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Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support (bbc.co.uk)
657 points by brobdingnagians on Jan 11, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 1261 comments



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I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.

Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).

Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist (whether it's your own vendors, or whether you are a vendor to a target).

What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? Try to reduce dependence on cloud providers and vendors by building more in-house? How far would you have to go, since a colo or an ISP can drop you just as AWS can?


> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)?

For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).


It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.

Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a similar standard to Twitter then the only way for a business to figure out if it is in breach is by experiment, and AWS just showed it can pull the plug in days with apparently no warning.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...


> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back.

And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress. But, we don't have to blind ourselves to that prior context. Given it, and given the way a number of people received those comments and have been actively organizing for violence around the inauguration since then, it doesn't seem to be to be a close call.


> taken together

Taken together primarily, along with numerous other tweets in secondary. It wasn't just those two.


Sure, I agree, but I thought that was kind of implicit in the phrase "straw that broke the camels back". This was the latest individual thing, sitting on a mountain of other things, that finally caused the dam to break.


[flagged]


Could you clarify you position here? I can read your comment a few ways:

1. The president did not incite violent insurrection.

2. None of the presidents actions meet the legal standard for incitement. Full Stop.

3. None of the presidents actions meet the commonly understood definition of incitement. Full Stop.

I think an argument could be made for 1. I’d struggle with 2 or 3. IANAL but let’s consider:

> So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

> So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Please stop. He went on for two months about how the election was stolen (with no evidence), talked about the 2nd amendment and "how it could solve this", and then sent proxies to talk about "taking it to Congress," not to mention literally thousands of other lies.

Enough with the gaslighting - this was entirely justified.


??? lightgreen was saying it wasn't incitement. nemosaltat, whom you replied to, was -arguing- with lightgreen. nemosaltat said that he was pretty sure it met the legal standard for incitement. Maybe he doesn't say it quite as strongly as you would like, but you can hardly call this "gaslighting".


Do you realize you don't have to literally say "let's be violent and attack people" in order to incite violence?


Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.

In fact I don’t like the tone of your comment and I feel it might be setting some people off.

How about we keep the responsibility with the people actually physically doing the crime. People make their own decisions.

Your logic would dictate the person doing the crime takes no responsibility since they were incited into doing it.


> Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.

That's false. The standards for incitement according to the SCOTUS are defined in the Brandenburg Test and are _famously_ narrow. They include a subjective test of the speaker's intent, and an objective test.

- Subjective: Speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" (this means, was the speaker intending to produce imminent lawless action).

- Objective: Speech is "likely to incite or produce such action"

In an incitement case here, the objective test is absolutely easy. The crowd broken into the halls of the Capitol, violently disrupted a session of Congress, and killed a police officer. Any lawyer would have no problem arguing in court that the speech that morning was "likely" to incite imminent lawless action.

The harder test is the subjective test of the speaker's intent. Here, we need to show that Donald Trump intended to incite imminent lawless action. That's typically a very hard test, because we can't read minds. But we can use circumstantial† evidence to piece together enough of a picture to allow a jury to convict.

† circumstantial evidence is used all the time to determine intent for crimes in courtrooms all over the United States, and is completely valid evidence. Don't raise "but that's circumstantial!" as a defense, because circumstantial evidence is completely valid.


You didn't disprove anything I said. I said nothing about making a legal case in court and proving. Notice the word claim? Additionally, just because the law is in court doesn't mean it's good or not dangerous. You still NEED a subjective proof to determine guilt. This means the law is inherently flawed because it will be used in a biased way and risks being used to attack certain individuals.


I don't care even a little bit about how you feel of the "tone" of my comment. You're being extremely disingenuous, and using terms like "guilt" and "crime" which do not apply to the current situation. The current situation is: Twitter as a corporate entity believes that Trump's tweets directly led to the events at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election and directly incited violence. The vast majority of Americans agree, but Jack Dorsey's opinion is the only one that matters.

By your logic a mafia don who says "it'd be a lot better if [enemy boss] wasn't alive" resulting in an assassination didn't incite violence, and the responsibility should lie with the "people who did the crime" because people make their own decisions. This is a colossally stupid take.

Your post is full of straw man arguments and I'm not sure if you're being intentionally disingenuous, or just have a very poor understanding of political events in general and Twitter's ability to moderate their own platform. Come back if you want to have a real discussion.


Wooooosh the point of me saying that was that ANYONE can label your speech as incitement bud. Again, your tone sounds pretty violent to me and I think you need to be removed from this platform. See how stupid and ridiculous this logic is?

Twitter is being prodded by government officials and working in monopolistic collusion your silly claim about it being a private entity is completely moot. If this is the road you want the US to do down you reap what you sow.


Did you attack someone based on my post? Don't be dense.


No one acted violently after reading your comment, but people did act violently after reading Trump’s Twitter. If you have an example of someone’s Twitter being taken down for inciting violence were no violence occurred, let us know!


How about the opposite where actual dictators are allowed to incite and not get taken down? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/09/18/twitter-sa...


Paywalled, cannot read, sorry.


> No one acted violently after reading your comment, but people did act violently after reading Trump’s Twitter.

Consider this example.

John fired Andrew from the job. And told him, please do whatever you want to get your job back. Andrew took his shotgun and killed ten top managers.

Deaths of ten people is a direct consequence of John actions. John actions might be irresponsible, but was not inciting violence.

Same way Capitol hill events were a direct consequence of Trump actions, but Trump did not incite violence.


It happens all the time. Possibly a majority of all twitter bans over the last 5 years fit that description. Say racist thing like "Muslims should stay out of the USA" get banned by twitter for "inciting violence against a protected group".

In a way, all political advocacy consists of incitement of violence. Any law not ultimately backed up by the credible threat of violence is just a suggestion. If you don't pay your taxes for long enough, eventually federal agents with guns will come to take you to jail, and if you resist, they'll kill you.


That is a wild misrepresentation of the facts.

That was the second of two tweets, that they are taking together. This was the other

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

They explain the context and how these tweets are being interpreted.


Ok, so it looks like the two tweets were:

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!

"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

I fail to see the issue with these tweets. He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem? Is it even something that the incoming President was requesting? And what is the issue with the other tweet?

This is a bizarre hill that Twitter chose to spend 10% of their market cap on. It seems like there must have been something else that they could have picked that would have made more sense.


If you insist on trying to identify a handful of tweets that justify this, you're going to be disappointed.

The problem is the totality of his behavior. Watch the first 20 minutes of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uSYhyFao4


I think it's some of the following factors:

- President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.

- The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

- The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

- The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.

- Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

> He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem?

It's pretty significant as it hasn't happened since 1869.


The fact that he's being censored based on how some people interpreted what he said is troubling.

John Lennon was murdered because of how someone interpreted Catcher In the Rye. Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?


> Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?

This is patently disingenuous. Twitter didn't jail the President for inciting violence. They said he wasn't allowed to Tweet anymore.

Could the publisher of Catcher in the Rye have decided to stop publishing it based on that? Yes, they could.

You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection that attacked Congress and then praised them saying: "we love you" and "you're special". As I said before, we don't have to be blind to the prior context. This reductionist thinking that we must take these two tweets entirely on their own and devoid of context isn't something I'm going to participate in.


> You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection

And we have a justice system to deal with insurrectionists and we have a democratic process with our elected representatives to remove leaders from office. This involves due process and respecting rights honed over 200 years of jurisprudence. It's not done in a corporate backroom by a couple executives with zero public accountability.

Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol? What's happening here is the digital equivalent. You're busy thanking them because you support what they did. Some of us are stepping back and asking the question: wait, who controls these soldiers and what checks and balances are there on their power to police us? It turns out Twitter owns them and the checks and balances are none. If that doesn't concern you then you're missing the big picture.


> Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol?

I'm done with this conversation as it doesn't seem to be productive or in good faith.


Propaganda doesn’t need to be explicit; it’s clear the intent of these messages, just like the veiled messaging in his incitement speech.

It’s clear that once something like a violent insurrection happens the companies previously giving a platform to the one who incited the insurrection are going to give a lot less leeway on anything he says.

Seems odd that this is seemingly hard to understand. If the violence didn’t happen, and he wrote those two tweets he’d still be on Twitter.

But it did happen and that’s changed the game


You can say anything is a coded message and claim it means whatever you want. The tweet that prompted the initial ban literally said "go home and be peaceful". That is supposed to be an incitement to violence?

Lots of violence happened during the protests this summer too. Should we assume that everyone tweeting about being peaceful then was also sending coded messages supporting the violence?

Are we really going to go with the logic that violence occurred, therefore anything tweeted prior to the violence was an incitement to the violence? And if it appeared to say the opposite of that, then it was actually a coded message that means whatever is politically convenient for us to have it mean?


You can keep claiming it’s one tweet if you like, but you know this is disingenuous. It’s 1 tweet + 4 years of destabilising lies + 1 incitement to insurrection

Propaganda over the ages has been studied very closely, there are known techniques. His incitement speech was a textbook example [1]. Why on earth would anyone give him the benefit of the doubt? He’s a wannabe tyrant.

[1] https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1347908845281095680 - A good deep dive on his incitement speech


[flagged]


How does your outburst relate to my comment? What obligation does twitter have to give anybody a voice? Especially a voice that has incited a violent insurrection. I don't see how Twitter are struggling to maintain user trust, except for those that believe violent insurrection is a good thing.


The outburst was a reaction to the question of why people would give him the benifit of the doubt. He was entrusted (non violently, but begrudgingly by some Americans) with the ability to command the United States' nuclear arsenal. Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it. I don't trust that Trump incited the violence, nor that it's a good idea to blame him and dismiss objection.


> Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it

So you're comparing the insurrection that happened last week, in a mature, functioning democracy to the overthrow of rule-from-afar by a king? Are you sure that a violent insurrection in America, today, could be a good thing? An insurrection is usually to replace the embedded status quo. What should democracy be replaced with that's better? Do you believe totalitarianism/fascism is really a better system? Because that appears to be Trump's preferred system of government.

> I don't trust that Trump incited the violence

He staged a rally called the "Save America March" with a speech loaded with violent imagery and threats to "weak republicans" with phrases like "We have someone in there who should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we're not going to stand for that" with repeated phrases like "fight like hell", giving the impression that there were similar marches around the country, etc. etc. all carefully crafted to make it seem like today was the day that, if the mob didn't do something about it, they would lose democracy itself. Making it appear that the election was still ongoing, putting it in the present tense, and that in 1 hour's time, it would all be over. He even laid out plans for what he would do in office going forward, like a State of the Union speech. It was all timed to finish 45 minutes before the electoral college votes were due to be counted.

This was after Guiliani had called for "trial by combat".

If you haven't seen the full transcript of his speech, I would encourage you to dig it out. The incitement is absolutely plain as day. It's textbook propaganda and was designed to rile up the crowd to believe they, the "real Americans" (like Hitler's "real Germans"), could stop what he was decrying as a fraudulent election.

I get it that if you're a Trump fan or a Republican, you may be willing to give more of a benefit of the doubt. But to a non-partisan (I'm not American, but deeply concerned by what I can see from my part of the world) it's plain as day.


>I get it that if you're a Trump fan or a Republican, you may be willing to give more of a benefit of the doubt.

I'm neither.

>But to a non-partisan (I'm not American, but deeply concerned by what I can see from my part of the world) it's plain as day.

I am an American, non-partisan, who shares mutual deep concern.


We're going to go with the logic - and evidence - that Trump has been doing this for years. Even before he was president he was threatening violence if he didn't win the nomination. [1]

So it is spectacularly, flagrantly, and most of all utterly unconvincing to suggest that he - I don't know - misspoke? Didn't mean it? Was widely and unfortunately misinterpreted by an angry crowd he just happened find himself in front of with kindness and good will to all men in his heart?

None of that is even remotely plausible.

Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc are perfectly justified in shutting him up, for the safety of all Americans, and very possibly the rest of the world.

Once we've dealt with this threat, we can come back and have a debate about media control in all of its forms. And when we do that we can include the trad media too, because they have a lot to answer for.

But for now there are more pressing problems. Whether or not Twitter did the right thing isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-warns-s...


Sure, once we've won the War on Terror, you'll be able to get on a plane without taking your shoes off again and we'll shut down the NSA program to spy on everyone. Once we end the scourge of drugs, we'll restore your 4th amendment rights and end civil forfeiture. The people who take your away your rights to bolster their own political power have always been very conscientious about giving them back later.


Conflating multi decade long concerns with the remaining few days of a presidential term is hardly a useful comparison.

A tech company banning a user isn’t equivalent to a new law on the statute either.


Multi-decade concerns start out as immediate concerns. If you only care about freedom when it's easy and convenient to protect, you just plain don't care about freedom.


Loss of Twitter use isn’t loss of freedom. No laws have been changed. He’s just lost access to a private company’s services. It is not the same as any of the things you list


If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point. It's about our freedom to hear differing points of view and make up our own minds about them.

If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote. We only get to choose from a pre-approved list of options that all have to conform to whatever Twitter and Facebook deem is acceptable. Twitter and Facebook et al are unelected and accountable to no one. That's not democracy. That's a corporate dictatorship with sham elections.


> If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point

I really haven't. Trump is the only western leader to have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms. You can't claim this is the thin end of the wedge, this is a reaction [by those platforms] to the risks to western democracy in its entirety. They gave him four years of rope to hang himself with, it was only a direct attack on democracy itself that caused this action.

> If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote.

Trump has all the means of communication that any previous president has had. All he has to do is stand at a lectern and talk and it will be broadcast on national television.

Again, he wouldn't have lost the access that he had if he hadn't tried to directly attack the entire system of democracy itself. All the other lies he's told over the years were allowed to be seen.

> corporate dictatorship

That's a laughable leap, sorry. If he hadn't incited a violent insurrection, and if he wasn't a few days away from the end of his tenure then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Let me put this another way. Do you think everybody, no matter what harms they cause, deserve a voice on all platforms? Would you expect Twitter to host the voice of Hitler?

Ultimately, they are private companies, they have no obligation to balance, fairness, access. It seems the state forcing corporations to do their bidding would be far more of a slippery slope than the president, who has tried to actually destroy democratic process, being banned from a platform.


You claim it's clear, yet the majority of protestors that showed up in DC DID NOT storm the capitol.

How is it it's clear to so many people on the left that Trump was inciting violence, when that wasn't the case for most of his supporters?


A lot of people still argue that Charles Manson should have been freed as well.

I mean it's not like the guy ever killed anyone. /s


> They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form

It comes off like this statement is what big tech really has a problem with.


I don’t think you can really pick this part the way you are approaching it. There were many many other tweets that added up to this, and Twitter really didn’t decide that any particular tweet was a problem until people chose to be violent after reading them.


I'm aware of the wider context, and I didn't mean that in complete seriousness. I was just pointing out the extremely one-sided bias on display. We've had our cities burned down and dozens of people murdered in the name of leftist causes, and all we get is denial that the violence is even happening, or baseless claims that it's all committed by alt righters who somehow flourish in zones controlled by violent leftists. CHAZ de facto seceded from the Union, and Portland was borderline in that respect. While the riot in the Capitol was very serious and reprehensible, it was not even remotely a coup and the overall level of harm was low compared to the violent harm constantly caused by and celebrated by the left all last year. It's abundantly clear that violence is good and healthy as long as it's committed by the left, and it's okay to stamp out groups that find that abhorrent. The tech giants do not have the slightest problem with violence. They have a problem with their political opponents. This is a political power grab that is affecting thousands of people who have not committed any crime.

I'm all for prosecuting people and groups that have actually committed violence. In the court system, not by unaccountable decrees from the billionaire ruling class, and not with collateral damage involving thousands of innocent people.


I think a lot of what you’re saying is not true.

I say this living in Seattle. Nobody burned down my city. Chaz was pretty interesting; I visited and talked to people there. It was not a threat to the Union. :)

The things you seem to think are abundantly clear are not clear to people who lived through the events you’re hearing about.


OK then add this to context, they had also just determined that pipe bombs had been located in 4 places (Capital area, RNC Headquarters , DNC Headquarters, and in a pickup truck bed). So if someone who was revered and you felt wrong enough to stage a potential coup or insurgence for wasn't going to be some place and still hadn't condemned your behavior, yet those who were permitted to do the wrong (in the mind of the insurgence) you were just given a green light and location. That is where it breaks down. He was also stating he was moving platforms, so then those who were prepared to perpetrate the violence would know where they could celebrate it with the person they felt had been wronged.

Now personally I took more umbrage with the fact that he hadn't been kicked off previously, I personally Don't think that the previous comments should have ever been allowed to be made on the platform since he should have been removed for TOS violations.

Also for those asking how this should impact businesses going forward, a smart company should have a mitigation plan in place for any similar issue. It would have been strange if this was the first occurrence, but just look back a few years for 8Chan. This isn't the first time, especially for an application that a bunch of the users had used since QAnon had gone there previously.


This thread started out talking about on what grounds a vendor like AWS might refuse service to a service like Parler, and what those who run companies might want to do to mitigate this risk.

You switched it to talking about on what grounds Twitter might refuse service to the President of a country or other powerful person. Which you got lots of takers to discuss that, but it seems like a very different discussion to me.


Maybe it was the part where he directed an angry mob to the steps of the Capitol building?


[flagged]


Sigh.


Sigh.


Wow, the contrived reasoning in that Twitter statement is beyond belief:

Trump: "I totally disagree with the outcome of the election [...] there will be an orderly transition [...] I will not be going to the Inauguration"

Twitter's interpretation: I don't think the election is legitimate, therefore I disavow my statement that the transition will be orderly, therefore you should commit violence. Also, since I won't be at the inauguration, you're free to do terrorism there without risk of harming me personally.


> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.

When President Trump published this tweet, he knew full well extremists are actively planning to attack the inauguration on January 20th.

There isn't a clear, objective bar in this kind of situation. Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos each decided for themselves if they were willing to stand by and allow Trump and Parler to continue along the path of inciting violence on January 20th.


The people voted to remove Donald Trump from office and he wouldn't and still does not accept it coupled with his calls to violent action. If he's willing to drag the entire country I can only imagine what he would try to do to a company that defied him, Trump is an abuser. While any of these companies could have taken action, I understand to some extent why they did not. It doesn't make it right, doesn't mean I condone their lack of response, but I can see why a company did not go heads up with this person and waited for the appropriate time to take action.


> not everything is a slippery slope

From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down and honestly any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Part of that plan should be projected scenarios about how low the bar will go....

Part of what is really dicey here too is that the result of getting this calculation wrong is basically annihilation for your service (unless you think you can operate without "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers"). The stakes are really high!

(Edited to fix my 'raise-the-bar' analogy)


The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2.

You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses.

Or.

You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a Lame Duck status.

The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. Yes, you should absolutely be actively paying attention. No static rule will allow you, or me, or that guy over there to go back to not paying attention.


>in 15 years, the U.S. becomes Germany, pre-WW2

>the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”.

Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t change anything, kicking so many reactionaries off of Twitter that they went off to make Gab didn’t help, and destroying Parler and kicking Trump off social media isn’t going to help.

How is silencing a group that feels oppressed going to help anything?

This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.


People need to stop hiding behind the first amendment and "but censorship" as a way of allowing democracy-threatening activity. Speech has ALWAYS had limitations. You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre. You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation. You cannot reveal classified information. You cannot imitate a police officer. Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial? Particularly when these are private corporations making the decisions, who are not duty-bound to enable free spech in the first place?


>democracy-threatening activity.

Yes, like handing the keys to public discourse over to a private corporation and then defending their right to censor it as they please.

>You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre.

Actually, you can. This is protected by Brandenberg as I understand it.

>You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation.

Sure, thats defamation. I agree that should be illegal.

>You cannot reveal classified information.

