminal conduct, they might be liable for not reporting or supporting such activities. There's also bad PR and various guilt-by association. Take a hard look what happened to the founder of Wikileaks for instance.
Those persecuting Galileo were not “everyone else” though, it was just the Catholic Church authorities, and in fact even many church scholars were sympathetic to Galileo views and confirmed his observations. Also Galileo was subject to actual persecution by the authorities, not simply being dropped by business partners. It’s a completely spurious example.
This underlying principle would argue that democracy itself is unjust, and that we cannot, say, have laws against murder simply because the majority of people think that murder is bad. What if it's actually good? Consensus does not infer virtue. Shall we suspend all laws?
The answer is that, while such an argument is technically true, we have yet to find a better way to structure society. Your example of Galileo strongly suggests that we should not hand over this sort of decision-making to princes or priests, which are the usual alternatives to the ballot box. The judgment of the majority is regularly wrong, but it is also the most regularly not-wrong thing we know about.
If you think the majority is wrong, convince them that they are wrong. It will take time. I'm sorry there isn't a better way.
> This underlying principle would argue that democracy itself is unjust...while such an argument is technically true, we have yet to find a better way to structure society.
We certainly have found a better way to structure society: a Constitutional government that honors certain principles that even the democratically elected Congress and President can only override with much more than a majority, with judges trusted to guard those principles.
Who writes the constitution, and more importantly, who gives it their assent? Who appoints the judges and decides that they are trustworthy?
I'm not arguing for rule by simple majority. I do agree that important things need the consensus of much more than 51% of society (let alone 51% of people who bother to vote).
If it were only a simple majority of cloud hosts, text messaging services, email providers, and lawyers that ditched Parler, they would be in no danger at all.
> I do agree that important things need the consensus of much more than 51% of society (let alone 51% of people who bother to vote).
Even if all the cloud hosts, text messaging services, email providers, and lawyers in America agreed, that's still much less than a simple majority of Americans.
I haven't seen any evidence that a supermajority supports banning Parler, which was the #1 downloaded app on both Google and Apple app stores back in November[1].
They almost certainly were assholes the whole time, it’s just that very recently they proved they were not just assholes but murderous treasonous ones in action in a way that removed all reasonable doubt.
I mean, if for a few years you lead people to believe that you’re the type of person who poops in the pool, and then you finally do it one day, who’s gonna invite you over to their house?
You can make the argument that it sucks that so much infrastructure is built upon orgs that have their own first amendment rights and I’d agree with that, but just that, no one is forced to associate with you. If a group of companies are refusing your cash, might want to reevaluate your viewpoints respective to the broader community.
Prior to a week ago, there hadn't been an attack against the US Capitol planned on the app while the owners defend the right of the planners to use it for that purpose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It should be expected that when historically unprecedented things happen, people's viewpoints change.
Trump can organize another attack on the next platform his followers migrate to. Will you ban that we well? What makes you think platforms are the problem and not the actual person that started it? Do you think with the ban of this platform the problem has been fixed?
There have been enough mob rule systems in history to prove that saying entirely wrong.
Was Oppenheimer an asshole during the McCarthy hysteria?
Was Solschenizyn an asshole during communism?
We are seeing similar methods of silencing now, starting with universities, open source projects and now free speech apps in monopolies or oligopolies that should be forced to adhere to common carrier rules.
How about we attempt to understand why people are thinking this way. Why are they not interested in thinking your way? What can be done to help both side talk and solve problems together?
we absolutely need to do all of that. but when i talk my parlerish side of the family it usually starts with them saying “if we hadn’t ended segregation we wouldn’t have these problems” and i don’t know what path to take from there
Sometimes people just need you to listen. Though it's ill adviced to agree with wild conspiracy theories, after a long discussion normal human beings tend to agree on something together, especially if not arguing.
Sure. I can help with this. I was actually discussing this earlier.
The economy has been shit for middle class Americans for quite a while. Rent and home prices have been increasing far faster than wages. Furthermore, lots more nickel and diming has led to more debt and misery for the average middle american. The situation is even worse for people lower than that. However, especially for lower middle class white Americans, they aren't too far removed from a time when that was enough to have an OK life. So they remember or have heard about it. And they are unhappy.
And for a while we were working on fixing that unhappiness. But then some people came along and said something different. They said that those other people over there are the reason for your unhappiness. If it weren't for them things would be better. They are your enemy. And they've been doing this for decades now.
And things were getting more tense. Then (probably with a little outside help) someone else came along and really encouraged ramping up that anger. And said all the right things. And said if we just take over, we'll be able to make it right this time. And so many people believed this that they didn't really stop what that actually meant.