You can also sign an NDA!

>Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial?

Because without the freedom to "incite violent terrorism" we are essentially captive to the whims of the government.

To quote Thomas Jefferson. "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."[1]

The whole letter I take this quote from is worth a read.

[1]https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tre...

edit: formatting


>>You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre.

>Actually, you can. This is protected by Brandenberg as I understand it.

Brandenberg says that the government can't restrict inflammatory speech unless it's "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". The case specifies three requirements for punishing speech: 'intent', 'immenent lawless action', and 'likely to incite'. Shouting 'fire' is discussed in the opinion as potentially prosecutable:

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/

> The line between what is permissible and not subject to control and what may be made impermissible and subject to regulation is the line between ideas and overt acts.

> The example usually given by those who would punish speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theatre.

> This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 357 U. S. 536-537 (DOUGLAS, J., concurring). They are indeed inseparable, and a prosecution can be launched for the overt acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution. Certainly there is no constitutional line between advocacy of abstract ideas, as in Yates, and advocacy of political action, as in Scales. The quality of advocacy turns on the depth of the conviction, and government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.

P.S. the theater company can ban you for being a nuisance even if it's not illegal.


Riversflow, the reference to the replenishment of the "tree of liberty" is unhelpful. It's cliche and generates far more heat than light.

The real reason it can be dangerous to ban speech connected with "terrorism" is the quoted term is so poorly defined as to potentially be almost anything abrasive and unpopular. I haven't seen any cohesive explanation of how the occupation of the Capitol January 6 was terroristic in nature, and yet the event broadly is being criticized as such, exemplifying why high-stakes laws against ill-defined things could have a chilling effect far broader than just those things we all agree should not occur. Is the line when protesters are unlawfully in a location? Like the middle of a street? When they advocate for things that are not currently lawful, e.g., changes in law? When they are agitated, animated and frighten their neighbors?


> You cannot yell “fire” in a movie theatre.

That’s the standard illustration of the Schenk (which suppressed what is widely now recognized as core political speech) “clear and present danger” test, which probably comes to a different result under the Brandenberg “incites imminent lawless action” test which replaced it


They're not 'hiding behind it'. They believe that suppressing speech makes extremism worse in the long run.

Speech has limitations, but banning an entire social media network at the decision of tech oligarchs instead of the actual legal limits on speech is a precedent many see as escalation of the conflict. I do. This is a giant mistake that will breed resentment and do nothing but confirm to Trumpists that there is, in fact, a conspiracy against them.


Why must we provide them a platform to spew their hate of anyone who is not a white conservative?

If they want such a platform, they can go build their own parallel economy and technology infrastructure.

Good luck to them.


They're going to do exactly that and you're not going to like it.


> spew their hate of anyone who is not a white conservative?

This is extremely biased and ignorant. For one, there are plenty of non-white non-conservatives on the platform. Your statement here reveals much about your biases.

You are basically removing platform of communication is ok for people that hold opinions other than the mainstream politically-correct ones. This is exactly the sort of things authoritarian government such as China do.


The irony that the conservative movement wants less regulation and government yet cries foul when the vendors they use aren't regulated


>Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial?

When it takes pages to describe why something is inciting violence, and the result is huge numbers of people arguing it both was and wasn't inciting violence - including very, very intelligent people on both sides - then maybe it's not as cut and dry as you make it out to be. Or is everyone who disagrees with you either disingenuous or stupid?


But the thing is, have you actually read the stuff on Parker this is about? These people are actively inciting violence. Their leaders are encouraging violent assaults on democratic institutions. They really aren’t that different from what happened in Germany in the late 20s and 30s. Whether they also come to resemble Germany in the late 30s is irrelevant.


a lot of people on HN are at peace with any violent disruptions that may ocurr. you cannot assume we all want the same thing.


>These people are actively inciting violence.

Err, so what?, the supreme court has a pretty strict definition per Brandenburg. And I agree with the court's opinion there,

> "These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone advocating for it, especially from behind a keyboard, actually expected storming the capital to happen, and it seems like it only happened as a result of law enforcement essentially giving it it's blessing. As pointed out by your sibling comment, calling a group of people who mostly milled around the capital "insurrectionists" is just fallacious, and tells you how loaded this whole thing is. I'm extremely concerned that this spectacle is going to be used to curtail our liberties the same way 9/11 was used to pass the Patriot act.

I feel like I'm in crazy town when I see so much being done to stop "inciting violence". Isn't it ultimately the responsibility of the public to not act on such incitements? When a group becomes sufficiently disenfranchised the most radical members transition from trying to make peaceful change to calling for revolution. If the disenfranchisement continues unabated more and more members of the group will be convinced of the need for action. This is fundamentally why the U.S. exists, and I think it is the right of the oppressed group to self-advocate and self-determine.

So in that sense I don't think that anyone can honestly say that calls for violence are never appropriate. Any revolution, even a velvet one, is going to have some fringe of people calling for violence or it will never come about. Should western media have shut down the Arab spring for the same reason? What about #freepalestine? There were plenty of calls for violence against Trump, and nobody seemed too concerned. Should Kathy Griffin have been blackballed?

If we define this group of people as predominantly non-college educated, non-hispanic white males, then we are talking about a group whose deaths of despair (suicide and drug overdose) rate has tripled in the last twenty years, a trend that has likely intensified significantly during the lockdown [1]. Now I could be wrong, but I don't think they are killing themselves because they aren't allowed to be racist, rather I think it's because non-college educated rural americans[2] are being and have been marginalized.[3]

Perhaps we should try and lift this group up instead of grinding them down and using them as a scape goat for problems primarily related to wealth inequality.

[1]https://www.sciencenews.org/article/deaths-of-despair-depres... [2]https://www.americancommunities.org/chapter/american-communi... [3]https://www.the74million.org/article/solving-the-rural-educa...

e: formatting


> When a group becomes sufficiently disenfranchised the most radical members transition from trying to make peaceful change to calling for revolution.

I'd agree that there is a sizeable proportion of the population that feels left behind. However, a large portion of the people present on Jan 6 were not the disenfranchised. There were a worrying number of CEOs, Active Military, Doctors, and Lawyers present.

> Perhaps we should try and lift this group up instead of grinding them down and using them as a scape goat for problems primarily related to wealth inequality.

This is overwhelmingly what people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are trying to do. The rhetoric of both is based around trying to help working people by introducing social safety nets with the express purpose of giving people like them some room to breath financially. Have you seen how those policies have been received? Instead they elected an authoritarian millionaire who stoked division and xenophobia while cutting taxes for everyone but them.

They've been convinced that the reason they're struggling is the fault of illegal immigrants, the Chinese, feminism, and leftists. Propaganda that has carried over from the Cold War leads them to reject any policy that might actually help them as "communism". As a block they vote overwhelmingly for policies that only serve to enrich their bosses and the people producing the propaganda. They'll rant for hours about how awful Obamacare was going to be, but then happily tell you about how much they love the "ACA" that they're currently making use of.

We've reached a point where they're behaving more like a spouse who won't leave their abusive husband. The best thing is remove the source of that abuse for long enough that they might come to some degree of sense.


Here's the thing. If you've paid attention for more than fifteen minutes to feminists complaining about mistreatment, you'd know that one of the oldest tricks in the deflection playbook is to play the "agreeableness" card, asking people to calm down and be reasonable. At its best, it's a delaying tactic, playing for time while you continue to enjoy the fruits of inequality. I don't like it when it happens to women. I'm sure as hell not going to tolerate it being turned toward me.

When they say "literal nazis", they mean literal nazis, not figurative nazis.

I don't think the entire GOP it turning into Nazis. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say they believed it. However, I don't think every German, or even most Germans, in WWII were Nazis either. That didn't stop the Nazis from being in charge. It barely slowed them down.

In order to get his 49% of the votes, #45 had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, courting every non-liberal element of society. The GOP leadership has publicly recognized these groups and groups like them as members of Team GOP. They seated them at a table as if they deserve to be peers with the folks you claim to represent.

Let me ask you a serious question. Was it worth it to win that way? Really? What entitles anyone who says 'yes' or 'maybe' to be painted with a separate brush from the people who delivered the victory at "any cost"?

If getting you, or all of us really, looking in the mirror is going to be predicated on treating you with the respect you plan to earn once they've treated you as if you've earned it, then buddy, you're going to be disrespected for an awful long time. Read the warnings, take some umbrage. I certainly am.


So what do we do instead? Just continue down this path until 75% of Americans "feel oppressed" and that "BLM and Antifa and Democrats are Marxists and enemies of the people"? Yeah? 'cause that's not working out.

Or are you kind of thinking it is working out and it's your desired outcome?

The Right is excellent at projecting and playing "the victim" so I wouldn't be surprised.


>This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.

I would never refer to a conservative who recognizes the legitimate results of our free and fair elections as a Nazi! Now the question is, why in the flying MOTHERFUCK do I need that qualifier?


I am a conservative who doesn't think it was stolen. But I have to point out the double standard. For ~3 years democrats claimed trump only won 2016 because Putin helped him. And they claimed for months that Stacy Ambrams was the actual winner of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?


> Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?

Now? You do realize that the current president is the ringleader of birtherism, right?


>You do realize that the current president is the ringleader of birtherism, right?

Hillary Clinton, in her 2008 presidential campaign brought the fringe conspiracy theory of 'birtherism' into the mainstream as a rhetorical weapon to discredit her rival, Barack Obama, at least in the eyes of enough potential voters to do some harm. Donald Trump did bring the matter up in his campaign, but quickly repudiated it and never mentioned it again. It does not look like a sustainable assertion that Trump is, or ever was the 'ringleader' of 'birtherism.'


>For ~3 years democrats claimed trump only won 2016 because Putin helped him.

Of which there was concrete proof of election meddling by Russia. Obviously we can't litigate what-ifs, but I'm not sure how the two can be separated.

>Stacey Abrams was the actual winner of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.

The guy she was running against was the secretary of state at the time and passed several laws that were very clearly meant to suppress voter turnout before an election that he was standing in.

>Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?

Yes, and for inciting violence and beating a police officer to death with a flag of the steps of the Capitol while saying the pledge of allegiance. Either work to make sure it never happens again or be inextricably linked to it.


Case and point.


Dems bitch and moan about every election they lose. But they don't try to assassinate or ransom elected officials.


And it's only fringe people on the right that tried that. All mainstream right leaning people disavowed it.


[flagged]


This comment highlights how ridiculously politicized HN has become. Just an hour ago this post was downvoted, and somehow has been upvoted despite not adding anything to the discussion

>You know what's even more toxic? Literal Nazis and fascists, the ranks of which have been, if not growing, then clearly emboldened.

What does the word literal even mean at this point? What is fascism to you? What is Nazism to you?

>This group "feels oppressed" because they are not able to exert their will to oppress others.

How is this sentence even appearing on a thread about an app getting removed because they refused to force more stringent moderation onto their users?


There actually were literal Nazis there though...

> An image of Packer inside the Capitol, whose sweatshirt bore the name of the Nazi concentration camp where about 1.1 million people were killed during World War II, has evoked shock and disbelief on social media. The bottom of his shirt stated, "Work brings freedom," which is the rough translation of the phrase "Arbeit macht frei" that was on the concentration camp's gates.[1]

Apparently the back read "Staff"[2]. While maybe not "literal" Nazis themselves, the people there seem perfectly happy to associate with and receive the support of literal Nazis.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/10/politics/man-camp-auschwi...

[2] https://twitter.com/MrTAchilles/status/1346996921282531328


Not to mention, in recent years there's been a rise in adoption of Nazi symbology: 88, Nazi salute, swastikas obviously, plus co-opting of Norse runes and symbols they perceive as associated with the Aryan race.

But it's not just Nazis that are the problem. They're clearly in the minority. There's growing interest in garden variety fascism. Some of the hallmarks of that are nationalism, militarism, submission to authority, anti-intellectualism, fomenting fear of "the other" and outsiders. Umberto Eco has a list [1] that encapsulates and explains these. And, I'm sorry, but a lot of these describe the trajectory of the current Republican Party, especially under Trump's rule. (note: I think the GOP has largely abandoned what we would call "conservatism". Even though many of those left in the party might self-identify as conservative, they have veered into fascist ideology, they just won't admit it)

[1] https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list...


What are we supposed to make of people carrying the Confederate flag, as well? The Confederate States of America fought a civil war to preserve the enslavement of Black people (as specifically mentioned in most of the state constitutions of the CSA states)- what message are they trying to send by bringing that flag to the capitol building?


Downvoted Really!? What the fuck for??

Parler's app was the number one download on the app store & play store after Trump was kicked off Twitter.

Then apple and google decided that Parler was not going to be a platform Trump could use, so they kicked the app off.

Then amazon decided that Parler had no place on their computing resources.

Those 2 tweets were interpreted as they were, to suit the political leanings of those tech companies and their political allies. And a legitimate competitor was destroyed into the bargain. This is not reasonable and it is antithetical to the freedoms on which your great nation was founded.

If you, dear HN reader, can't see the threat to your freedom in this then you are blind.

The US democracy may be under stress, so to speak, but it does seem to be working. The democrats will have their man in the white house. Trump will leave.

Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??


|| If you, dear HN reader, can't see the threat to your freedom in this then you are blind.

Forcing a private corporation to provide a platform for someone else is also a form of tyrrany.

|| Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??

They were going to kill our representatives in government. That was their intent, and it's a bit odd that you're making excuses for them.


> Forcing a private corporation to provide a platform for someone else is also a form of tyrrany.

I appreciate that. I am not sure where I stand on this anymore. I agree that they are private corporations with rights. But they are also unprecedented in history in terms of scale, wealth and power. And they just silenced a president and shutdown a competitor. Those are some implications that need to be considered carefully.


> And they just silenced a president

The President is perfectly capable of getting a message out without the use of twitter. There's even a room in his house specifically for giving press briefings. To pretend that this is "silencing" him is ridiculous.

> But they are also unprecedented in history in terms of scale, wealth and power. And they just silenced a president and shutdown a competitor. Those are some implications that need to be considered carefully.

Then break them up, they absolutely deserve to be, I just don't think this particular situation is an example of why they should be broken up.

I would like to point out that Parler claimed to be using AWS as a regular hosting provider, so this isn't an area where the market is anywhere near as consolidated, there are thousands of other hosting providers out there who probably don't want to deal with them either.


> The President is perfectly capable of getting a message out without the use of twitter. There's even a room in his house specifically for giving press briefings. To pretend that this is "silencing" him is ridiculous.

Debating, especially on the internet, requires a little generosity when interpreting your opponent's words. Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit. I know that the President wasn't literally silenced. Jeff Bezos didn't send goons to the whitehouse to gag and bag him.

We both know that firing off a tweet to millions instantly is a lot easier than calling a press conference.


> They were going to kill our representatives in government. That was their intent, and it's a bit odd that you're making excuses for them.

Maybe so. But that's still not a coup. It's a heinous, despicable act, but not a coup.


It was an attempted coup. Words have meanings.


Here's a thing every activist knows, from the most benign to the most toxic (by anyone's estimation):

If you wait for the government to provide you every good thing in life, it'll never come.

Governments like to look around at what people are already doing in several locales or regions and either stop them or give it to everybody. The courts get involved and decide whether that's allowed. If the Federal government doesn't like what the courts say, they can use more strongly worded laws so the courts have to agree. We make the last bit difficult so that we don't do it frivolously. It cuts down on overreach, but it also means bad actors tend to get to play a bit longer at the expense of everybody else.

If individuals or corporations are the last word in reasonable political discourse, we will have failed. Not so spectacularly as if we never do anything until Congress says so, but failed nonetheless.

To be clear, I'm not saying this should be the end of this. But someone has to get the wheels of government rolling, and this is fairly typical, if not ideal.


>Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??

This reminds me of far-leftists refusing to admit that Islamist terrorism should be counted as terrorism, because, after all, what was killing a few people in an LGBT nightclub going to accomplish for ISIS?


My problem is with the description of that action as a "coup". I'm not defending those people. I'm not informed well enough to do that. But a coup? I don't think so.

Coups generally rely on military support, or some sort of established basis for taking and holding political power. This was not a coup. Or it was the shittest one ever.


If you consider that their aim was to overturn an election by force, then yes, it was a coup attempt. I think they were counting on the military and law enforcement rank-and-file (which overwhelmingly support Trump) to join them.


Clearly, vendors should be made to continue doing business with (some appropriately chosen set of?) clients, because that would be different than post-1933 intrawar Germany...how?


By 'result of doing nothing' I mean vendors turning a blind eye to their clients, instead of dumping them on the side of the road without even the courtesy of slowing the car down first.

I would have thought that was pretty clear from context.


>You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long

"People" is a general term, "offense" is a relative term. What you may consider an offense, I might consider a complement. Additionally, what you consider an offense today, you might not do so tomorrow. There is no such thing as a static set of provisions that can handle all cases of immorality across all of time and satisfy all people.

>The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance

The price of freedom is nothing, the price of consequence is eternal vigilance. The only reason you would need to be alerted if someone commits an offense you deem immoral, is so that they can be punished for the offense. You can't reverse an act that someone committed, but sure if you have constant oversight of their actions you can definitely punish them as you see fit. Law is synonymous with punishment, but it is punishment that applies universally to all parties, as opposed to the Terms of Service applied by modern corporations, which (by design) can be applied to whomever and can be ignored for whomever the corporation feels like. Hence why it's a slippery slope.


> The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.


No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.

There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.


I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..."

I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than Twitter in all ways; it was more like a news website. I have seen more provocative comments on other forums.

I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC. Part of this is due to the comments being easier to read on Twitter than Parler. I assume bad behavior on Parler was deep in the comments, but the website didn't make those easy to read.

I thought the Parler takedown seemed random. They were used as a scapegoat. If you were a normal user, you used it to hear a different viewpoint but you still lurked on Twitter some because there was no real discussion happening on Parler.


> I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC.

I am very curious for an example of an AOC tweet that you considered a violent statement.

I am thinking you must have a very different definition of "violent statement" than I do, and I'm curious to learn more about it by example. Because I read a lot of AOC, and have never seen anything I would remotely consider a violent statement. But you may consider things differently, what exactly "violence" means, let alone in a statement, is to some extent not entirely set in stone, I agree.

Can you provide an example (or three) of a violent statement from AOC you have personally witnessed, as you say?

She is a real person, it seems only fair to provide an example when making such an accusation.


I can't speak for OP, but #guillotines is a perennially popular hashtag among the Chapo-sphere on Twitter. And those Tweets, let alone the user, are almost never removed.


We might have a different definition of violence; I find it to be a spectrum with multiple levels.

I consider cancel culture a form of violence. There was a tweet from AOC suggesting making a list of all those who worked under Trump; I presume she wants to cancel them. This was dangerous since she was a Congresswoman. There was also a tweet where she voiced support for the riots this summer.

To be fair to AOC, she is not the worst I have seen.

Also, to be fair to Twitter, I bet there is a ton of right side violent speech I just personally haven't seen much of it.

I have personally witnessed violent speech on the postmodern side on Twitter because I'm more tuned into people calling for censorship. It's a topic I'm following.

I think the main reason I didn't see it on Parler was because the comment section is hard to read.


Can you provide the specific tweets so we know what you're talking about?

But yes, if you consider "making a list" to be violence, I guess we do have different understandings. I hope you apply this understanding in all directions, to your political compatriots too, telling them they are being violent (presumably in an undesirable way) when they do things like make lists? Or wait, you just presume that she was going to do something? Yeah, I"m curious to see the tweet. It sounds like a lot of presuming...

But cause if AOC isn't the worst you have seen... why did you use her as an example? Like, everyone is always using AOC as an example, when to me she's like one of the smartest and kindest politicians I know, from her utterances. Regardless of what you think of "cancel culture", she's not even a very good example of it, she's not the paragon of cancel culture, that's not really what she does at all. I think it's very unfair to AOC.

And yet, everyone wants to use her as an example. (Including by 'presuming' extra things she hasn't actually done!) Why? If you recognize she's not actually a great example of what bothers you, why did you mention her name as the only specific name example you mentioned?

This is one of the things AOC said which impressed me which I think is literally the opposite of "cancel culture": https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne8wjg/watch-aoc-give-a-dire...


It's easy to find the AOC list tweet our riot tweet if you google it; I'm currently taking a break from twitter.

AOC was the first that came to mind. Regarding her list, I believe at the time twitter users were citing a law saying what she was recommending was getting close to being illegal. They called it citizen intimidation, yet with more formal wording.

AOC wasn't the best example. The best examples were people saying it was good Rand Paul had been injured by his neighbor and the professor saying Mike Adams suicide was good.

I hadn't seen the AOC tweet you linked. It does appear uniting at first, yet when I looked closer I saw a familiar persuasion trick. It seems like she's applying the argument that anyone who has certain beliefs is a white supremist.

One of the most divisive things these days is labeling all people with conservative beliefs racist. It seems racist has become a catch-all term for anything postmodernists disagree with.

Calling someone racist means you don't listen to them and you can cause them to lose their reputation even if the claims don't have merit. The parody account Titania McGrath helps outline how the definition of racism has changed.


You made a very specific, very inflammatory claim.

>I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC.

Kindly provide the evidence or admit your claim was mistaken.


A clearer more accurate statement than the parent statement would be:

I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years. Postmodern leaders, such as AOC, have encouraged low levels of violence using the Twitter platform.

This definition of violence is meant to describe violence as a spectrum which includes the destruction of property and destruction of job prospects of conservative individuals.

As far as I know, AOC has NOT tweeted the worst levels of violence. I apologize for using AOC as the primary example. If I could edit the parent statement I would because she is NOT the best example. It is also possible there is a less inflammatory word to describe cancel culture and property destruction than violence; I don't want to mix two things up.

The AOC tweets I was referring are below:

- Encouraging riots.

AOC, protests/riots threat: https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1334184644707758080

"The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the “polite language” policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore."

- Encouraging cancel culture.

AOC list tweet, is now deleted but was widespread. https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/132481791745673625...

Other tweets I've seen:

Mike Adams bashing soon after suicide before burial: https://twitter.com/ProfeRandolph/status/1286440502271901707

Most Rand Paul violent tweets were deleted. Most were anonymous. This is where Kelly Paul states her memories of the tweets. https://twitter.com/KelleyAshbyPaul/status/13483463720434524...

Hang Mike Pence as recent example. Most of these were deleted. https://twitter.com/TeaPainUSA/status/1348828960679997440


>I consider cancel culture a form of violence

OK snowflake


For the benefit of others, let me explain.

It's about scale. A disagreement that should stay between a small group of people and often could be solved by mediation, a conversation, or community service ends up being a national event.

An individual who has a specialized skillset loses the ability to be economically viable. They might not be able to get another job in the field.

Often, they are being used as a scapegoat.

If you make it impossible for a person to get a job in his or her field because you disagree with what they say, that's a form of violence. If you're going to economically eliminate someone in a scaled way, make sure it's worth it; it should be a last resort. This is really about scale.


I'd appreciate it if you could avoid the term "leftist" in future - this may be a cultural thing, but here in the UK, it's almost always used as a derogatory slur. I get the impression that's also true in NA, but forgive me if that isn't the case.

Can you provide an example of a violent statement posted on Twitter by AOC?


Not to mention that "leftist" is necessarily relative to some other position. In the UK (not to mention continental Europe!), "left" means something rather different than in the US...


I won't use leftist again. My anger at censorship is coming out. The proper academic term is postmodernist; at least that's what the Cynical Theories book by Primose mentioned.

I told my husband I would stop looking at Twitter since it upsets me so I'm handcuffed to find specific proof there. But, I was primarily referring to the list tweet where AOC mentioned gathering republicans who worked for Trump. There have been other similar sentiments expressed by her to punish people over time; she has an activist side which can get aggressive for a Congresswoman.

To be fair AOC isn't the worse I've seen as far as Twitter threats. The worst I've seen is the guy who acted like the controversial professional Mike Adams's suicide was good who is currently a North Carolina professor. Also, there were tweets against Rand Paul which were violent after he got attacked by a neighbor. There have also been tweets for years mostly by random accounts threatening Trump; Gab has organized all the data.


I appreciate the reply. Here in the UK I look on with a mixture of sorrow and fear. Events happening across the pond right now are some of the scariest I've witnessed in my life, but I'm acutely aware of similar issues here if not, mercifully, anything like the same kind of tension. I just want deescalation. I want calm heads and kind hearts to prevail. We need to listen to ourselves less and each other more. Stay safe, America — every last one of you.


Do you have examples of "violent statements on Twitter" by e.g. AOC? Not trying to doubt you at all, just broadening perspectives.


They don't exist. Full stop.

Before I started reading AOC's tweets, the right's view of her had seeped into my brain. I didn't know why, but I had a slightly negative view of her.

Once I actually read her views expressed in her tweets I was shocked how reasonable she was. In 100's of tweets I've never seen her say anything that I thought was even remotely radical.


https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078

Now change Trump for Biden and you tell me about it


Did you link to a different tweet than you intended? You appear to be arguing that it’s “violence” for a public figure not to be able to disappear past public statements which they now regret. Her position that they should take responsibility for what they said is something most children learn pretty young.


"Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future"

Yes, show me where in those words you find violence. I see someone wanted to hold the enablers of DJT accountable.


> I see someone wanted to hold the enablers of DJT accountable.

So around 40% of the American population. The left loves to talk about the right-wingers doing dog-whistles, this is one from the left. Your commentary also come across as naive or disingenuous when in those days AOC just one of several left-wing politicians and personalities calling for the creation of undesirable lists (again that 40%) to ,when the time comes, get them to pay for enabling Trump. All these within the highly violent BLM protests context.


I asked for evidence. What was provided was insanely weak.

Again, put up some evidence that is equal to the charge: show us violent rhetoric.


" I believe injustice is a threat to the safety of all people. Because once you have a group that is marginalized and marginalized and marginalized … once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot." AOC,2020

"Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts." https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080

Nancy Pelosi 2017

"When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe."

Robert Reich,2020

https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1317614803704115200

BTW show me a tweet from Trump calling for violence, seeing how stringent are your standards and how adamant you are that only the right calls for violence you must have examples a plenty.

But I am wasting my time here.You know it and I know it. You have your mind made up.


1. Explanation of why people riot. No call for violence.

2. Russia interfered with our election. Not even close to a call for violence.

3. Not even close to a call for violence.

Trump calls for violence? Easy:

https://www.vox.com/21506029/trump-violence-tweets-racist-ha...

That was just the first google hit.


A half-assed google search wont do. Give me a tweet. These are dark times when I find myself defending Donald Trump against the sycophants of powerful tech barons,consciously willingly to abandon basic democratic ideas like free speech, surrendering them to private entities whose interests are totally misaligned with the public, especially the poor. All of this, "to own the right". The US is fucked beyond repair.


To extend on that... the entire premise of parler was that everyone was censoring them too much(for similar calls for violence) so they needed a platform that was immune from that. well when your entire premise is flawed from the start it's not a stretch to see that they would be targeted from that like stormfront.


That's a stretch.

Millions feel censored and diminished.

You don't get to the level parler got purely because the few extreme users felt censored.

You saw a minority of users taking free speech too far.

This wasn't Amazon, Google's or Twitter's place to act. This was a job for the police and the FBI and really the fact they intervened at all is just so fucking American.

World police that nobody bloody wants.


Sounds like reasonable open internet regulation, like the type that "The Left" has been fighting to get for decades, would have really been something useful for Republicans to not oppose simply because of its popularity among the left.

Instead, we are left with mega corporations being the arbiters of their own platforms, Just like those supporting deregulation wanted.


the stuff they were posting on parler was probably illegal[0][1] and parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric. (though they did moderate anything that didn't align with their groupthink)

0: https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/rioting-and-in...

1: https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/sedition.html


i know the dead comment below won't see this and likely doesn't care but for posterity they were absent in their moderation for many weeks and were knowledgeable of it from the get go: https://twitter.com/cambrian_era/status/1349371372384841730


No, Parler was doing plenty of moderation. They actively suppressed opposing left-wing view points. It was a pure far-right agitation machine.


> It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.

The financial backers of Facebook supported the company a lot through its enabling of the Rohingya genocide. But, then again, the Rohingya are not white, nor Christian, and they don't live in a country that can be a potential source of expats (like the UK or Australia, nice, good countries), only of immigrants.


There are lots of horrible things on Parler from what I’ve seen (I don’t have an account, I’ve just seen screen shots). The most egregious example was the post from Trump attorney Lin Wood calling for Pence to be executed by firing squad. It was up for days, and only taken down when this all blew up.


For reference, this was on Twitter & Parler. Twitter didn't take him down for at least a week.

Similarly, I've seen people regularly call for violence on all sides and not be removed from Twitter.

The reality is that the moderators are overwhelmed, etc.


Twitter, though, at least has moderators, and makes an effort to remove threatening content from its service. The speed and efficacy of Twitter's abuse team is a topic for debate, but they have (and enforce) policy.

Parler famously had no such policy, that's why it was so attractive to the insurrectionists. The CEO, even after January 6th, went on record that he didn't feel it was Parler's responsibility to moderate user-generated content at all. Whatever last-minute olive branch they tried extending to AWS regarding a potential future volunteer moderator system obviously wasn't sufficient for Amazon.


Twitter and Facebook took how many years and millions of dollars to scale up a moderation strategy? I guarantee they weren't worrying about moderation at Parler's scale.


Twitter didn't take him down for a week, but they took that post down faster (I think). I regularly report twitter posts that are similar to that - violence mostly. It often takes two or three days, but they do get them taken down.


Too busy to moderate Trump's inner circle.



and i think a key point about this particular example is that Lin Wood is a very visible public figure. This wasn't a single crazy comment buried in a long thread that a moderator could have missed. If there was any good-faith effort by Parler to moderate content, it would have caught the Lin Wood rant.


I find it hard to understand why that should not be allowed to be said. I know it's in extremely bad taste, but still...


You're wondering why making threats of violence against a person or trying to rally a credible threat against them isn't permitted under the first?


It does neither incite or produce imminent lawless action, nor likely to incite or produce such action.

Twitter contains worse.


I would have to see the exact text, but the way it was mentioned up in this thread it didn't sound like either of those.




Thanks for sharing that, I hadn't seen that post.

I can see how you would take it that way, but honestly people have been saying a lot worse on the internet for a long time now.

I believe he's saying that we should have military tribunals to try and execute traitors, but of course those words were implied, not explicitly said.

I agree it's inflammatory for sure, but after all the crap I've seen on the internet, this is hardly a post to justify removing the entire platform this was posted on.


And after the tribunals are setup and operational and people are getting executed - would it be enough then? Or not quite yet still? What's your "this is enough, guys" point? Do you have one?

We got mighty close this time, didn't we? Do we need to get "closer"? Should Nancy Pelosi have had to be captured by some "patriot" with zip-ties and an AR-15?


No, you misunderstand. I don't want a mob to hold a tribunal. I want a real military tribunal that follows all procedures, exposes their crimes and then punishes them.

The masses long for justice while the elite and elite-wannabes try to convince themselves that the system isn't completely broken.


> I want a real military tribunal that follows all procedures, exposes their crimes and then punishes them.

Exposes which crimes exactly? Don't tribunals normally take place after you've got a good idea of what the crimes are?

> The masses long for justice while the elite and elite-wannabes try to convince themselves that the system isn't completely broken.

The multi-millionaire son of a multi-millionaire, truly the only person that knows the hardships put upon everyday americans. It's such a shame our hero was hoodwinked by all those nasty corrupt people who just happened to run his campaign, legal team and otherwise generally surround him...


You have opinions. I have opinions. It's easy to jump to conclusions.

We should have trials to get to the truth instead of smearing people for having money and being successful. If we assume the worst about people because they were born into a wealthy family where does that leave us?

You don't believe the swamp could be that corrupt. I do. Is it ok for me to hold that opinion? Is it ok for me to speak it, or will I be silenced for wrong think?


> We should have trials to get to the truth

You're still being cryptic about this. I'll ask you again what the basis of these trials should be? who and what should we be investigating?

I'm aware of a few trials that have already happened, my favourites:

Paul Manafort, former campaign chairman of the Trump campaign sentenced to 7.5 years in prison[1]. Collusion with suspected Russian operatives, lying about that collusion. Sentenced separately in Virginia for ~4 years for bank fraud, tax fraud, and hiding foreign accounts[2].

Michael Cohen, former personal attorney to Donald Trump sentenced to 3 years in prison. "charges involving campaign finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress"[3].

A fun list of the rest of the swamp dwellers that have been charged or convicted[4].

> If we assume the worst about people because they were born into a wealthy family where does that leave us?

We aren't assuming the worst about people born into a wealthy family. We're asserting that they cannot relate to those born into a lower or middle class family.

> You don't believe the swamp could be that corrupt. I do. Is it ok for me to hold that opinion? Is it ok for me to speak it, or will I be silenced for wrong think?

You're intentionally ignoring the fact that the man who told you there was a swamp is entirely surrounded by people found guilty of some form of fraud or corruption...

[1] https://www.axios.com/paul-manafort-sentenced-years-prison-r...

[2] https://www.axios.com/paul-manafort-sentenced-prison-mueller...

[3] https://www.axios.com/michael-cohen-prison-sentence-mueller-...

[4] https://www.yourtango.com/2020336767/trump-associates-have-b...


> We're asserting that they cannot relate to those born into a lower or middle class family.

That's a big leap to make. I'm sure we have much different narratives we find to be true, but Trump is basically filling stadiums wherever he goes. Maybe he relates to the lower and middle classes better than you are giving him credit for.

> You're intentionally ignoring the fact that the man who told you there was a swamp

To be fair, you have no idea how I came to believe there is a swamp. I thought that long before Trump became president for a variety of reasons.

I'm not going to get into the details of what I believe. There's just too much to cover. I'm not claiming that I could persuade you that I am right. We are on the sidelines in all this. We are in the middle of an information war, and probably have been our entire lives.


Ah, so it's a load of bullshit. As I imagined.


No, it's a violent call to action in front of an angry mob willing to commit violence.


Well, it's illegal in the US for one: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/871

There's also the fact that an angry mob overran the US Capitol while chanting "Hang Mike Pence" as a direct result of Lin and Trump's posts/comments


I hope no one ever posts a horrible thing like calling for the death of a politician on twitter.


> From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

If you do a sufficiently poor job, you might as well not even be trying at all. Especially if you court the content as a growth strategy.

Everyone's free to manage their risks however they please, but I personally have no less confidence in AWS than I had before this event. I have updated my understanding of their decision heuristic as it applies to kicking people off their service. But the probability of me or any company I'd manage running afoul of it is far less than the chance of getting struck by lightning.


> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ...

Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.


Are we just assuming this userbase doesn't also have twitter, facebook, signal, etc accounts? I recall a lot of live streaming and tweets during the riots.


Exactly. I already had that factored into my prior for whether my business was going to get cancelled by Amazon. I’d actually expect to fade a court for knowingly facilitating the shit on Parler.


And if my hypothetical platform is decentralized to the extent that I can’t top-down censor content, what then?


Then you probably shouldn't host it in AWS, because it'll risk violating other AUP terms.

The Acceptable Use Policy is here: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/

If your users use your service for illegal or fraudulent activities, you have no way of stopping them, and your service is on AWS, then you risk being shut-down.

That hasn't changed today. That was true as of September 16th, 2016 (and probably before then as well)


That is simply a different question


I think things are pretty clear cut, if you want to start a service to obviously harbor fascist user-driven content, then yes, prepare to be cut off from the mainstream vendors. DailyStormer and Parler are explicitly those types of services.

It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.


> It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.

This is definitely a straw-man, but at the same time, if your website hosts user-supplied content and you don't have a rock-solid strategy for moderating it, then yeah you probably should be worried. (Though the spammers will probably take down your site long before AWS...)


I disagree, you don't need a "rock-solid strategy for moderating" "user-supplied content", you just need a user base that is by and large not inciting violence, particularly against government officials.

If I run some hobbyist forum where say 1 in 1000 users is posting hate speech or calling for violence, as long as I have less-than-rock-solid moderation that can clean up some of their posts and ban the worst offenders based on user reports, I wouldn't be too worried. It's also in my interest to keep the community healthy.

Now, if 20% or 50% of my users are posting hate speech and calling for violence, yeah I would be worried, but I would be less worried about moderation, and more worried about why my hobby attracts extremists. Might call for some self reflection.


It sounds like you have done your risk analysis and settled on an balance of risk and moderation effort that is acceptable to you. That sounds fair to me.

> Now, if 20% or 50% of my users are posting hate speech and calling for violence, yeah I would be worried, but I would be less worried about moderation, and more worried about why my hobby attracts extremists. Might call for some self reflection.

LOL! I think this is actually the right take! Definitely also applies to your social network...


Just a thought....

Maybe it doesn't attract extremists. Maybe extremists just happened to randomly pick your site as the latest site to use for communication.

Just theorizing here, but assume that instead of hosting their own content, web sites with comments are hijacked to host extremists propaganda/plans/violent event, with a pointer to the next web site to use (not IF) but when the current one gets shut down.

The only way to avoid this is to moderate the comments before they are allowed to be displayed. And I'm betting there are a thousand+ web sites that are run by amateurs where this is the last thing on their minds.

Hopefully the fact that scaling and searching would be impossible makes this a non-issue.


Sure but AWS isn’t run by robots (yet!). It’s run by people who understand context and intent. I also very seriously doubt that Parler was turned off without any notice. If a company was getting abused like that, I think AWS would try to help them.


winning argument right here


No, the lesson of Parler is not that you need to have

> ... a rock-solid strategy for moderating ...

The lesson is you need to have a rock-solid `policy` that content which advocates violence is impermissible.


Unfortunately I cannot reference Parlor's actual Community Guidelines (https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf) since the site is down for some reason. :)

However, based on what is described here (https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-abo...) `there are policies against “fighting words” and “threats of harm”. This includes “a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group”.`

Based on recent examples of Parlor posts it seems like the Parlor moderators were not adequately enforcing this policy.


Pretty sure Parlor had no official moderators.

Just the community self-moderating themselves.


"a rock-solid strategy for moderating it"

You mean, like Facebook and Twitter?


Twitter literally allows dictators to use their service so your point is moot. There’s a massive double standard being applied. Additionally, the term fascist is used for essentially anything people dislike anymore so forgive if your subjective take or big tech’s take on fascism doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/twitter-trump-dictators...


The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down...

I fail to see how this is a movement of the bar.

Based on these two examples, the bar seems to be that a site gets canceled if a site is used to promote violence, there is a riot, violence happens, and people return to the site to celebrate and promote future violence. That was the bar in both 2017 and 2021. Doesn't seem to have moved.

Given the fact that the attack on the Capitol was a direct attack on the US government, if anything the bar has been RAISED.


Parlor did not have a real, honest, effort at moderation.

It was done poorly, and seems to have been just a fig leaf to say they were doing it. Objectively it was not working. Way way way worse than anything on FB or Twitter.


It seems likely that this is true. But couldn't you get to the same end-result by having good intentions but a bad moderation system? (e.g. I want to keep Nazi content off my service so I subject all posts to a review by 5 other users. That might work until you get a bunch of Nazis that suddenly sign up up-vote each other's content).

Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.