This may seem like I'm just BSing here, but I'm not. It's the same technique used by gangs, cults, and neo-nazi's. They target the young, naive, and emotionally frail. And they promise companionship and strength. And for people that feel alone and left behind, that is enough. They don't need to be dumb or evil. Just a little broken. And then the evil ones come in and take advantage.
But if you haven't ever seen how difficult it is to help someone recover from being in a cult or a neo-nazi gang... then you wouldn't realize how hard it is to deal with these groups.
I think you should go to one of these forums - parler or gab, currently /r/conspiracy, or one of the similar. Try to have a reasoned conversation with them. I really genuinely want more people to do that. Because when you do that you very quickly start to understand there is no reason. On the 5th of January, you would've heard them loudly preach that the 6th will be the "reckoning" the "true patriots" would "rise up" that Italygate was an explosive new revelation. Joe Biden had finally been caught in their trap, that and finally Trump would make his move under executive order blah blah blah. On the 7th of January you would've seen them loudly declaring that antifa undercover agents stormed the capitol to discredit them - despite the fact that storming the capitol is literally what they had been advocating on the 5th. Everything they claimed to want on the 5th was actually a setup to discredit them on the 7th.
There is no logic, there is no consistency, there is only claiming whatever is expedient at the time.
Sounds like a sort of social psychosis, lead by psychopaths in lead positions, or anonymous anarchy. Point being humans experience pleasure at such fantastical thinking, especially when validated in a group setting, even online. In the beginning this can be powerful feelings, though more like addiction and craving over time.
Anyways, that was a brief attempt to grok "crazytalk".
> I think you should go to one of these forums - parler or gab, currently /r/conspiracy, or one of the similar. Try to have a reasoned conversation with them
You'll be banned pretty quickly, they really don't care about free speech, only their speech.
It is impossible. Especially for the far right and far left. Go into subreddits just to see the difference. I used to think like that too, and then seeing the actual reality its just disappointing. When Trump said that he can shoot someone at 5th avenue and his supporters will support him, that's real.
Thankfully majority of people are not far left far right, but center.
Are you suggesting 'tolerant' people should tolerate something like, racism? You are a logical moron if you try to make that argument. You know exactly what you are doing, and it's stupid.
We've banned this account for abusing HN for ideological flamewar. We ban accounts for that, regardless of which ideology they're for or against, and regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. You've been doing this a long time, you've been using the site primarily for it, and we've asked you many times previously to stop.
HN is a site for thoughtful, curious conversation. There's no substantive and interesting discussion that can't be had that way, and accounts that are unwilling to stop setting fires and attacking others are not cool here. Ironically, the people destroying the commons this way have far more in common with their enemies than they do with the bulk of the community, who come here to find interesting things to read and to escape this sort of ragey shitfest.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. You've posted some good comments in the past, but the damage caused by the abusive ones unfortunately far outweighs the benefit of the good ones.
Is anybody who espouses this view willing to define how we determine who the intolerant are (to then not tolerate them)? Where is the line?
Should Fox News be taken off the air? Should any conservative talk radio show be shut down? Should all employees for any type of org that can considered conservative or adjacent be made to pay for tolerating the intolerant?
Tolerating the intolerant gives the intolerant the foothold they need to get enough legitimacy to seize power and destroy the society which was tolerant of them.
I understand your viewpoint, but I'm asking where you draw the line for who counts as the intolerant?
If the risk is society's destruction as you say, then I'd imagine you'd be motivated to cast a pretty wide net for who counts as intolerant (who thus should be sanctioned and not given equal access to services until they fall in line). After all, anything can be justified to save our society from destruction, correct? It seems like it'd be better to be safe than sorry, with the stakes so high as you mention.
Are there any conservatives/republicans and their associated organizations that you think should maintain their equal access to services, and shouldn't face some sort of penalty for either directly/indirectly supporting an ideology that led to the events of January 6th?
Come on. Anyone who supported the insurrection on Jan 6th should be expelled from Congress and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for supporting a rebellion against the US. The fact you make me spell that out that to dance around the issue is disturbing.
This is pretty straight forward. If you:
Support violence against other groups because they look different
Seek to restrict someone's rights/voting because of the above
Then you should not be tolerated in our society and you should be punished.
I understand you're emotional about it, and asking for clarification is 'disturbing' to you. I also don't like what happened and would love to figure out ways to ensure a better functioning society.
However, I think where we may differ is how we think about solutions to problems like this. I want solutions that are scalable, and that help maintain a society where a diversity of people can all thrive over the long-term. I don't believe emotional reasoning should be a strong factor in determining punishments for people, as it leads to bias and discrimination.