To clarify, I believe that if you don't think you can adequately moderate your service, then you should absolutely not be running it. If your venders do not think you are doing a good enough job moderating your service, then they should not be forced to do business with you.

All I am trying to say is that it is important to realize that how you moderate your service may very well be judged by your venders and you could have a bad time if they find it lacking....


By that standard Twitter should be in a lot of trouble as well. And probably Facebook too.


> Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.

If you're planning on starting a service built around user generated content, you should have an answer for how you plan on moderating content.

If you don't have a plan for how to address illegal uses of your service (fraud, child pornography, etc), then you run the risk of being shut down. This isn't even a question of "is it or isn't it incitement".

If you want to run on a hosting platform that exists as a business unit anywhere in the United States, if you don't have a plan for moderating at least the most harmful illegal content, you are at risk of being shut down. FOSTA and SESTA make clear that the the service providers and hosting platforms bear some legal liability for this content, and they will shut you down if you don't moderate your platform.


But, AIUI, this content has been "slipping through" their moderation for a long time (and getting worse) and they did nothing.

So, infective moderation combined with apparent indifference.


Right I am not disagreeing with this at all. I am just trying to say that "infective moderation combined with apparent indifference" seems less extreme than DailyStormer-style intentional promotion of violent content.

There is still a long ways to go from "infective moderation combined with apparent indifference" to "effective moderation" or even to "infective moderation that we are attempting to fix". But somewhere between "apparent indifference" and "attempting to fix" is a nasty grey area that you don't want to be caught in.


You should be able to identify that a nazi takeover is happening and change your moderation systems accordingly. Any product person who is claiming to own the product should have eagle eyes on how their product is working or not working.


I would bet that any legal standard would involve phrases like "good faith attempt" and "standard of practice". (If you find a circle of Nazis up-voting each other, you'll have to think up a new moderation scheme.)

FaceBook and Twitter are decent examples---their moderation systems are pretty hit-or-miss, assuming good faith.


> The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. They also share that same objective as their founding motivation.

Just different branding.


As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'realistic' as I like to be, saying "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.


> "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.

Just moderate the platform to remove content that is an incitement to violence or the commission of violent crime. That's a pretty low bar to meet.


So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform, 24/7, 365.2425 days a year, both in and out of context.


> So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform

No. Not at all.

We're software engineers, right? Make the machines do the heavy lifting.

Create a simple keyword based alerting mechanism for known inflammatory language in the languages that you support. There are resources to help you make this easier in multiple languages, i.e. https://hatespeechdata.com/

Add a moderation system for your users to flag abusive content.

Until you grow to a huge size, or unless your platform is courting violence promoting content, there should be a relatively small amount of content you need to manually review and remove.


twitter did this, IIRC they needed to turn it off as it was flagging almost all republicans


I seriously doubt that Twitter has no system that internally flags potentially abusive or violent tweets using machine automated classifiers. This stuff is table stakes nowadays for any major service that accepts user generated data.


Funnily enough I see remarkably few people using the comments on my Strava feed to organize an insurrection.


I'm not convinced Parler is meaningfully different from the DailyStormer in this regard. In fact, I would say DailyStormer is plausibly less capable of promoting violence and terrorism than Parler is, and this shows in current events. In terms of effectiveness and threat level, Parler is clearly greater.


> Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

Parler got canceled for something a lot worse than the Daily Stormer.


Doesn't sound like the bar is moving to me from your examples. Not moderating content promoting violence is a decent bar.

> any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar.

Yes... They need to moderate out content that promotes violence. This is a thing that they should do.


Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer.

It was literally a neo-nazi site.

Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown?

Why would you even bring that site up tbh?

Lol so far the bar is don’t let people plan a violent insurrection on your app.


> Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer.

I was just trying to emphasize that I was using the term in the more loose colloquial sense and not trying to exactly describe the particular actions of the vendors.

> Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown?

Wow, seriously I am not sure how you could have managed to get this from my comment. Please do not put words into my mouth.

> Why would you even bring that site up tbh?

It is a broadly known example of a website that was dropped by pretty much all major online services (including even CloudFlare). What happened to Daily Stormer generated some interesting discussion around online service provides denying services (see the CloudFlare blogpost on why it terminated Daily Stormer: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/).


As the 'bar' goes 'lower' the reason for other vendors to refuse your money becomes less clear. It is quite clear the Parlor is not someone you want on the books.


Hopefully they keep it up and self sabotage themselves so we don’t even need to break them up.


A nit - I think your high/low bar metaphor was backwards. A high bar means that standard is more strict while a low bar means it is less strict.


Ha, you are right! Fixed.


What's the calculation you need to make?

Don't provide an unmoderated online platform for neo-nazis preparing for genocide.

I didn't finish my math major but this seems straightforward.


> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that there was even the slightest, faintest, remotest chance of the dude in the viking outfit overthrowing the US government?

It was a violent protest that got way out of hand, absolutely. There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though. It's like someone dropped a cigarette butt on the ground and people are leaping on the opportunity to call it attempted arson.


What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death?

No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.


You are deflecting from the armed militia attempting to breach the house and senate chambers while the lynch mob chants for blood.


> There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though.

That doesn't really matter, does it? Isn't it like criminal conspiracy where all that really matters is for at least two people to plan a crime? AFAIK it doesn't matter if the plan is bad, there just needs to be a plan.


The mob of people who stormed the Capitol building beat a police officer to death. If the mob had reached the rooms with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, I think they would have been assaulted, too, killing them by accident or deliberately. That would have triggered a Constitutional crisis which could have given Trump grounds to keep power.

Was this a well thought out plan? No. But would it have been enough to derail the process of formally choosing the next President? Quite possibly.


Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that Trump and his supporters were not trying to keep him in power when he had clearly lost the election?

That was their clear goal. It has been for months, and Trump himself has been saying as much in no uncertain terms. They were looking to intimidate, possible kidnap or kill, members of congress and the Vice President in order to prevent the results of the election from being confirmed.

It's easy to get political fatigue in the current climate, I understand the knee-jerk impulse to assume "hey, you're probably overreacting about this political issue". But some things really are a big deal. Like overturning an election.


AWS's letter to Parler explains quite well why they are taking them down and I don't see any rational argument against it

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1348136296976408576/p...


> but not everything is a slippery slope.

This is indeed why it is called the "slippery slope fallacy".

It's a fallacy because the implication of a "slippery slope" is that once the merits of this specific idea are evaluated, then all subsequent ideas following will be implemented immediately without a separate debate and discussion of the merits of those ideas.

Pursuant to the current issue: if you're not planning on running a "somewhat moderated" platform where you'll host content calling for violence against the current government representatives, resulting in an actual attempt at a coup...then you've nothing to worry about.


>attempt to... install an illegitimate government

I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it.

I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life that accompanies an uprising, with the explicit goal of installing a new government.

Is this claim misinformation? Should it be censored?


Failing to succeed at your coup doesn't mean that wasn't what you were attempting to do.

Being stupid about it has never been a criminal defense. "Attempted murder" is still a felony (and you know, the crowd actually murdered a capitol police officer).


They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government.

You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.


Didn't BLM install gallows outside Jeff bezos house or something like that? Were they trying to overthrow Amazon?



If so, that would be a crime and those people should have been arrested. So what? I love the conservative view that if any liberal anywhere did anything bad, then it’s a get out of jail card for them to also do that bad thing. No dude. A crime is a crime.


That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself.

Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts?

Did the owner/company make a call to violence?

Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different)

It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust.

No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship.

This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition.

This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.


It really isn't a straw man.

If clients or customers bring bad publicity to a company they can refuse them service. They can in fact refuse service for any reason that isn't discriminatory in many jurisdictions.

Censorship has nothing to do with this. Any person can host a website from home, pay for a dedicated line, build their own datacenter, find a colo, host on a decentralised network, etc.

Amazon is under no obligation to provide service to Parler. They are not censored by Amazon refusing them as customers.

It's also not relevant to antitrust, literally at all.

A far more dangerous precedent would be compelling companies to provide service to hate groups and terrorists.


I must of missed the section of the parler site that said it was a hate group or terrorist organisation..


Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming.

No company should be forced to lose money.


> It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave.

What is the source of that statement? I did not find anything confirming that.


> We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself

Why though? On some level in seems impossible to make a distinction "from the outside," and I'm not sure it should matter that a decision was made by a person (probably following an Excel spreadsheet) or software.


> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

I don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair?

What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced?

Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections are fair and enforce action?

I think the problem is either you are a neutral platform, or you hold too much power.


The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.

This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.

The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.

This isn't just another political issue. The most existential issue facing the state is the integrity of the Constitution.


> The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.

So if the Russian government and Russian courts decide their election was fair and just, should Amazon shut down any websites which counter that viewpoint?

Because that's the precedent we are presumably setting.

> The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.

Yep, same in Russia for questioning election. You get sent to gulag. Or in China - what do you mean you are talking about Taiwan being it's own independent country in a group chat?

> This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.

Most of the coordination actually happened on Facebook, not Parler. None of those arrested so far had a Parler account.


We're setting the precedent that supporting White Supremacist insurrection against the United States will get punished the same way each time.

Russia doesn't have democracy, and Amazon isn't a Russian company, so I hardly understand your analogy.

Why would you compare what Russia does to political prisoners with the military's discipline in the United States?

This may be news to you, but military service members are subject to an independent justice system with different protections, different laws, and different penalties.

You're arguing that US corporations should be restricted from taking action to suppress insurrection on the basis of having your head in the sand. The US should be in a state of emergency now, and it's obvious to me that it's solely because a white supremacist has replaced the civilian leadership of our government with those complicit in this act.

You're free to ignore what has happened, or believe in an alternate reality. Some of us would be guilty of violating our oaths were we to do the same.


well stated


Despite being headquartered in USA, aws is a global company and these questions about the future is common sense. Not everything is about American politics, people around the world are used to violence happening on your soil, it's just another news.


> the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair?

That one is easy: it was approximately 60 different courts of law that laughed the "evidence" of fraud out of the room


It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room.

To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story.

If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AWS and says shut them down, what do they do?

Now suddenly they're the arbitrators of what is true in the world.

I don't want to get too hypothetical here, because I think this time it was pretty black and white.


100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation.

Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech?

And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)


Except Amazon aren’t determining what is true for the world, they’re determining it for themselves based on their assessment of the evidence and control only their own actions? This is true of everyone. To impute a stupid decision-making algorithm to AWS and then point out that it’s stupid does not a great argument against AWS’ actual process make.


Except these companies are defining truth in the world.

You said individuals make their own assessment based on the “evidence” - the problem here is that these companies serve up the “evidence”, so if these companies decide to only show you the “correct” evidence then that’s where they begin to define “truth”.

For an example, see Google Maps and Crimea in Ukraine vs Russia.


They certainly have a lot of sway, there—“history is written by the victors”, etc—but that we are having this discussion in the first place seems proof positive that said sway doesn’t prevent people from holding informed, contrary opinions.


> who decides if the democratic election was fair?

The several states, of which all 50 had certified their votes well in advance of January 6th. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the votes being counted were even cast in public.


Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?

There were claims that Russians hacked the election, voting machine issues, voter fraud and suppression. Democratic leaders objected to the legitimacy of the election results. There were even protestors who interrupted the electoral vote counting [1].

Did the big tech companies miss a chance to censor those peddling theories of an unfair election in 2016? Or do we have a moving definition of what constitutes a fair election and is allowable for questioning depending on which side won?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/01/06/508562183/biden-to-democrats-...


> Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?

Yes, of course. I wasn't happy about it, but I was aghast that so many people voted for a con man, not convinced that it couldn't possibly be true that more people (in the right places, at least) wanted him than the second-worst political candidate I've ever seen run for President.

Also, by the time the certification comes around, the actual voters, all 538 of them, have publicly voted, so not only did I think the election was fair, but by then I knew it was 100% legal.

IMO big tech doesn't really do much censoring until pushed into a corner, now or in the past; they're more about the money than the politics. The Russians (along with a few other players, no doubt) absolutely fuck with our elections, but they do it the old fashioned way -- by spreading propaganda on social media and convincing American citizens to believe in conspiracy theories, and turn against their fellow citizens, etc.

FWIW, no Democrats stormed the Capitol in 2017. The losing candidate conceded, and relatively quickly at that. After losing by a lower margin than Trump in 2020, while beating him by millions of votes nationwide.

There isn't really a good way to spin it. Trump supporters storming the Capitol is bad, but it's actually a fairly distant second place to what the sitting President is doing.


The platform being used for organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups. If the screenshots are correct of what I have seen then AWS had no choice. They would have been liable if something really bad happened and was made aware of this before it happened. Parler has no monitoring of this activity and that is why everyone shut them down once it was exposed.


Note that in the past AWS has been more than open to hosting platforms organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups, to the point of issuing a lawsuit after a competitor was chosen to host the platform. [1]

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/amaz...


I look forward to AWS removing itself from this lawsuit now it has worked out it is fully anti-violence.

Surely it’s ethics aren’t just swayed by money and political pressure?!


>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.


There is a big difference between “controversial” and a place where people are actively planning criminal activity. It’s not close. No bank, for example, could continue serving a known crime org. They themselves would be charged if they did that.


> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3].

To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_repu...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-th...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-el...


Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.


I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.


Probably, which might have something to do with the fact that there's no genuine belief that Biden is going to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to administrational incompetence, or going to spend his entire term attempting to subvert democracy. On the other hand, it turns out the people who said those things about Trump in 2016 have been proven 100% correct.

The purpose of faithless electors isn't to stop the appointment of arbitrary candidates based on personal preference, it's to stop the appointment of people who are completely unfit for the position. It absolutely makes sense that it would only be justifiable to exercise that option on certain individuals. An individual who blatantly and repeatedly lies about election results and encourages their supporters to commit voter fraud in an attempt to retain power seems like the exact type of person you might want to stop from having that power in the first place.


To be fair, Michael Moore didn't try to assassinate the Vice President and hold Senators for ransom.


Were either of those things attempted?


That's a good point, but I think it actually services to show just how bad this situation was. It's not a stretch to say that faithless electors are a "feature" of the electoral college. One of the stated reasons behind choosing electors rather than voting directly is that the electors could exercise their own discretion in the choice. I agree that it's unscrupulous to attempt to coax electors like that, but it's at least within the bounds of the framework of presidential elections.

This was a crowd of thousands of people, many armed, attempting to interfere with the actual process of counting the votes of those electors. More than a couple members of the crowd had zip ties, which can only be reasonably explained as hostage taking paraphernalia. A literal gallows was erected, and members of the crowd were chanting for violence against Pence and Pelosi (the next two after Trump in the order of succession). A couple IEDs were found on the premise. A police officer was beaten to death. If security hadn't managed to evacuate congress and the VP before the crowd got to them, it seems likely that there would have been deaths among them.

Treating those two things as equivalent is absurd.


To be fair they wanted to do that because they saw Trump as a would-be dictator unwilling to leave power peacefully and deadest on using the government to punish his enemies and line his own pockets. They did THAT to avoid THIS. Being right about the reasons why you are doing things is actually important.


But that isn't the standard that was used. It seems to be something more akin to 'don't not moderate content that encourages...'. Except it isn't quite clear what moderation is considered good enough, as one can look at other sites which hosted and continue to host similar content. Sure, they haven't taken the stance they won't moderate, but they haven't done enough to moderate the content to remove it.

Or is it that stance? Perhaps that was the defining standard, that they took a stance instead of passively allowing it to remain like other sites do (until called out, at which point they'll react based on the size of the call out).


> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

This is key advice that a lot of founders seem to forget. Capturing a capital is an extremely bold and risky action, which shouldn't be attempted by anyone with fewer than 4 or 5 high-production cities of their own (some of which ideally also having an Encampment district to support training siege units faster). I encourage new players to focus on obtaining a scientific or cultural victory instead, as these are more straightforward for beginners.


>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.


Which has always been Twitter's defense when similar things happened on their platform. Shouldn't 230 apply here?


> don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

Erm, was Parler as a platform even doing that? Or you know, PEOPLE on the platform, which is not the exact same thing?


The platform refused to moderate that content.

In fact it was its raison d'étre.


Turns out you should keep those attempting to over throw democratic elections off your service.


Ouch, that's going to hurt. USA government is a pretty big customer. Or do we not care about democratic elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, etc.?


No, we don't. I thought trying not to shit in the same place you eat was common sense, yet here we are...


At some point it is the same thing. By act or omission.


"... something that is more genuinely a popular social issue ..."

We shouldn't let minority rights or freedoms be ignored just because they aren't popular. If this is an important issue to that other person, then they should bring it up for discussion.


Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc.

This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.


> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated.

Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegitimate government.


Did parler really try and overturn an election? Or did some of the people that use the site walk around a building?


I didn't know it was common to bludgeon police officers to death on your morning walk.


People also left IEDs in the building, walked around with weapons and zip-ties, chanted "Hang Mike Pence," and did a lot of property damage.

Please don't downplay what happened on Jan 6 as "walk around a building," it's absurd and that kind of equivocation doesn't belong here.


> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social?

Buy a server?


Buy a server where?


On eBay, maybe?


> I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope

This won't age well.


Nope. Decentralized services will be very important moving forward. Most people just haven't realized it yet.


What works for Al Qaeda could work for Y'all Qaeda, who knows.


Thank you for saying this. Personally I'm fine with there being rules against things like websites for how to make a pipe bomb or as you mentioned, overthrow the government


> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

Ohhhh. You hear that? Overturning a fair democratic election. Where was the same argument when the whole Russia narrative played out - including intelligence agencies trying to "wire" the sitting president and sending agents to his national security advisor's residence to frame him? And trying to plot 25th amendment. And the whole 3years subsequent to that trying to find "collusion".

Also there is no evidence the founders of Parler were actively trying to sabotage the election and install illegitimate president. Some rouge users decided to co-ordinate through apps like Parler and FB. Same applies for FB.



If we want to continue down a path of honest discussion, at no point did people who firmly believed Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia devolve into storming a government building.

And, the Russia topic by and large never called into question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, attempting to disenfranchise voters. The Russia narrative followed a path of legal investigation into questionable situations. Trump did not get impeached for the outcomes of the Mueller report. Dems did not force their way into political buildings. They (at least the mainstream ones) never called for violence.

So, it seems that the left, in the end, did believe it was a fair election in terms of ballot numbers, and never suggested that the democratic election be overturned.

The last part of your statement says something entirely different than the first part. I don't think anyone is claiming that Dems haven't worked hard to undermine Trump during his time in office. Just like I don't think anyone claimed Republicans weren't working to undermine Obama when they took control of the Senate. That's politics, good or bad. But that does not correlate to a belief that a fair election should be overturned.

Not really an apt comparison in my opinion.


Bullying is real.

My wife and I run a side Business Saas product. She is listed as COO on her social media profile for the company.

She is also in a bunch of groups about gardening in our local area.

During the height of BLM protests and CHOP/CHAZ, someone made a post that was very off-topic for the group, basically saying we should all support what was happening in the CHOP and all the violence against cops was justified due to racial injustice.

My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group.

Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content).

One person took it a step further and went on her profile to see where she worked. They then messaged our company's social media profile to tell our company that my wife was a racist, and she should be fired or reprimanded because she had made racist comments in a FB group (she had not, and the person provided no screenshots/proof either).

Unfortunately for that person, they did not realize they were talking to my wife's husband (me) who promptly banned them from our page and blocked their profile from my/my wife's profiles so they could no longer bother us.

However, this type of new "online activism" is rampant nowadays. Small companies often have little choice but to comply or be publicly shamed/bullied, including doxxing or going after individual employees, as in our story.

I disapprove of this type of behavior. This is mob justice in a different form. It is the court of public opinion rather than an actual court of law where someone would get a chance to defend themselves. It is wrong and our society needs to grow up past this childish phase it's going through where every angry person riled up by this or that party's rhetoric feels like they have the right to attempt to destroy another person's livelihood for the sake of pushing "their truth" or "justice". That's not what Justice is.


Bullying from internet trolls is real and spans political boundaries. It goes into even things like sports fandom and video game culture. This is a fundamentally different issue than what we're seeing with Parler.


I don't think it's anything new. People used to call political activists' house to make death threats. It's a recurring theme in Selma, the movie about Dr. King.

I never had to deal with this as a community moderator, but these sort of virtue spirals can destroy communities if they're not nipped in the bud.


[flagged]


That's murder.


> My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group.

> Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content).

Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?


Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?

Why is it privilege to avoid discussing politics in a gardening group? I'll grant that "take no position" can be a privileged position in some contexts, but a gardening group discussion seems pretty clearly not one of those contexts.


I mean to tie it to a more concrete example: Take the incident with the white lady and the black guy who was bird watching in New York. I'm pretty sure he'd love nothing more than to be able enjoy his pretty chill hobby of bird watching without it becoming racial or political or what have you. But the fact of the matter is that's not his choice.

So yea, being able to say you don't take a position in politics can definitely be a privilege.

Edit: Not to say I think people should really be hounding this lady anyways but just want to explain the point about privilege there.


The black guy was the one who attempted to lure her dog away from her to teach her a lesson by "doing something she's not going to like" to her dog(which certainly sounds like a threat).

He admitted to carrying dog treats with him to do just that. And then he posted the video online, attracting even more attention to what would normally just be a "crazy people are crazy" experience that you get in NY when you confront strangers for bad behavior.

I've been accused by a crazy person on the subway of being a rapist, but that doesn't mean that I'm oppressed for being a male of a certain color. It was just a crazy person doing crazy things.


Sure, and she said "I’m calling the cops … I’m gonna tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life." So literally weaponizing racism. I ain't saying the guy is a saint here but clearly the fact that that's the threat she would make kinda says something about our society here.


Yes, I agree the woman was out of line. But her behavior may be explained as her just describing the man in a manner she's seen on TV shows(the perp is 6', stocky, wearing flannel), because she also said something along the lines of "I'm going to tell them it is a black man in a dark shirt and a baseball cap" or something like that. Keep in mind this lady was a vocal supporter of BLM before this incident happened. And the man had already said, basically, "Put your dog on the leash or I'm going to do something you aren't going to like", which really does sound like a threat.

It's possible she decided on the spot to weaponize the mans race against him, or it's also possible she was scared out of her mind that this stranger was accosting her for a minor thing she does all the time (or, she's just off her rocker).

Anyways, my point wasn't about the lady's behavior which was clearly wrong regardless of her reasons, it was more about how the guy in that situation created a situation and then publicized it. I can't really feel sorry for the burdens put upon him, since he went out of his way to make what happened a news story, instead of, again, just chalking it up to crazy people behaving crazy (or racist, which is just another flavor of crazy). Like I've said, I've been stereotyped in NYC because of both my race and gender, but I didn't go out of my way to make a news story about it. I didn't even let it affect my day. Everyone has choices about where they spend their mental energy. Getting into a scuffle in central park because someone has their calm dog off leash near them is not where I would choose to spend mine.


>It's possible she decided on the spot to weaponize the mans race against him

I mean, that's the point I'm trying to make. The fact that she could weaponize his race is a problem to being with.

>Keep in mind this lady was a vocal supporter of BLM before this incident happened.

And mind you, I don't actually think she's some kind of virulent or bad person. It's more about recognizing some of the injustices we unfortunately live with.

> But her behavior may be explained as her just describing the man in a manner she's seen on TV shows

And you know, you're right she could be. But that just speaks to how pervasive a lot of these kinds of structures are.


But...did she weaponize his race? She called the cops and described him. The cops showed up. Both people had already left at that point. It didn't seem that Cooper was in much fear of his race being weaponized against him. It did become a talking point after the fact though.

> But that just speaks to how pervasive a lot of these kinds of structures are.

Cop dramas are popular even in largely monoracial societies that have high respect for their police, and the same tropes exist there(regarding describing suspects in certain terminology).


> But...did she weaponize his race? She called the cops and described him.

Would she have told a white man that she was going to "call the cops and tell them a white man was threatening her"?. The prevailing opinion of the situation seems to be that she wouldn't have. IIRC this was also steeped in the context of a number of other videos where people had been explicitly mentioning a black person's race for "help" in contrived/unthreatening situations that they had often started.


But that's not what she said - or rather not the whole quote. An equivalent would be like "a white man in a red t shirt and jeans", which sounds much more like a description than a weaponization of someone's race.

The context this video was steeped in has nothing to do with whether this lady decided to weaponize his race or not. They were completely unrelated events, with unrelated people, that we're not even sure the lady knew about.


Yes, it's called Facebook Group Admin privilege. Has nothing to do with race.


It is unreasonable to expect every individual to shoulder every "other" groups genuine or perceived injustices. It just is.

This new flavor of the month which attempts to make silence on an issue a state of complicity and therefore ... a sin is something that I find deeply manipulative.


If that's a privilege - then so is being able to post about political issues in a group that makes posting political issues against the rules.


Fuck off with that bullshit


Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned here. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


The best mitigation strategy here is to engage your vendors with private contracts instead of depending on generic terms of service (ToS) alone.

Every company I've worked with has negotiated separate agreements with providers to reduce risk. Including contracts with both AWS and Azure.

If your business gets to a certain size and you are still on the generic ToS and paying by credit card you have a big risk on your hands. You could be terminated at any point.

With a private contract you can negotiate things like a termination notice. You can put in place a grace period before things are shut off. You can implement dispute procedures that are unique to your business needs so that when you and the vendor disagree it doesn't immediately disrupt your business.

None of this is easy. But if your business absolutely depends on public cloud hosting you'd be stupid not to call up your vendor and negotiate.

If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.


I agree with this general idea, but also any bespoke service contract approved by a competent attorney will still have clauses for instant-kill under certain circumstances.

For example, no provider would provide service under a bespoke contract obligating them to knowingly host & serve illegal content (because this creates legal liability for the provider).

What is alleged about Parler would likely fit into the instant-kill provisions of even any reasonable bespoke contract.

[Edit: obviously this does not apply to providers specifically in the business of catering to high-risk customers. Stripe doesn't do gambling or porn, but other providers presumably have different pricing or risk mitigation/tolerance and therefore on can use credit cards to pay for these items.]


I think the poster was worried about slippery slope - today they come for the evil men, tomorrow they come for the unpopular men, the next day they come for me. In such a context i assume the poster isnt actually planning to host anything illegal or even distatsteful to current views, so a good contract should be fully negotiatable.


> You could be terminated at any point.

You could be "terminated at any point" regardless of what the contract says if something as bizarre as what happened last week occurs and your platform was an integral part of it. Contracts only go so far. Not everything in human affairs runs like clockwork, contracts are broken all the time.


> If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.

Isn't that what happened, they lost all of their cloud providers because the providers could not justify being part guaranteeing reliable service delivery of under moderated content?


I don't think it's possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property. OP would also need to be a fairly large player to able to negotiate favorable terms with someone like AWS to begin with.


> I don’t think it’s possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property.

Not only is it not possible in the pragmatic sense, I don’t think its legally possible, since knowingly carrying such content is quite often criminal (not just for you, but if the higher-level vendor knows about it its criminal for them), and a contract to commit a crime is usually void.


> If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.

I actually think that the providers would fall like dominoes. See what Apple and Google did to the app. Once a big company shows you the door because they worry about legal risks and reputational damage, other companies will take note and you'll have a hard time staying on.

You'll have to find a company that does it out of idealism. Or one that is socially disconnected enough that the threats to reputation and legal risks do not apply.


If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you don't like X, then build your own X." I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. My guess is that BitChute is next.


What unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in when the cost of doing business with a company associated with white supremacists, insurrectionists, and murderers outweighs the benefits so much that other private businesses won't sell them things.

Everyone is entitled to force themselves on Apple, Google, Amazon, Twilio, Stripe, et al., right?

I find a depressing majority of the people screaming censorship at the top of their lungs believe people are not entitled to health care or free education in this country. That would be big government. People however are entitled to make you do business with them, even if it's financially damaging to you.


If just Apple suspended them for a clearly identified infringement of codified policy and then gave them steps to correct it, I wouldn't care nearly as much as multiple sectors of industry banning one company within hours of each other. It's the coordination that is terrifying. When a group of powerful people says, "You have to let me do crazy thing, or the boogieman wins," you must forgive me for having doubts. I have heard that too many times to count.


It’s not coordination if multiple companies actually agree on reality. I would think it would be worse if some companies said this were fine and other didn’t - THAT would imply that someone was being treated unfairly maybe. This is just a unanimous jury, that’s all. I think it’s rather silly to say that if, for example, someone goes on tv and says they’re planning on building nuclear bombs in their closet, you believe Apple can’t suspend them until they say that exact same thing on their platform. If you are a violent threat in the real world, then you also are on all the platforms whether you reveal that there or not.


The problem with your example is I don't turn off the bomb maker's electricity. I call the police. They take violent threats seriously. If you think someone is making a violent threat, that is what you do. They want to shut down non-violent speech. The police won't deal with that.

As for the collusion, I might believe you if this were the first time. After all, it was such an enormous, public incident. But it is not the first time and it will not be the last time either.


> It's the coordination that is terrifying.

Imagine there's a number of farmers in a village who all stop working and go inside when a thunderstorm is imminent. Did they all coordinate to stop working at around the same time or did they individually make a judgement of what's in their best self-interest?

I think our disagreement may be that you don't believe there was a thunderstorm. You may think it was a perfectly clear day, hence their reasoning and timing are suspect, and there must have been some communication. I think there was a thunderstorm of regulatory pressure (imagine more people dying as attacks are planned on an app in the AppStore), employee pressure, reputation / brand damage that was brewing due to the actions in DC on 1/06. This tipped the calculations away from maintaining the status quo, and whatever revenue Parler may have generated (along with other factors, like outcries of bias vs. the right) was no longer enough.

The case for companies further down the supply chain is even more clear: Imagine you're Twilio and are doing cost / benefit analysis on if you should continue your relationship with Parler. Outside of public outrage, employee calls for action, etc.., the other side of the equation is Parler brings in revenue. Your calculations became much simplified due to upstream actors like AWS. Parler has 0 users now and 0 revenue now after Apple, Google and Amazon's actions. Why in the world would you take the continued costs of maintaining your relationship with them in that case? There's still no coordination, only actors making the best decision as the values of underlying variables are updated.


I might believe you if this were the first time I have seen something like this happen. After all, it was such an enormous, public incident. But it is not the first time and it will not be the last time either.


Great. The burden of proof is on you to prove coordination.

A parting analogy (since I'm awful at them but keep making them):

A group of Spanish speakers are spread across a number of gates waiting for their flight at SFO. A person stands up and yells in Spanish they have a bomb. All the Spanish speakers simultaneously duck. Was this coordination or actors acting in their best self-interest based on privileged information they share?

In whatever incident you keep referring to, that isn't this one, that also occurred (you imply there are many -- listing one should be no problem) where you suspect there was coordination across tech companies to censor, please ensure it isn't the tech companies all have similar data and drew the same conclusions.


> It's the coordination that is terrifying.

Is it “coordination” if lots of companies have been contacted as law enforcement authorities following the connections out from the events at the Capitol and looking for assistance both in investigation and in forestalling the upcoming attacks they have said they have intelligence on being planned, and a bunch of corporate counsel have all had their attention directed to the statute on material support for terrorism at the same time and come to the same conclusion?

> When a group of powerful people says, "You have to let me do crazy thing, or the boogieman wins," you must forgive me for having doubts.

Sure, e.g.:

crazy thing = provide support to domestic terrorists

boogieman = evil corporations


This is happening to normal folks with small businesses too. I have some friends who are being targeted by google and fb, for no good reason as they’re completely in the dark. We need to decentralize the web yesterday.


Why bit chute? Aren't they just a peertube alternative?


They host content that YouTube will not. That seems to be enough. Peertube is federated, and I haven't seen them attack a federated service, yet.


Parler obviously only existed to cater to right wing extrimsm and violent rhetoric. It's the reason they "couldn't" moderate it, as if they did there would be no reason for it to exist.

Reddit is still around even after r/thedonald and other violent / hateful subreddits were on the site and finally banned. The difference is reddit doesn't primarily exist to foster violence and extremism.


> I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep.

Magical?


I believe the commenter is referring to the coordinated collusion of the activity, which is reminiscent of anti-competitive cartels.


Seems a false equivalent to compare the events that caused these recent terminations to the past, or "magic." What about that should be protected?


I'd expect the bar to remain in exactly the same place.

AWS has continued to host the National Enquirer, even after that publication dug deep into Jeff Bezos's personal life. Said coverage perhaps accelerated Bezos's divorce, which cost him $30 billion in stock, as part of the settlement with his ex-wife. ($30b is 2019 valuation; it's much bigger now.)

If Amazon/AWS will quietly endure a $30b+ hit to its founder's wealth, without pulling the plug, I'd say the cloud-business risk you've identified should be one of the smallest stressors in your life.


Just strategically this doesn’t make any sense as banning National Enquirer would draw 100 times more attention to the story. If Bezos wants revenge he’s surely smart enough to get it quietly.

Banning Parler also draws similar attention to it (I’ve never heard of it before today, for one), but it’s a calculated and coordinated (with Google, Apple) move to 1) take them down and 2) send a message to anyone watching. The point is the additional attention here is not unwanted and even desired.

Not to mention such a retaliation would have come at a time when Trump (highly critical of Bezos) was still very much in power and had enough support in congress to use it against him.


Excellent points I agree that this sets a dangerous precedent.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social

We are witnessing it now on HN. There's a huge uptick in deplatform-proof p2p mesh networks running web applications.

How do you take down a mesh network that will simply regenerate and absorb most external shocks?

I believe that the future of the internet would be fragmented into a conventional centralized server like we see with AWS dominating the market which will still serve useful purpose for most applications and another for the rest.

With Moore's law and 6G we are heading towards a hyper connected world that will facilitate the rise of robust, secure, mesh network based software that runs on our phones.

It will not be without trouble, people will find ways to poison the well. The mesh network would evolve into essentially islands where you physically travel to in order to join that private network to minimize DDOS, MITM attacks.

It would be a cyberpunkesque reality where to buy a bag of weed in a non-legal state, you simply head towards a dark alley, connect to the mesh network, find the drop, and head back to your tiny apartment occasionally poking your head out the window to take in the sights of foggy neon-lit streets with flying cars and spiky haired gender-neutral entities shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it no more!"


If you host user-generated content, you will have to decide on community standards and do your best to enforce them. This will be expensive. You are legally obligated to police things like terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and even DMCA violations. You are morally obligated to do more than just that, not just by your conscience, but also by the global zeitgeist.

Of course some absurdity lies in making believe your corporation has a conscience. You may have a conscience. But ultimately, no matter what corporate culture you instill, your corporation is a psychopath.

So your corporation will be Dexter and you do your best to operate it like it cares about people and issues and is a good citizen (since after all, it is legally a person.) If you do this poorly, it is revealed to have no soul and punished. If you do it well, you get a brand.

If covering for a psychopath whose only motivation is money and whose opinions are the amalgamation of half-formed thoughts from hundreds or thousands of different individuals isn't your idea of a good time, then maybe running a business isn't the best idea.


> What are the best mitigations here

What are you trying to mitigate?

You can't mitigate "Getting banned for making a place to plan a coup". You can't mitigate "I want a place to allow posts advocating criminal activity".

If people were openly discussing breaking and entering houses, should that be allowed too?

Why should we tolerate publicly planning violence when we don't tolerate publicly planning other crimes?


You can mitigate anything (i dont think you should, but that is a different question). I dont think the original poster was suggesting that type of thing (more a fear of slippery slope), but for the sake of argument, if they were tor hidden services would be the obvious way to mitigate.


> You can mitigate anything

My point is what this guy seems to want to enable is fundamentally conspiring to commit crimes.

He seems to talk around that, but that's where we are.


I think you're reading in things he did not say. He seems concerned he will be unpopular not illegal. Whether or not that is a reasonable concern is debatable... but history certainly has examples of that sort of thing.

That said, there are plenty of websites that do conspire to do illegal acts and seem to get away with it, for a time at least. (pirate bay, sci-hub are two im ok with ethically. The silk road is an example im less ok with)


Parler had no trouble getting in the App Store and AWS when they were perceived as merely espousing an unpopular opinion.

Parler was blocked only after there was clear evidence that criminal activity was being openly planned on their platform and that planning was acted on.


I'm a Freemason. Some people don't like that. They think we worship the devil (we don't) and that we control the world (were that wishing made it so but, no, we don't).

It's not out of the realm of possibility that enough people have that view and decide that I and/or my company need to be shamed, shunned, and shut down. What do I do then? I've done nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical but a group of people have decided I need to lose everything simply because I joined a fraternity.

That view in particular has already happened once, by the way. It could easily happen again.

I say all that to say this: I think OP's question is what happens when it takes less than criminal activity to get kicked off of vendors such as AWS?


> I think OP's question is what happens when it takes less than criminal activity to get kicked off of vendors such as AWS?

Right now I have my own virtual machine for my web services. There are half a dozen of similarly affordable, neutral platforms not owned or affiliated with Amazon. Even my opinion were unpopular in the US, I could host in the EU, Canada, or Sweden.


That presumes only people in the US fear my being a Freemason and, so the question remains.


They were too small to bother with. If they had been perceived the exact same way but with 100x the userbase, they would have gotten banned.


Not to put too fine a point on what you said but since lot of people here are saying, in essence, "Unless you do support storming the Capitol then you have nothing to worry about" I think it's worth highlighting with a concrete example that isn't outside the realm of possibility.

Let's say you own a company with about 100 employees. You have never taken a political stand beyond voting. Now let's imagine that two of those employees say something on their personal social media that is insensitive to some. Someone somewhere is going to figure out where those two people work and show up at your digital doorstep.

If you as the business owner don't respond in a way that people approve of then those same people are going to go to your vendors such as AWS, etc... and demand they drop you as a customer. If those vendors side with those people strongly enough, or are afraid of them enough, then you may get dropped as quickly as Parler was.

Let's be clear on a key distinction here: you're the CEO of a company providing a SaaS product with no relation or affiliation to politics whatsoever, whereas Parler was clearly enabling and encouraging illegal and seditious activity and their being shut down is completely justified. That distinction isn't clear in the minds of a great many people. Especially in today's highly charged political environment.


Either the baker gets to decide whether to make a gay wedding cake or they don’t. Which one is it??


That's quite a straw man comparison to the scenario I describe.


Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties.

For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulate. These are simple network engineering practices that can be replicated by any experienced IT staff. Sure, you might not be able to mitigate a theoretical 100+ terabit DDOS attack, but is this actually a problem in practice for your business? Even if you have ridiculous capacity, at a certain point you would still have to defer to ISPs, law enforcement and other external measures in order to restore sane operations.

Certainly, there is no perfect solution. But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.


I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers.

> But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.

Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent. And with Parler, I'd assume that that point comes sooner than later. I mean I don't know their funding situation, but I find it reasonable to assume that if they'd built a NOC first they wouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.


I'd say if they don't have the means to stand on their own and build all their own mitigations against this sort of attack, then they've bit off more than they can chew.

If their goal is to be a free-speech-above-all platform that is definitely going to piss off both infrastructure providers and the world of people who might attack them, then they better have the technical capabilities to back that up or they're going to get torn to shreds. Nobody else is required to help them in their misguided (in my opinion) endeavor.