Most vocal people you see on the internet don't seem particularly interested in long-term/scalable solutions. It's not terribly surprising, we humans are very short-term oriented and tribal by nature. When we see members of the outgroup performing badly, we want to punish them. When members of our own ingroup perform badly, we are more likely to rationalize it away and be more charitable with the interpretation of what they've done.
I don't believe the 'punish the outgroup, forgive the ingroup' thinking is healthy for a functioning pluralistic society. The words you are using and the way you are framing things are signals to me that you may be fairly biased against your outgroup. That's why I was asking you to spell out exactly what rules should govern punishment in your mind.
The next step in critically thinking through your proposed rules is whether you would punish members of your ingroup for violating them, or if you'd add new caveats to ensure they were given some leniency. But that's just a rhetorical question given the nature of this forum.
Note: I am making no claims of equivalence between your outgroup and ingroup in terms of actions they've done. You also likely think I'm part of your outgroup for straying from the status quo by even posing such questions, and may feel inclined to use terms reserved for your outgroup. You'd be mistaken, but I understand the impulse.
Parler may have just ended its own business, I think. They should have pivoted to be a free speech alternative to sensible conservatives, with sensible moderation, and market their product as such. As it is, no one wants to do business with a company that openly allows neo-nazis, anti-semites, and lately, criminals, on their platform, and no one with a brain would even want to be on such a platform.
I'm open to a Twitter alternative that is lenient on conservative views, as long as it has the right sort of moderation. And I really hope this alternative learns from Parler's mistakes.
Twitter itself is open to conservative views. It’s just not open to outright lies about factual matters of critical importance, or to incitements to violence or the overthrow of the state. Surely one can express conservative opinions without resorting to such things—and most do.
I agree, but conservatives have been complaining about the phenomenon of shadow-banning on the platform for years, and this was pretty much confirmed after the Twitter hack last year. To allow conservative views but reduce their visibility is just a more subtle form of censorship, reflecting a left-leaning bias. I don't think Twitter or Facebook would even bother denying any of this at this point.
To have the technological capability to do something does not necessarily imply that it is being used for the wrong reasons. Without proof, all there is is speculation.
> To allow conservative views but reduce their visibility is just a more subtle form of censorship
You're moving the goalposts. I was referring to allowing speech - you're talking about amplifying it. There is a huge difference between tolerance and amplification, and nobody should expect Twitter or any other media you don't own to amplify what you say for free. If you want people to follow you, say interesting things and influence people (but don't cross the line of inciting violence or calling on people to overthrow the government).
How the hell did we get from "this platform should allow me to post what I want" to "this platform should broadcast what [person X] says with equal volumetric distribution to non-subscribers as it does [person Y]?"
I read your other comment under the submission, and suddenly this makes more sense. It's possible there's something these companies know/aware of that we don't, or that the government is secretly involved in it somehow. What I know for certain is that it's extremely rare for all the FAANGs to gang up on a company like that simply because of differences of opinion.
The sad thing is a platform does nothing to help us find common ground and move past the chaos which has overtaken discourse. What is the solution here?
Some people need to lose some attitude and respect fellow human beings. Nobody knows everything and believing random texts online is nuts. Just stay humble and help those around you and locally.
The irony is the bad qualities they hate in others, only festers in themselves, they're unable to let go of the hate.
The Constitution gives a format for making decisions and living with them when we don't agree. It's not really for finding common ground. That's up to us.
you don't need common ground Constitution is common ground. what are problem of just following the Constitution. Democrats and Republican abolish Constitution that is a problem.
I'm not worried about some moustache-twirling plot where tech companies effectively become the illuminati. I'm only slightly worried about politicians using the threat of regulation (e.g. revoking Section 230) to leverage companies into prohibiting things they don't like, or content favorable to opponents. I don't think many politicians would do this - the risk that this manipulation gets discovered and publicized is probably too great.
What I'm most worried about is good-intentioned censorship that further divides and alienates large sections of our society. These bans play directly into the narrative that leftist tech companies are excluding and pushing out conservative voices, and it's having the opposite effect of what is intended. For instance, suppressing allegations of fraud is likely having the opposite effect: it's triggering a reaction along the lines of, "well clearly there's something afoot, otherwise why would these companies be deliberately shutting down talk of fraud?". Who here has ever held a view and was banned from a forum, or told to stop by the forum's authorities, (electronic or otherwise) for that view? Did it make you change said view, or did it make you even more entrenched and suspicious of the authority that issued the ban? That's what I'm most worried about: companies ostracizing certain groups or topics with the intention of curbing extremism, but to the effect of fostering ever greater extremism.