And yes, it's possible that such a grand plan takes more resources than they actually have. Not anyone else's problem.


I totally agree. Their situation looks untenable.

I'd love to know the risk-scenarios they considered. Could they imagine getting booted off AWS?


Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented.

Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).


I responded to your claims around DDOS mitigation. At 100 Mbps you're swamped the second a couple cell phones decide to flood you.


100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation.

Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).


Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content.

Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your application such that you can move it to another cloud vendor.

If your content is so toxic that other cloud vendors won't accept you either, then maybe the problem isn't with the cloud vendors.


"legal" in a democracy is something that only a court can decide.

I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?


So if someone posts a plot to kill lawmakers, take over the government all while using their website to organize the insurrection, you're saying that they can't be held to ToS terms banning illegal content until a court has ruled on whether or not their insurrection is illegal?

I haven't seen the examples that AWS provided to Parler, but I trust that AWS lawyers signed off on the plan so they show a lack of moderation on Parler's part.


When there was a plot against the Michigan governor, without a single step of the plot going into action everyone was arrested and convicted and no one from either party complained about that, after being shown the evidence.

If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law.

AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.


If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law.

So you're in favor of removing moderation entirely and hosting providers given broad immunity from liability for any type of content -- feel free to plot your murder, host child porn, plan an insurrection, whatever; and it should be up to the government to track down the responsible parties.... even if those parties are untraceable or not even in the USA?

AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.

So you don't dispute that Parler violated the ToS, you're disputing the ToS themselves and that they unfairly target companies like Parler?


AWS is within their legal rights. This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear.

I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities.

Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason. If they wanted to turn a blind eye, they would have kept it anonymous.


AWS said:

It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.

They didn't say "98 people posted bad things so you suck", they said that Parler was lacking a system to prevent those kinds of posts and provided 98 examples.

I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities.

Why do you think that Parler should be able to moderate their users, ban them or report them to authorities, but AWS should not be allowed to do the same with their own customers?

This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear

That's the funny thing about ethics -- everyone has their own set of ethics. I think that if a site abuses the ToS of a provider and allows their platform to be used to plan an insurrection, then that provider ought to be able to terminate services.

Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason

You don't need to give ID to post on Parler. Becoming verified gives you some additional access/visiblity (for example, users can block posts from unverified users), but verification is not neccessary to post.


I'm calling total crap on that. At best this is civil law and contract interpretation between the two parties.

Or, should AWS be forced to host the Daily Stormer against their own freedom of association?


Yes. AWS is so big that the common carrier laws should apply to it.


Then argue that law in front of congress.

Even still, the first amendment doesn't cover calls to action so even this would have been well within legal rights to block or terminate.


Ah yes, the old “someone can’t have an opinion on what should happen unless they themselves draft legislation and take it into congress.”


I was addressing OP who said the content was illegal. AWS is within their legal rights to boot anyone off because of the Terms and Conditions. This thread is about the ethical side of what they did.


If a service provider detects illegal activity taking place on their services, I assume the correct action is to contact the relevant authorities and suspend the activity until it gets straightened out. Which seems to be what has happened here. I don't know exactly what efforts were made to work with Parler in advance but I do believe there have been some, and Parler has refused to take action on their own behalf.


And it is being decided. This is how that looks. Parler has sued Amazon, and Amazon will presumably respond. Expecting Amazon to sue Parler to show that it has the right to drop it just isn't realistic. IANAL, but I can't imagine how Amazon could show that it had standing in that situation.


There is already a precedent from decades ago. The U.S. and pretty much every developed country on Earth have laws against distributing and possessing child pornography, because child pornography creates a market for exploiting children and selling the recordings online. The universal consensus is that this kind of expression needs to be restricted in the strictest possible terms, because it causes material harm to disadvantaged people. Nobody loud enough to be picked up in the media bats an eye at this reasoning for sanitizing the open Internet of such content, and online the words "illegal content" have become more or less synonymous with child pornography. Researchers looking into the subject to study its actual effects have been ostracized themselves because it's so hated. Its illegality has entered the realm of common sense at this point. So maybe there exists some extreme in terms of what you can post online such that if you disagree and insist that a certain class of content needs a platform because of reasons relating to "free speech," you will be almost universally disagreed with and vehemently ostracized. That's why the deplatforming doesn't surprise me much.

But determining what counts as inciting violence is harder to determine. You can't post images of children that were actually exploited and later declare with plausible deniability that the content of those images were not to be taken seriously, because they act as photographic evidence of a crime. But how many people that post online about hanging a politician would really act on those words if the politician was within arm's reach?

It's another question as to whether or not child pornography incites child exploitation, instead of just incentivizing it, similar to the argument that pornography incites rape. But it seems to be agreed on that humanity would be better off without it entirely, to the point of very harsh legislation. I'm wondering if this is the direction some people would want to take the spreading of misinformation and alleged incitement. I wonder how many people who distribute child pornography would change their outlook on it in the face of evidence.


Child abuse websites all get seized and their owners arrested by a court order. The websites don't just get "blocked".

Parler was not, and in all likelihood, cannot be convicted, because they were only sharing speech. The SCOTUS even ruled that anti-gay-marriage was considered free and protected speech because a good percent of the population has different opinion than the rest. Same for pro-Trump material. He had seventy two million votes just a couple of months ago. That's not the same as child abuse which is universally condemned by the entire population.


Everyone is responsible for knowing if their actions are legal or not. If you shoot someone on the street and use the defense that you thought it was legal because a court didn't tell you that it wasn't in advance, then you're going to have a bad time.


There is no evidence I have seen that Parler was doing anything illegal.

Note that my understanding is that hosting someone else’s illegal speech is not in itself illegal (if it was, the buzzfeed article would also need to be taken down).


Parler was essentially 90% MAGA shouting. There was virtually no content that was non-political and it was basically the Twitter version of the anti-Obama rumor emails my boomer dad kept forward me from 2008-2016. I had the app, checked it quite a bit while trying to understand the other side better.


[flagged]


...I was just answering the question around what the content was like on Parler.


The answer is inviting for discussion tho..


I don't know who downvotes you, but it has to be a really blind, one sided person(-s)


Everyone nowadays is one-sided it seems. Its very sad..


It's the perfect setup going extreme to one or the other side, and peoples are happy because they think it's the right way to go....truly sad.


I got flagged when my post was literally only this one line:

"Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?"

Either both are illegal or neither is. If anything, the many of the anti-Trump rumors have reached a point that the anti-Obama have never had.

I remember back when the Internet was the place to be open minded and avoid the real world biased or ill-informed discussions. Now its the total opposite.


>98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence."

Just imagine how much that would be in Facebook numbers? I think we can block Facebook too, no?


Facebook runs on AWS? No they have their own infra.

Lesson of the day, if you're doing shady shit, own your own servers and stay off mine.


Though by nature the internet is an interconnected network of large tech companies. If the club has decided to ban you, even if you build your own datacenters, you may have trouble peering into anything useful.


>Facebook runs on AWS?

That means you as a Infrastructure provider can jugge what normally justice will do, but when you have the money to run your own DC you can jump over that problems? Don't you see that this is the opposite of a free society? It does not matter if it's extreme right or left, Wikileaks, Wikipedia Pirate-bay or Sci-hub.

BTW: Totally not right wing, but in a free an fair society justice should have the decision if a Service is illegal and NOT Market-providers like Amazon Google or Apple.


That means you as a Infrastructure provider can jugge what normally justice will do, but when you have the money to run your own DC you can jump over that problems?

You can't since you still need to have an upstream internet provider. (or in the case of Facebook, access to internet exchange points). If Facebook was promoting illegal content, even if they host their own servers, they'd lose their internet connectivity.


>If Facebook was promoting illegal content

Did Parler promote illegal content? Again, Amazon is NOT a Court.


> Again, Amazon is NOT a Court.

If you want entitlement to a court on the legality of content before getting cutoff from service, negotiate a contract that specifies that you can carry any legal content, and the other party must assume content is legal absent a determination by a court to the contrary.

OTOH, that’s not part of anyone’s boilerplate, and adds a lot of potential cost, so expect to pay an extremely hefty premium to get a business to agree to those terms.


Then it's a good thing it's being decided in a court.

Which is what provides checks and balances, AWS says "You violated our ToS, we're cutting you off", "Parler sues and says 'No we didn't and here's why'".

If Parler wins and can prove that they were unfairly targeted, then they can sue Amazon for damages. Which is what keeps Amazon from unfairly applying its ToS. And if they can demonstrate irreparable harm, then they can get an injunction forcing AWS to restore their services immediately rather than waiting for the court case to be decided.

But I think the best they could do is present monetary damages, which the court could decide AWS is able to pay.


Why let pesky 'courts' and 'due process' get in the way of efficient ruling by capitalism and mega-corporations?


What are you talking about? The courts are involved.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/tech/parler-amazon-lawsuit/in...


Their business is already shut down - guilty until proven innocent, which is great because it really streamlines the whole justice process.

In fact this new form of justice is so efficient we can even shut down a company before the court proceedings have even started. By we I mean our corporate overlords, but they wouldn’t ever turn on us.


If they can prove that they were wrongfully shut down, then they can sue for damages, which is what keeps companies from abusing their power.

This isn't a new form of justice, this is how the civil legal system works.


>This isn't a new form of justice, this is how the civil legal system works.

Funny, Hitler and Staling would agree with you 100%


This lasted surprisingly long until you invoked Godwin's law.

I'm done.


Does Facebook have a moderation policy in place that will remove these posts? Does Parler?


>Does Parler

That's not the point, i'm ~sure that illegal stuff is removed from parler too, and if not that's the Justice who should make the rules and NOT Amazon...like you know Facebook just made those moderation's after a justice ruling.


Isn't that exactly the point? Apple removed them because: Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety. We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues

And AWS said:

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

If they were removing the illegal content, then why did AWS say they don't have an effective process to remove it? If they can show that they already have effective moderation, then they should win their lawsuit against AWS and quickly be back online.


>If they were removing the illegal content, then why did AWS say they don't have an effective process to remove it?

Because you get a Sympathy-Star-Sticker in your book and Amazon is the good guy who try's to safe the United States, it's more Marketing then real fear being extreme right wing.

BTW: Wanna buy a real Postage stamp from Hitler? No Problem:

https://www.amazon.com/STRIKING-ORIGINAL-ANNIVERSARY-SEIZING...

or a beautiful flag?

https://www.amazon.ca/German-Imperial-Germany-Ensign-Flags/d...

The original "Mein Kampf" without comments?

https://www.amazon.ca/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler/dp/0395925037/...


Those items may be distasteful, but are they illegal? I'm not aware of a prohibition on selling Nazi memorabilia in this country.

On the other hand, inciting violence is illegal:

"by all the Patriots descending on Washington DC on #jan6 ....come armed...."

Another expletive-laced message posted the day before the riot warned: "To all our enemies high and low you want a war? Well you're asking for one...To the American people on the ground in DC today and all over this great nation, be prepared for anything."


>"by all the Patriots descending on Washington DC on #jan6 ....come armed...."

That's not violent per se, maybe the right wing is in fear of polar bears near the Capitol. Please don't get me wrong, but if you let big Marketplaces and not Justice make decisions whats right or wrong...well then that can go really fast the other way too.


Don't be silly. Courts will decide based on the meaning in context. A reasonable person may very well conclude that that quote is a call to arms. I mean I don't know how a court would interpret this specific example, but polar bears won't factor in their deliberation.

The provisions against incitement of violence in the AWS TOS are standard. If Parler sues AWS, a court will actually decide on whether Parler violated the TOS. And I'm pretty sure that the AWS decision will hold. They didn't do this lightly.

Refusing service to trolls is a standard occurrence. The justice system would be clogged immediately if it were forced to decide every TOS violation before the accused party could be banned.


That is the point though. The reasons cited by AWS for their actions were due to violent posts and content moderation. When addressed with the issue Parler said they'd use volunteers to proactively moderate violent posts, but AWS said that "nascent plant to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts".


>remove dangerous content

Really disappointed in HN right now, hacking youtube videos are dangerous too no? Content is not dangerous, peoples are.


Youtube has paid staff whose sole duty is to remove videos that violate their TOS. Parler does not. That is the distinction AWS used in there reasonings to terminate service.


>TOS

That's a private rule and with Amazon as big as it is, we need to have a discussion if a TOS is even legal, if you take a blind eye on that, nothing stands in the way that big company's take over everything, if you want such a world...well then welcome to cyberpunk.


For large customers, the TOS is not just a click through agreement, it's actually signed as a part of an overall MSA.

I don't see how you could argue that a TOS is not legal when both parties signed and agreed to it.


>I don't see how you could argue that a TOS is not legal when both parties signed and agreed to it.

Because it clashes often with existing law, many TOS's you can simply ignore (at least in europe) and yes even when you signed it. A TOS does not stand above existing law.


I don't know how the law currently works, but it seems reasonable to me that it should be the responsibility of the government to determine what's legal and what's not. I think Amazon would not be acting improperly if they alerted law enforcement that they suspect illegal activity and then waited for the authorities to issue an official order to take down the content (presumably based on a court order). I get that the current ToS allows Amazon to terminate the relationship unilaterally, but I don't think Amazon has to do that morally. And if they have to do that legally, I think it's fair to ask that the law be changed to allow private organizations selling a platform to not have to determine the legality of the actions of their customers. The FBI, police, and courts can do that.


It is the responsibility of the government to determine what's legal and not, there's an entire court system that does just that. And Parler is using that system by filing a suit against AWS.

But that doesn't mean that I can help someone load a body into his car, then tell police later "Well, I wasn't sure if he was legally killed or not, so I was just trying to help out, it's not my job to determine legality, I was going to come in later today and ask you guys about that. You can probably still catch him if you want to, I got his contact info: he said his name was John and his car said he lives in the Ukraine"


Ok, fair point. I think you convinced me that Amazon had a moral responsibility to terminate their relationship with anyone they believe is breaking the the law. I suppose that if the customer sues and wins they can try to recover damages.


> Was the parler content legal?

Yes, unless there is a court judgement I missed. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of the land.


But is that Parler breaking the law or its users??


Let’s be honest about this. Parler exists to host right extremists who are tired of being moderated and fact checked by twitter and facebook.


how about all those who looted, burnt cities and rioted. that wasn't a double standard to keep them on the platforms?


Yes.


> "encourage and incite violence."

98 examples is nothing. We dealt with an entire year of content on Facebook encouraging and inciting violence but it was okay because it was aligned ideologically with the powers that be.

I personally lost track of how many people just in my own friend's list advocating for "punching nazis", where "nazis" is a generic term for "anyone I strongly disagree with politically". Heck, I saw multiple people post videos of violence against people they consider "nazis" and celebrating it.

Personally, I'm 100% against the violence both last year and on Jan 6th, but it's amazing how egregious the double standard is between last year and Jan 6th.


> Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal

Amazon is leading Cloud yes, but it stands at 40% market share at best. Azure/GCP are pretty competent alternatives, though I am not sure if they would not do the same as AWS (probably yes)

The wider impaction to me, is that AWS is setting some precedent, and many people are not fully comfortable with it, and I think it will haunt AWS for a long time to come.


Parler chose to use AWS for their hosting. When you build your company on someone else's platform, you're explicitly giving them that market power.


They needed 300-500 servers according to the CEO. There isn't much choice in the market when it comes to that kind of need, specially when you need to be hosted in the US because you're a political website. Imagine if they were hosted in Russia instead, they would have lost all their credibility.


Thousands of companies host 300-500 servers on a couple of racks in some data center in the Midwest.

There is not reason at all to have your content hosted in the US if you felt its legislators or IT providers aren't up to par to your idea of what free speech represents. Credibility? Yeah, seems that the crediblity issues weren't exactly about the hosting provider.


Look at their growth curve, they weren't planning from the beginning on that. I am sure they would have gone with their own DC if they did.

The legislative and judicial system didn't say anything about Parler, and that's the core of the problem. Big tech acted by themselves to appease the new king.


Which is both their right and prerogative. Fascists aren't a protected class.


In this Great country, everyone is a "protected class" unless a court determines otherwise. It is their "right" to kick anyone off because of their overly broad Terms and Conditions, but they have no right to label anyone as a criminal.


You have the notion of “protected class” backwards. Everyone in this country has the right to equal protection under the law, but private companies are allowed to discriminate except in cases of protected class.

AWS can say “we don’t want Parler as a customer” but they cannot say “we don’t serve black people on our platform” as race is a protected class while being Parler is not.


No one said AWS did something illegal. Any company can do anything given how Terms and Conditions are written. Doesn't make that immune from discussion tho on their ethical side.


Of course there is! There are at least hundreds of hosting companies that can provide that as a service, and of course they can just buy their own servers. Nobody is obliged to make it easy for them to run their site.


A 24 hour notice off AWS is more than just "not make it easy". It is a loud and clear political message.


It's not political. It's an immediate refusal of service to a client that is clearly causing commercial harm to AWS. They have no obligation to host Parler!


Are you seriously expecting anyone to believe booting Parler off from Google, Apple and Amazon all in the same day was not a political move?


Yes. It's a PR/business reputation move.


I think it’s a fairly transparent political move too - this is happening with the background of an ongoing investigation of these companies by congress.


Trump is a political leader, not a musical celebrity. Any moves that hinder his or his supporters speech (he had an account on Parler) is by default a political one, even if at the same time it is a "PR/business reputation move". In this case its big tech wanting to appease the new king on the hill.


Was Parler blocked because Amazon did not like it, or because Democrats do not like it, and they have full control of government, and can pass arbitrary laws e.g. to break up Amazon?

Edit: an unfairly flagged comment in reply to this says > Why would democrats break up Amazon, when it helps them in banning the republicans? That will not happen.

That's exactly my point, this is a form of lobbying to stay on good side of the government.


AWS being able to shutdown a company is the fault of that company not having a multi-provider arch.


Amazon can't shut down any company at the push of a button. It can only shut down a company from using its services.

There are many other hosting providers in the world. If Parler hadn't hosted its service on AWS, then Amazon wouldn't be able to shut them down.


It can definitely shut down companies - I used to work at a supermarket that had most of its infra in AWS. If AWS was totally nuked getting systems back up properly would probably have taken months. Even trading would have taken a few days to be fully back.

Even distribution centres operate on the cloud these days.

Cloud migration at any scale isn’t a 24 hour process.


What you've written doesn't contradict anything that I've said.

> It can only shut down a company from using its services.

> Amazon can't shut down *any* company at the push of a button

If you've chosen to use AWS, then yes, Amazon can shut that down. If your business relies critically on AWS, then yes, Amazon can shut down your business.

But they can't shut down *any* company. There are lots of companies that don't rely on AWS and Amazon can't shut them down.


Amazon is not the only cloud provider. Parler could have just as easily been a customer of Microsoft or Google


Hehe as is if those are any better.


It is illegal to conspire to commit violence against the US


Parler didn’t conspire to commit violence against the US.

And it’s actually not illegal to host other people’s illegal speech. It’s super pedantic, but also very important!

So what did Parler do that was illegal?


How is any social media platform up? I understand why Parler was taken down, but why is this not applied to every single website? I'm sure we can find a 'conspiracy to commit violence against the US' in this single article thread


Because there is a difference between 1% of your content being illegal and you actively working o it and like 50% of your content being illegal and you telling everyone profusely you refuse to moderate?


I am not sure why people are treating this like it's new? There is already a massive list of things you can't do on AWS, for example running a spam operation, pirated software trading site, drug trading site, etc. Is it really so surprising that this list also includes running a site where violent attacks are planned?


It's not too different from how you should diversify your income as a Youtuber, especially if you make content about controversial topics. They knew that their platform was going to host controversial content, I'm honestly surprised how little redundancy they had planned for here.


Every week there's a front page story on HN to the tune of "X froze my account and won't tell me why, and their appeal process is totally opaque."

I think that to some extent, the availability of multiple providers, and the risk of getting kicked out, are the long term remedy. People will figure out how to mitigate sole-source risks. There might be a risk-reward tradeoff, i.e., the most desirable platforms from a short term profit standpoint might carry the biggest risk of getting shutdown. There will always be somebody who will let you in, at some level of service and security.


BLM caused the deaths of over 80 people and nobody deplatformed Facebook or Twitter. This is obviously about the belief that republicans are not human.


A nuance: AWS de-platformed Parler for its insufficient moderation on violence-inciting discussion, not for existence of such discussion. Not that I agree with or disagree with AWS decision, but it's worth having a nuanced discussion. A larger problem I see in the US is that many, if not all, nuanced discussions are considered evil by the left or by the right.


Have you seen Parlor? It actually hosted and glorified violent videos. In comments, people were celebrating beating of cops.

As for BLM, I don't know if they have any central location where they plan any violence and then share videos of that.


citation needed


I think you're setting an egregiously false equivalence here. BLM didn't openly plan to kill 80 people on Facebook. And if the right-wingers had merely planned to have protests and some crimes happened to be committed at those protests, Parler wouldn't be shut down now.


At the risk of sounding snide, it appears that if your business plan is to attract the type of users that foment hate and violence ... you are in a risky business.

Anything other than that at this point is a slippery slope fallacy.


Mitigation: don't try to overthrow a democratic government. If you want to build meinspace, be prepared to secure a server in Switzerland or something.

I mean, video inciting violence in the name of the Jihad are also taken offline. This is pretty similar. The rules are fairly clear and rational and always have been, the only difference is that they are now enforced and there has been a coup attempt by white supremacists.


Even their own lawyers dropped them out of fear....


If you a run a business that violates the terms of service of your vendors, be prepared to be cut off. It's like if I rent an apartment and decide to make meth; I shouldn't be surprised if I get evicted.


exactly. look at whatsapp now for example.

from being one of the most privacy friendly faces of the mobile to being portrayed as privacy invader (i know messages are E2EE). but see the effects. things happen slowly.

did amazon or big tech do the right thing here? probably yes.

did they see that their influence is massive? yes. (they already do know, just stirring up their convictions stronger now)

Is there a chance in future that they might just misuse their powers without anyone knowing it? most certainly yes.

Its a real trolley problem for me as a privacy supporter.


Messages are E2EE, but by default get backed up into your Google/Apple account which are easily accessible by a search warrant, or from a prism backdoor.


It seems like disagreement in any degree can be interpreted as an incitement to violence if you have supporters who are prone to violence. While I support the right of private companies to do as they please, I think that Net Neutrality has a role to play here.

The packets I send and whom I send them to should be protected by law in the same way that the letters I send are. It is a crime to open someone else's mail without a warrant, even if that mail contains hate speech or incitement to violence. Private companies who carry mail are not excempt from this restriction, they are content-agnostic. I beleive ISPs fall firmly into this category, and that a strong case may be made for cloud hosting providers as well.

With regards to accountability, individuals are accountable for their actions. It was those people who trespassed and committed violence who should be, and it seems will be, held accountable. Those who directly (as in "go here and do this") incited them, or directly planned their actions, committed crimes as well. Those who simply failed to condone them, or who expressed sympathy with their ideals and causes, or who delivered their mail, are not responsible for the actions of those people.


>What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social?

Don't violate the terms of service of other businesses you depend on?

For all the hard-core libertarian/corporate/free market cheerleaders, isn't this the libertarian way to handle it? CorpA and CorpB have a service agreement/contract, CorpA feels like CorpB violated it, kicks them off, courts handle the aftermath?


It is easy to see where that trend is going. Little steps by little steps, GAFAs while turn the West in an environment similar to Iran or China when it comes to freedom of speech.


> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward.

This is nothing new, and the risks of running a business are the same. If your suppliers drop your business, you have to find a new supplier or you are dead. And you get to decide if you want to chase compensation in the courts (breach of contract, persecution based on protected classes such as politics or race) or not.

The suppliers who are not allowed to drop you are regulated and called utilities. AWS dropping the ban hammer here is interesting, as the end result might end up with cloud services getting regulated and defined as a utility.


Read the TOS before subscribing to a service would be a good start. And have a plan 'B' and if you plan on starting a revolution maybe have a plan 'C', 'D' and 'E' as well just in case.


You’re preaching to the choir. We’ve been having discussions on HN for years about the dangers of swapping the short-term benefits of AWS for the long-term dangers it can bring. I’m sure there’s some Nostradamus on here that predicted this exact situation with Parler. The dangers were obvious and clear to anyone who was paying attention but not everyone was paying attention. Hopefully, this gets managers and CEOs to double-check if the benefits of AWS/EWS truly outweigh the risks.


I'm not sure anyone in the (near) future will be able to guarantee you some sort of "right" that you can host/publish whatever you want and not be held accountable.

America is a country that prides itself (to an absolute ridiculous fault) on "freedom of speech" and "the free market will handle it". Well, the market handled it, didn't it. When the government fell short, the market stepped in.

The last 20 years have polarized society to the breaking point. To think that we can continue down this path and be governable, as a people...it's just not happening. The "free ride" we've enjoyed so far is basically over. Sadly, too many Americans can't tell conspiracy theories and made-up fairy-tales from reality and so now we all lose.

The coming administration already has an axe to grind with Big Tech and they will grind it. Both the Left and the Right want to see Big Tech reigned in in some way and even though the reasons might be different, the end result will be the same - host "uncomfortable" content and be censored.


I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.


Here are the AWS Service Terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/). You are responsible for understanding and following these as well as the appropriate laws (which probably require the assistance of a lawyer, which I am not, and which is probably a good idea in any case).

If a service provider refuses you service and you believe it violates the terms of service that you agreed to (that's going to be a hard row to hoe), you should have legal recourse. (Still not a lawyer, though.)

Technically, the safest approach would be to build your own geographically-distributed server facilities and get your own Autonomous System Number. Remember to take care---the legal responsibilities in individual countries differ.


The problem is that someone (Parler in this case) would have to actively build automated moderation systems or be philosophically aligned with moderation in order to fulfill the TOS in this case since its the users driving the violation. The baseline shouldn't require them build something, that seems like a burden too far. Suppose the violators were bots, doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?


> doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?

Yes.


If you build your entire business on a platform controlled by one entity and they decide they don't like you then you better hope none of the debt is secured because that's the end.

It's surprising and disappointing how few people get this. It's like the idea that profit requires selling things for more than they cost.


I would echo the words of that black dude in that show about drugs and cops in Baltimore: "Diversify yo bonds, nigga" aka "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".

Apply them to your scenario if you can. Two cloud providers from different countries. Duplicate your data across both, which is good for backups anyway. Maybe try and use chaos computing to stimulate entire data centers going down on you.

Parler would've done well to encrypt their data and use some kind of distributed data storage for their usecase. Probably should've gotten servers in Russia, China, Romania or something and maybe even hosted an eep- or onion-site. They were obviously on the fringe and hosting their stuff on mainstream services would've ended badly sooner or later.

Know your usecase, know your risks, and prepare accordingly.


> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward.

Why is that? In general, a slippery slope argument is a poor one.

> Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist

I can imagine a lot of things, I'm sure you can too. But what matters is, is it likely? If, let's say, Slack got taken down by this because it was found that sound rioters used it to coordinate, I would imagine there would be an absolutely huge backlash even today with a situation as dire as the capitol riots.

I can't answer your last question, and it is a good question. But I do agree with AWS and others: the answer is not to do nothing.


They used to say the same thing about wiretaps. Now the government can enter your name into xkeyscore and have access to your life


Parler isn't the first app to get cut from app/play store, and it's not the first online service to be given the cold shoulder by its infrastructure providers.

If you rely on a provider, don't motivate the provider to end its relationship with you. The best mitigation here is, first, don't cater to fascists who want to tear apart the fabric of American society.

Second, if you're going to piss people off, either set up a contract that doesn't give your infrastructure provider the freedom to end its relationship with you, or do without the benefits of cloud. AWS isn't a utility, and its services are largely replaceable -- buy some computers and set up your own servers.


This problem would have been even more pronounced if running from a co-lo/non-cloud entity. Imagine getting a court-ordered shutdown or confiscation of servers for evidence etc. Frankly you would expect a "high"-profile/controversial service like Parler to have at least conceived of the possibility of a take-down from a cloud service and had a plan in place for it. Amazon had already cut ties with Gab last year [1] so this should not have been a huge surprise.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven...


Probably to mitigate the way one mitigates against other disasters, such as natural disasters or political upheaval in a nation: have an exit plan to a partitioned cloud environment.

Since we're talking political consequences, the partitioning here would be political. Whatever nation owns the companies you do business with, find counterpart companies in nations on poor terms with those host nations and have a plan in place to ramp up infrastructure in those nations quickly (or keep it on "hot standby").

There is the risk that data migration could violate laws in the originating nation, if you're exfiltrating data that the host nation's laws don't allow to be exfiltrated.


These days you have to create 'financial incentives' just to get people to do the right thing... Every business is going to need crypto. You need to bribe people into doing the right thing to prevent them from being bribed into doing the wrong thing.

It's going to be cheaper to bribe people into doing the right thing than to bribe them into doing the wrong thing... We just have to let good people know that bribing is OK so that bad people don't have a monopoly over it... As is the case today.


Taken from The Book: "don't lend money to someone more powerful than you!". I would say this is a business failure. They should have prepared for that and they did not.


I think the mitigation is "don't build a platform to attract white supremacists banned from other sites and then watch as they use it to plan a riot in the Capitol."


Imagine a hypothetical, well-intentioned free speech focused platform, without censorship and with low moderation: it will attract those people because those people have nowhere else to go. That strategy is a non-starter. The real requirement is that we are pushing for a world of auto-moderation where robots have to approve every single thing we say online - otherwise you are not allowed to let people communicate.


You platform is indeed hypothetical because what you're asking for is essentially impossible. Low moderation just doesn't work at large scale without a substantial number of people suffering from its effects, including harrassment, threats of violence, spamming, and child pornography.

I would say that this hasn't been possible for at least the last 15 years.


Just to be clear about this specific case: There is "evidence" (Twitter posts) coming out that showed that all new users of Parler were shadowbanned by default, until their posts/content were approved by a small group of "right-think" moderators.

So while your hypothetical isn't invalid in general, it's really not what was happening here with Parler.

What they said they were trying to be was not at all what they were actually doing - a common theme in extremist spaces.

But your overall concern about the concentration and centralization of our communications is legit. There's no easy answer there.


The irony. You mean they did exactly what twitter does but on the right wing? They deserve to be digitally obliterated!!!!


No they don't. You are making this up.



Right, if someone wants to build a business and can't do it without making it easier for hate groups and terrorists to organise, why would any government allow the business to exist? It's fundamentally a threat to any nation for it to allow profit from enabling sedition.


The planning was largely done on Facebook https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293


This debate has been happening since Anglin and Cloudflare. There was a similar discussion when Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, and Laura Loomer isn't even allowed to order an Uber anymore.

This will become more common, all it will take will be an allegation even without proof and you'll be denied all services.


The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised.

Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.


No provider is going to sign a contract that forces them to host illegal content that opens them up to liability.


Poster never said he intended to host illegal content.


Your faith in the legal system is appalling.

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26


Penalties for non performance is like the most standard thing possible in a contract. Its hardly some unfair clause like you agree not to sue ever. Hell, even without a clause specificly stating penalties, you could still probably sue for damages from breaching a contract. (Obviously in the parler case amazon probably didnt breach, but if you are negotiating your own contract it probably wouldn't allow for arbitrary termination with no notice)


Kinda interesting as a threat model, if 4chan/the wrong people can maliciously use your service enough to get it cancelled / shutdown just for the lols. I imagine a few startups aren’t building moderating content / moderation teams as part of their MVP..


President has been set long ago. From child porn, pirating websites, to al-Qaeda websites. There is nothing new about Parler being kicked off hosting sites. It took me five minutes being on the site to see calls for violence.


It is a reminder to operate with sensitivity to the laws and customs of the land we do business in, even if we don't agree with it.

The days of the internet as a wild west no man's land is over.


Technically the best mitigation is to use a decentralized service that cannot be censored.

Socially the best mitigation is the same as always, be honest and peaceful.


I find the "overnight" more shocking than terminating a contract. That they would be so callous toward a customer should make anyone think twice before signing up.


I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t have conversations beforehand. It’s also really black and white - they were proud of their lack of moderation and said it publicly. It’s not like there was a misunderstanding. Plus an org like Parler has its own lawyers. There is no way they weren’t warned of their contractual obligations by their own counsel. They just chose to take that risk.


I wasn't under the table but Parler's CEO claims there was no prior notice.


I think it means that if you blatantly violate their ToS and don't fix it after multiple conversations then you won't be able to use their service.


> specifically targeted at those people for this to happen.

was it though? Wasn't it just a twitter without censorship?


I'm not sure there is a real risk. Slippery slope falacy is easy to reach for here.


> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).

Ah, yes, the "everything is a slippery slope" propaganda technique.


Parler was filled with posts urging the killing of jews, lefties, BLM supporters, democrats, university professors, and millennials.

It should have been dropped a long time ago, as should any platform that allows that kind of talk.


Why would the bar be lower in the future? This action is really not something any company wants to do. I expect the bar to remain nearly the same.


"Every cloud vendor in the world telling you off" is a particular threat model only usually encountered by literal terrorist groups, torrent sites, Sci-Hub... and now right-wing filter-bubbles.

In this case, Parler will need to either build all their own infrastructure or sign up with some really skeevy second-world hosting sites. This, interestingly, means being hosted on the same servers that host actual terrorists like Hamas; if they intend to remain a legal corporate outfit their lawyers will probably have some very strong words about using such services. Building your own infrastructure is expensive, even without the particular threat of just being Parler. Notably, net neutrality has been dead in the water ever since Trump took office, so anything high-value becomes extraordinarily expensive fast.

I doubt other sites are going to face this same problem in the future. Parler's problem is not that they're on the "wrong side" of a political debate; it's that they deliberately aided and abetted the planning of literal insurrection. Providing any sort of service to them is a huge legal risk to your enterprise now. If the bar for technical deplatforming was lowered beyond "technically legal", you'd see the market for alternative infrastructure providers open up, because those are customers that AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are no longer serving. AWS can only "get away with" deplatforming Parler specifically due to the legally risky nature of working with them.


It appears there is a business opportunity to (re)create infrastructure for use by companies/individuals that have been banned from the mainstream platforms.

I'm sure such a platform would be despised by many in the mainstream, and most mainstream companies would not consider using them because customers would boycott them if they did. But for companies whose customers are primarily on the right, the cost/benefit could be favorable. If there are enough such companies, someone could build a business that caters to them.

I don't know anything about how complex it would be to set up companies to replace AWS, Stripe, etc., but I imagine that at least some of these services will be offered (probably at higher cost, due to lower scale/efficiencies) within the next year or two.

Even my liberal friends think that the de-platforming has gone too far — and the Trump presidency hasn't even officially ended yet. Most thought that the companies would wait until after Trump was no longer President and then ban him on the grounds that his behavior was only previously allowed because he was a political figure.


The end result will probably be two separate frameworks distanced from each other where each side is free to babble away in their echo chambers as much as they want.


We are certainly moving in that direction, unfortunately.


The two big issues that come to mind with this are DNS and SSL certs. AFIK both are really hard spaces to become a "provider", so you end up being reliant on the existing providers to do business with you. Sure there are decentralized solutions to these problems, but none of them really let you operate in the "normal" internet space...


If we're going to talk about universal access obligations then this should be where we start, this is real unavoidable infrastructure.

Yet we don't often see calls for this from anyone worried about deplatforming, they're more worried about having an audience than a right.


I've been kicking around how to do something like that because you need to consider all the layers.

On the app side, you need neutral phones/devices and the app distribution to get apps out there.

On the hosting side, you need the hosting itself (cloud or colo), the DNS and registrars, the SSL to secure it, SMS or emails for verification & resets, and probably a few others.

On the financial side, you need payment processing and the banking system behind it. That's one of the hardest because even if you can handle it, your customers have to be able to send you money from their bank.

All of those (and other components) have been cut off/disrupted for various organizations in the last year or two.


I'm sure that alternate platforms will pop up. Parler is an alternate platform. However, how good will those platforms be? There are already many clouds, and a lot of them have trouble competing. Stripe also has many competitors, but few of them are that good.


I’m wondering — this has been downvoted, but the replies all seem to agree that the comment is true/reasonable. Am I misunderstanding the comments, or are there other thoughts on why this is an objectionable observation?


> You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen.

I fail to see how Parler should be expected to be responsible for the behavior of some users that share a demographic and political alignment with a group that stormed the Capitol. Was the planning for it done via Parler? Was it not Twitter where the announcement by Trump actually happened?

The bar is already low my friend. This is nothing but an excuse for big tech to wield its trust effect to shut down potential competitors.

If big tech believes that social media companies should be held accountable for its users' actions, then they should support the repeal of section 230, which would effectively have the same effect, except with the additional protections under the justice system. Why is it suddenly okay when big tech does the same without due process?

Rules for thee, not for me.


How does ISIS and other terrorist orgs host their propaganda? I see a pretty funny future where Trump supporters and ISIS work together to figure out where they can host their content.


Don’t run a social network designed to host right wing extremists, and you should be fine.


Parler was not "designed to host right wing extremists", same way 1st amendment was not designed to provide free speech to "right wing extremists".

It was designed to provide free speech to everyone. And hypothetical right wing extremists occasionally use it same way they use telephones and supermarkets.


This looks a lot like the gun discussion. Some people believe X is just a tool, other people say because X is used for doing bad things, it should be banned. Technically this is exactly the line separating left from right, I don't think there will be a conclusion or agreement on this.


> conclusion or agreement on this

Agreement may be in discussing hard facts and not assigning emotional labels.


These companies are sucking up to their new democratic overloads so make sure you do not anger them.

Taliban have a twitter account, Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading, Iran's supremo calls for Jew genocide, and last but not the least China calls their Uighur detention camps as "reeducation" with zero consequences.

So yes plan if you want but cost of executing the plan might be high enough to put you out of business.


"Taliban have a twitter account"

President Trump came to an agreement with the Taliban, so somebody seems to think they're legitimate. (https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-usa-int/...)

"Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading"

Which comment Twitter removed. (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/a-bigot-without-principl...)


1. Since when Twitter started complying to Trump?

2. Tweet stayed up until French government got involved. Mahatir is still free to post do it again.

What about China and Iran? Last I checked Trump don't like them so why are they up?


> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.

Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. Companies have always pulled away from extremist groups. You wouldn't expect Microsoft to accept a contract with ISIS, would you?

This is really not that complicated. Once you attempt to overthrow a country's government, businesses in that country don't want to work with you. This has always been true.


> Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about.

What is your definition of a terror cell? Do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google qualify as terror cells for competing for billion dollar contracts with the DoD? This is an absurd benchmark with no basis in reality.

https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-clo...


It's really not, and has never been. A group of people literally organized on Facebook and brought guns to overtake the capitol. It's pretty cut and dry. Again, nobody would've expected Microsoft to support ISIS' tech. Businesses have always pulled away from extremist groups like this, as is their right to do.

The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant. If your stance is "Our own government is a terror cell", well obviously then our entire society is gone anyway, so why even bother discussing the ethics of tech in america at all? But obviously this stance is just hyperbole in an attempt to dismiss the validity of claiming the rioters as legitimate terrorists.

And even by your own example, when has the DoD ever stormed the capitol? Or attempted to overthrow the US government? Spoiler: they haven't. And these insanely silly attempts at implying that legitimate businesses are under the same category as fascist extremists is a joke. This tech precedent pearl clutching is such an insanely bad look it's difficult to even fathom. My assertion is simple: when you try to overthrow a country's government, companies in that country don't want to work with you. The waters are muddier with respect to overthrowing other people's governments, but the DoD has never once attempted to overthrow the US government. There has never been an AWS-supported US coup (before last week). SO the "whatabouts" aren't even relevant.


> The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant.

Only if you take a US-centric view. If you take a world-oriented view, the US military-intelligence complex is by far the most destructive terrorist organization in human history, doing things like erasing democracy in Latin America and overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran which was going to take away its oil.

What the MAGA terrorists did for 4 hours to the US Capitol, the US has been doing to the world for more than 50 years.


You are making a false equivalency.

Parler exists solely to provide a place for right wing ideology to escape from facebook and twitter’s moderation and fact checking policies.

It has already been used as one of the primary means of coordinating an attempted coup, and it was being used to coordinate subsequent attempts on the 19th and 20th. This is the activity which was not effectively being moderated, and arguably it was the kind of activity that it was created to foment.


All I’m going to say is that I’m all for free speech and setting fair rules for everyone to play by (ie regulation), but looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles this is beyond simple free speech. I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. If Parler doesn’t want to do any content regulation then fine (though this should be any easy place to draw the line), but I can’t blame Amazon for saying “we don’t want that here”.


> I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech

This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.

If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers won't be associated with it and thus hosts can't or won't afford to host it, that's on the author.


> This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.

I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication.

I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm not even allowed outside to go and talk to friends - people are getting fined and arrested for just sitting on a park bench because of the latest lockdown. All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. If they lock me out, I'm totally screwed. What is free speech if I can't talk to anyone? Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying?

So one could argue, that actually if we want free speech in the 21st century, and want to honour the intent of what it means to have free speech, there does need to be some protection here.

The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said - and I think the legislators would have been horrified!


If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps?

Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses?

Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square.

So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.

Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.


All well and good. But say for instance you lived in nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon. And yet they would be true and right for you. In your mind you would have every right to express yourself and undermine the government outside of democratic means.

The point is we can never know how far outside of what is "good" we currently circle. It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action. It is right that a state that believes itself true defends itself. It is all part of the process, all of it. Who the hell are you to know with certainty that you, specifically you, have the the eagle eyed vision to discern right from wrong? To somehow miraculously step outside of the tiny little context in which you live and know with 100% certainty that you are right.

You are the product of your surroundings, a container for thoughts passing through, a ghost in the machine. Don't be so God damned arrogant. You cannot know truth, you cannot know right. The world is unfolding as it should.


What exactly is your point, other than ad-hominem attacks?

OP made no claims to know that “good” is other than

> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.

Struggling to see a world that would consider incitements to violence as a “good” thing. I mean sure it’s possible, but so far away from our reality as to be entirely pointless as a basis for argument.

> nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon.

What does Nazi Germany have to do with any of this? That was a government suppressing a minority population and invading Europe. Your not suggesting that AWS is about to attempt the same thing?

> It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action

Glad we agree that people at AWS who have a strong belief to drop Parler are allowed to act on those beliefs.

> The world is unfolding as it should.

Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?


> Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?

I'm annoyed with the histrionics. Making arguments from places of moral outrage. Of extreme emotion. Each looking at the other with righteous indignation. Unable to see that what they feel is what the other side is feeling. What is needed at a time like this is for people to step outside of themselves. To understand that they do not know everything, that there is more than one way to think and to live. To be humble. When their amygdala screams that the other is dangerous, that the other is alien and dark and inhuman... To breathe, to understand their own weaknesses and move forward from a place of humility.


Please, spare us the accusations of arrogance. If you think our interpretations are dubious, tell us why!


Oh come on, this is a not very old debate, and within living memory of many of us we actually had to fight against the Nazis and then determine how best to prevent fascism from taking hold. This is the basic debate about government. This is why any technologist who hopes to influence the world should read deeply of history and the prior debates along these same lines.

The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance, where we must stop some speech in order to make room for as many as possible. Fascists hate this, because fascists are the ones who demand total and perfect freedom to act and speak as the wish, up to the point of being allowed to perform violence on those whose speech they don't like. Which is why the fascists were chanting "Hang Pence" as they stormed the capitol.

Don't you dare try to accuse me of being arrogant for judging fascists, and don't you dare accuse me of trying to be the ultimate arbiter of good and evil. I can name fascists as unacceptable to society without being an ultimate arbiter.

We are in dangerous waters in the US, and all our words mean something right now. Will we fall for the lies of the fascists who say "let us violate all social norms with our speech, and we promise we woke take over with violence than force you to follow our norms with violence," or will we stand up to them and enable as open a society as we can?


So the slave holders who were all adamant that owning slaves was cool, they were totally right to not question their own views? They believed they were right. You believe you are right. Create a logical argument for me describing how you just know you are right.


You seem to be asking me to jump through some hoops to distinguish what I posted from justification of slavery. Also, as best as I can guess, you are advocating for nihilism.

How "logical" is it to say that because I have some values, they are indistinguishable from justifying slavery?

This sort of "there is no truth or good or bad" is exactly the sort of reasoning that's used to brainwash people into supporting anything and everything. Because once there's nothing true, there's nothing false.

If somebody is feeding you this line of reasoning, or some group, or some forum, I would recommend trying to reconnect with mainstream human thought and value of human life for a bit, and see if the nihilism still seems logical. Try to read a mainstream history of the Nuremberg trials, for example. Or read a book about the Reconstruction and the oppression that happened even after slavery was abolished.


I've held a position of cautious moral relativism since my early teens because I think carefully and try not to be reactive.


> "The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance"

It never ceases to surprise me that people wave around the Paradox of Tolerance as if were an immutable law of physics rather than merely one philosopher's opinion among many.


Which people would be doing that? Since you quoted my "clearest guideline" text, are you misinterpreting that as "an immutable law of physics"?

It seems that if you can't deal with what was stated and have to fabricate positions in order to argue against, that you are not posting in good faith.


Why would anyone quote or expect others to follow a guideline if they didn't believe it was true? Please provide a counterargument instead of using thought terminating clichés[0] like "not in good faith".

[0] Sorry for the jargon but there isn't a better term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...


So you are claiming that it is I who "wave around the Paradox of Tolerance as if were an immutable law of physics" by referring it to as "clearest guideline I have seen"?

This is a complete misrepresentation of what was written, as if you were talking about somebody else's comment. It is bad faith to misrepresent the position of others, not a cliche.


> If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

That's some Grade A corporate apologetics there. How can you assert this? Who decides what is going to get you "shut down in the public square"?


Who determines what speech gets shut down in the public square? In the US, it's a mixture of courts and legislation setting laws and their interpretations, lawsuits establishing damages for certain types of speech, and then of course cops on the ground making individual decisions on a case by case basis and using violence or threat of violence to arrest people.

I am not sure how any of this is apologizing for corporations instead of any other aspect of our system though...

Edit: For the lawsuit aspect of shutting down speech, check out this very topical lawsuit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/11/cybersecu...

Even if this particular suit fails, I hope that it demonstrates that there are entire bodies of law set up to silence some forms of speech.


> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no

Right. Even the Post Office is not required to deliver pipe bombs.

The issue is that right now, that's not the standard. Amazon /hasn't/ taken down sites in the name of political censorship, but it /could/. The implications of that are important, and they're why I find it hard to be satisfied with justifications like "Amazon is a private company, they can do what they want".


This is what everyone decided they wanted twenty years ago. Loss of public space was a huge topic of conversation, and the end consensus (IMHO) was that the internet itself was the public space and everyone was free to make something.

From that perspective this looks like a conversation about ease of access rather than free speech. Amazon's the only way to build something on Amazon, but nothing's stopping me from creating something myself.

I don't see being able to buy eyeballs on the cheap as a fundamental right. If you care enough, build it. If others care, they'll come.


Right now, the US military could side with Trump, launch a fascist coup, start rounding up enemy politicians for assassination, and eliminate any freedom at all for anybody who doesn't who enough MAGA support publicly. They haven't, but they could, and it's happened frequently enough in other countries.

Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.

So my question is, why the F are we even talking about Amazon? Because it's just a BS distraction from the elephant in the room.

It's time to stop engaging with sophistry and fight back the fascists that are trying to take away all our freedoms. And this big fear of big tech is exactly the type of distraction that lets fascism flourish enough to gain a stronghold.


> Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.

Politically motivated refusal of service by Amazon or other Silicon Valley firms is at least an order of magnitude more likely than any coup by the US military, much less a Trumpist one.


Preposterous, the ranks of Q anon and MAGA are filled with ex-military and law enforcement. They flashed their badges at the Capitol police force! We are that close!

Meanwhile, this political shutdown is pure theory, a straw man floated to distract us from the violence that seethes on the platforms used to organize a fascist overthrow of the government.

But even if we take your probability assessment, the damage times the probability places a violent military coup as a HUGE problem compared to Amazon stopping business with someone.


Wow, maybe all that "defund the police" stuff was right?


I’m curious what was your estimate of the likelihood of what happened last Wednesday before it happened? Were your priors updated in any way since then?


I can't speak for OP, but long before the election, I was expecting violence around the US if Trump lost.

I didn't predict an attack on the Capitol, but it didn't really surprise me, either.

I speak as a conservative who is aggressively anti-Trump but believes many of his voters would not condone what happened at the Capitol.


Many may not support it, but nearly half do including many elected Republican politicians. This isn't a fringe Trump supporter issue, but a major issue within the Republican party and with American conservatism in general. Maybe the perception of conservatives being censored is just a reflection of the reality that they support using violence to obtain their goals at much, much higher rates than liberals do and are just suffering the consequences of their actions?

https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/


Thanks for the numbers. Good to see some evidence my hunch was right - I'd say 43% of the sample is "many".

YouGov speculates in their presentation of the data they gathered that perhaps more Republicans approved because they saw the actions as basically peaceful:

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

That belief strikes me as crazy, but if they genuinely didn't think there was violence going on, hard to read it as being okay with violence.


That's basically my thinking as well, for what it's worth.


I'm pretty sure violent rhetoric is an entire ocean apart from mailing literal bombs..

Or are we still on that "words are violence" thing? I can't keep up.


If you're so tired by the incitement of violence, what do you think about what BLM did last year?


>If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

That's completely absurd. Tens of thousands of people are silenced by corporations every day for speech that is considered offensive by one metric or another, but is by no means illegal. An associate of mine was permanently banned for, "deadnaming" someone else. Certainly very offensive according certain standards but hardly something that you wouldn't be allowed to say in the public park.

You can reasonably argue about the right of private corporations to choose to do business with who they want, but you cannot reasonably argue that people are only being silenced for explicitly illegal behavior that would also be illegal offline.


The delusion and mania gripping the country is evident by the downvotes to the above post. It is beyond dispute that the standards used by tech companies to silence people go far beyond speech that violates the law. Reading the TOS of any of these tech companies will confirm this. Its rather astounding that otherwise intelligent and presumably literate people are so jarred by this statement of indisputable fact. Unfortunately its impossible to have a thoughtful, reasoned discussion about the free speech issues raised by recent events when so many are living in denial of reality.


There's two different sorts of "you" here. There's the big platform of "you" that AWS shut down, that was shut down for the not-allowed-in-public-sphere speech.

Then there are the "you"s that are posting on individual platforms that get to choose their own standards of conduct. AWS stopped business with a platform that would not be allowed in the public square.

An individual that got banned for dead naming can just start another account anonymously, as far as I know.


If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs? Despite retaining access to hundreds of unmoderated channels by which I can communicate?


>If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs?

That's completely unrelated to the issue at hand - whether or not you'd be able to ramble insanely or make personal attacks in a public park (you would).


> these private companies control communication.

I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication.

Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault?

> All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies.

Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.

That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value.

> The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said

It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach.

I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.


“Control communication” is intentional - Content is scanned to understand intent, promoted/demoted based on an invisible algorithm, and your communication can be labelled or shut down if you have a dissenting opinion. In-between your conversation political adverts are inserted, specifically tailored to your demographic data and personality profile (and rather than encouraging you to vote for the party, they are actually designed to disenfranchise you and make you not vote for anyone).

This isn’t a future dystopia - this all already happens on Facebook. And that’s why this involves a level of control over being a neutral communication channel.

> Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.

Yes be thankful to mega corp. mega corp good. Mega corp has our interests at its heart.


The difference with the phone companies is you’re talking one on one communication. Not a publishing platform which is what these social media services really are. You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort.

Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing).

Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled.

If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather.

If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process.

Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me.

You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash.

And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance.

“ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”


> You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?


Well Signal is free and open source. So feel free to boot up some servers on any other platform, or your own hosting and run it from there. Maybe signal the foundation needs to pay more or move platforms to support the app and make it easy to install, but again, why would or should AWS, Google, Apple be forced to host them? Don't those companies have a first amendment right to block speech they don't like?

It's like walking into the mall or public place, and saying, "You have to broadcast this message to everyone because 'freedom of speech'"".

In fact it's better to assume that private companies have such ability anywhere in the world. Signal fosters more access to defy censorship precisely because it realizes that. Making the software open source is how you allow people who need such tools to have them available.

And honestly... you've got the airwaves. It's called radio. Shortwave, can reach halfway around the world.

Again, the entitlement to these services astounds me. The internet didn't exist 40 years ago.... and now somehow the ability to assault people with misinformation, provide unfettered access for propaganda from state actors, permit the dissemination of hate speech is being called a right??

It makes no sense, and is completely devoid of historical perspective.


Like it or not private companies currently have a monopoly on the communication infrastructure of our planet. There is no "public option" for AWS. If they have a monopoly (which Apple and Google clearly have on the app store), then it comes with specific obligations to not discriminate and a requirement to provide services to everyone equally. That's the price you pay for banning competition from the market.

If Apple and Google allowed alternative app stores in their ecosystem, then there would be no problem with them kicking off any apps for any reason under the sun.

The argument is more nuanced for AWS as there are viable private competitors. However, it is stunning that they would cancel their contract with a customer by giving them only 24 hours notice. It's making me seriously consider why I would trust AWS as a partner.


> censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said

But you have to keep in mind the other side of that - the protections around freedom of speech were put in place at a time when it was inconceivable that a majority of people in the country had the ability to be seen and heard _by the majority of other people in the country_. In near real-time, anytime. And that they could do so in a way that meant often they did not have to accept any consequence for the wider-ranging effects of their words.

Separately I also have to wonder if the knowledge acquired as a result of that would have affected their framing. In particular the advances in psychology and group psychology, and in understanding how it's possible to use this instant mass communication to manipulate even people who are on guard against manipulation.


> Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying?

Possibly, although... you're paying for your phone service. You're not paying for parler, facebook, twitter, etc.


Parler were paying for AWS.


You can send a letter in the mail, can't you?


Oh great, that totally resolves the dystopian nightmare we might be heading for!


I mean, the UK is still has vestigial Monarchal components as opposed to the US constitution which was built from the ground up with severe limits and federation of power. We'd likely see that distopia in england long before the US justice system can adjust itself to allow it.


Free speech and the First Amendment are not the same thing.

Free speech is a moral principle/ideal that exists independently of the US Constitution.

The First Amendment guarantees a certain form of free speech in the United States.

Private-sector censorship / restriction of speech is not in violation of the First Amendment. However, it may still amount to a restriction on free speech.


Fair, but in this case we're talking about a US company hosting another US company's data, so I think talking about free speech in the context of the First Amendment is reasonable.


It's not unreasonable, but I think it's incomplete. We may be headed towards a world in which private companies exert a great deal of control over what an individual can say. Not only by controlling communication platforms, but also by withholding employment from people who say certain things.

I don't want to join the argument about whether that's good or bad, but I think it's a huge mistake to simply say "It's consistent with the 1st amendment, therefore it's OK." If we're going to let private corporations use their market power to police individual speech, we need to have a real debate about what that means.


The distinction between private and public sphere is not completely clear.

Let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and asks him nicely to squish certain people, and MZ complies. Is that a First Amendment issue or not?

Or, let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and offers him some concrete support (in an anti-trust case or taxation matters) for squishing certain people, and MZ takes up the offer. Is that a First Amendment issue or not?

The trouble with both scenarios is that they are certainly possible and hard to prove or disprove. That is one of the reasons why concentration of power in a few hands (even private ones) may translate into bad politics.


I agree with everything you say, but I don't see that "free speech" needs to be the hammer you use to drive in that nail. Concentration of power in the few is bad for many many reasons independent of free speech.


When the government is threatening regulation against the private-sector because these companies don't censor, then I think this could potentially be considered a 1st amendment issue.


Consider this - If the conservative farmers and distributers individually decided not serve the bay area anyone, they are well within their rights.

Political ideology is not protected, regardless of how important you perceive basic accommodations like shelter, food, or communication are.


Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Sure, the Bay Area could start their own farms to meet that need, but I could hardly imagine the whole population living there saying "This is fine, they're well within their rights."

This feels to me like a situation of "fine for anyone to do, problematic for everyone to do". With political ideology not a protected class in many states, anyone is free to refuse service to an outspoken Democratic voter, but if a whole town did that it would be unthinkable. The specious answer of "just make your own business" wouldn't be practical in that scenario (are you going to start your own grocery, gas station, etc?).

To be clear, I'm not trying to make a defense of Parler; my understanding having never signed up is that it was an unmoderated cesspool.I am, however, trying to point out that the end result of individuals making totally reasonable and rational decisions within their rights can produce outcomes that most people would view as wrong.


> Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area.

Now consider that this exact scenario is currently affecting 23.5 million people in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert


This is a great example, I think it exemplifies the problem well. Individually, farmers/distributors absolutely have (and in my mind, should have) the right to avoid shipping to areas which would actively lose them money.

When everyone avoids those areas, though, bam: food desert.

I honestly don't know the right balance to strike here. On the one hand, I fervently believe that businesses shouldn't be forced to act against their interests. On the other hand, though, the sum of these individual actions produces an unacceptable outcome.

I'm sure there's some balance of regulation, incentives, and public-private partnerships that would strike a good balance here, but both the extreme solutions (Groceries can locate wherever they want vs. groceries have to establish branches in food deserts) seem to be totally unsatisfactory, at least in my mind.


At the time the constitution was written "everyone" in any given industry was thousands of small businesses each of which was only subject to the public pressure of the people in the town in which they were based. So it was literally unthinkable that a whole industry could deny service to one person. I bet if the founders had envisioned an entity as powerful as Amazon, they would have written in constraints for private entities too.


It’s not so much the farmers as it is truckers. CA has a lot of agriculture but some places like NYC have a very limited food supply. For some reason a lot of people have no idea how dependent they are on rural areas. I never forgot this tweet from some politician from out East who was flying back from Denver or somewhere and posted a picture of the ground below the airplane (farm fields with patterns from circular irrigation systems) and he says “No idea why the ground looks like that!”


But since this action appears coordinated across major platforms and likely in response to political pressure from the now in power Democratic party (Amazon is being paid for hosting, so no advertisers fleeing issue), I think there now may be a real first amendment issue.


>> free speech

> First Amendment

These things are different. First Amendment protections restrict the US government from censoring protected speech. Free speech is a broader concept that covers any restrictions upon speech, including restrictions that are legal in the US.

It seems that the right to free speech must be balanced against the harms that speech can cause, but I am tired of this meme that just because they're a private company, AWS et al should be able to block whatever they like. These tech companies have more power and knowledge than many governments of the previous century. We should be cautious advocating for a totally hands-off policy on how they use that power.