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I'm generally anti-regulation, but one potential consideration is to apply the same standards of eviction to cloud hosts as we do to landlords.
I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations.
Even if the landlord insists on a contract abrogating this, it's unenforceable. Policy restricts this because 1) landlords generally have very high negotiation power, and 2) tenants rarely read the fine print. It seems to me that both conditions are approximately true for the major cloud providers.
If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. AWS/GCP/Gmail/iCloud could ban you as a customer, but only with 90 days notice. Otherwise, immediate eviction could only occur if it involved legally codified egregious behavior, and would require a court judgement.
I think this would eliminate nightmare scenarios where somebody suddenly finds themselves locked out of their Google Drive and Gmail for some algorithmic mishap. But it would put very little operating burden on the cloud providers.
>I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations.
This is false equivalency. AWS didn't "arbitrarily" kick them out. If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts, a landlord can ABSOLUTELY evict you immediately in all sorts of states.
AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS.
I think AWS can very easily make the argument that continuing to host Parler when they're allowing calls for violence would do significant harm to their business.
Your equivalency is false. Parler did not make any change of behavior. Amazon knew very well who they were and what they did when they were making 100s of k a month hosting them.
Furthermore it is simply not true that Parler refused to work with Amazon. Parler's policy forbids hate speech and incitement.
What actually happened was, when the mob decided that Parler must go, Amazon gave them little no notice or recourse before shutting them down.
>Furthermore it is simply not true that Parler refused to work with Amazon. Parler's policy forbids hate speech and incitement.
Defenders of Parler keep repeating various versions of this, but it doesn't reflect reality. So either you're being lied to by their founder and taking him at his word and just repeating it without verifying, or you're intentionally misrepresenting what was actually on the site.
Amazon cited 98 examples of hate speech/calls for violence with included images that they had reported over weeks, long before "the mob" you speak of witnessed an attack on the Capitol and decided enough is enough. Odd choice of words too, "the mob" you speak of are freedom loving Americans who support the peaceful transition of power, even when it doesn't go their way.
> Over the past several weeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence. Here are a few examples below from the ones we’ve sent previously: [See images above.]
>It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation.
> Amazon cited 98 examples of hate speech/calls for violence with included images that they had reported over weeks
This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
It's evidence that moderation is a hard problem, not that no effort to moderate is made.
Twitter and Facebook regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content. Parler did not.
Sure, corporations will turn a blind eye to a lot for a little more profit, but this does not extend to supporting a platform full of people trying to violently overthrow the government.
Just think about this for a second: every major provider shut down seditious media shortly after what happened on 1/6. When's the last time Apple, Google, Amazon, Shopify, etc., agreed on anything in the same day?
They are not going to risk the lawsuits and possible market share loss to competitors unless they have an iron clad insurance policy. In my opinion, the only thing that offers that kind of policy is a very clear signal from law enforcement.
Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal. Whatever it was, it was scary enough to move every single cloud provider in the same direction within hours of each other. Despite this kind of coordination being more evidence for monopolistic behavior, they all came to the same conclusion: create space between us and anything related to the 1/6 sedition. Now.
> Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal.
Do you have any evidence for this at all?
There are several other alternative explanations for them doing this. There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
Also, you can tell that everything is broken when doing something anti-competitive makes it more likely for you to win an antitrust case against you.
Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content. There are plenty of articles saying they didn't censor violent right-wing content, but you'll have to read them to figure that out.
> There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.
> And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.
Why is the businesses and politicians aligning a significant thing for you? It should be terrifying.
Also no outside pressure? A small group of employees pushed this for the entire lot. That’s outside pressure.
> Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content.
It says this:
> Judging from the posts announcing that they've been booted, at least some of the banned Parler users seem to have signed up for the service precisely to test the limits of the app's so-called "freedom of speech" policy.
I read this to mean that people showed up to purposely troll hard enough to get banned so they could claim they got banned, and then they were. Your claim was that they don't "regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content."
> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior.
Even if there was outside pressure, you're still speculating that it was from law enforcement rather than the political branches.
How are you even sure this is the first time this has happened? Certainly it's the most high profile, but tech companies have been quietly disappearing "undesirables" for years.
> There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
Not if they get ground into dust by competitors just as they're hitting the exponential growth stage.
I will. In the past I have advocated for them maintaining their own interests. Now I will join the group asking for them to open their phones up. By gov force if necessary because they attempted to control speech.
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls of violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
The better comparison would be instances of hate speech or calls to violence that were directly reported to Twitter by its hosting provider for the express purpose of requesting that they be taken down. I'd certainly give you even odds that the number of such reports that Twitter both received and ignored during that same time frame was fewer than 98, despite the fact that Twitter is orders of magnitude larger.
No doubt there are instances of similar behavior that go under the radar on Twitter and every other comparable site, but once your hosting provider has contacted you about a specific instance that's probably a sign you should do something about it.
>The lawsuit parler filed states they deleted every piece of content (and more) that AWS brought to their attention. Moderation is hard.
From an Ars Technica article[0]:
"But far from getting cut off suddenly, Parler had months of warning, Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all."
And
"Representatives from AWS spoke with Parler executive leadership on both January 8 and 9 about the platform's "content moderation policies, processes, and tools," Amazon said. In response, Parler allegedly offered steps that would rely on "volunteer" moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze allegedly told AWS that "Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service."
I mean there's no way parler (up until recent growth explosion) was pulling in more than 1MM - with 30 employees I doubt they could afford to pay moderators. It's not fair to judge a small company by the same standards as established companies w.r.t. hard problems like moderation, but here many people are comparing them more harshly than they compare established businesses like twitter and facebook which routinely are used to incite riots and violence.
Twitter and Facebook both use AWS for hosting parts of their website. Both of them are top 10 clients of AWS, with Facebook being on the AWS's biggest clients.
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter.
I think at most this would allow you to accuse AWS of hypocrisy, but the point is moot since Twitter, while an AWS customer, does not host content on AWS as far as I'm aware.
Really though, it has no bearing. You can argue that AWS is inconsistent in its enforcement but it does not change whether they have the right to that enforcement.
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter.
This statement omits the fact that Parler's userbase originated from Twitter's crackdown on hate speech and calls for violence that got a fair share of them banned from the platform.
It is not meaningless at all. Twitter has no bearing on agreements between AWS and Parler. Just because Parler considers them a competitor doesn't mean they have anything to do with a two-party contract when they aren't a party to it.
That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable. If Twitter and Facebook can't do it then it's strong evidence that it's not.
> That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable
That’s a made up point, though. The AWS contract makes no mention of “reasonable effort” or anything like that.
Yes, it is worthwhile to compare moderation on Parler to that of FB etc, but it has no bearing on whether Amazon had the right to terminate Parler’s contract, which they absolutely did. Within the context of that discussion the comparison to FB and Twitter is just whataboutism. They aren’t Parler and they aren’t hosted by AWS.
in parlers lawsuit they state that they deleted every post AWS brought to their attention on top of other posts they moderate. If you read their policy pre-DC riots you'll see they very clearly have content moderation strategy explicitly talked about in both the ToS and the linked community guidelines. It was simply not their marketing talking about it a lot for obvious reasons.
As far as I can tell there's zero evidence that moderation didn't happen with anything that was reported.
>During one of the calls, Parler’s CEO reported that Parler had a backlog of 26,000
reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service.
They were clearly lying when they claimed everything had been deleted... Their content moderation strategy is based entirely on volunteer moderators. You can keep claiming that AWS is just trying to deplatform conservatives but that's just not what happened.
I'm not sure how you're reading that - it's clearly showing they were trying to delete everything but the backlog was outpacing their ability to moderate. As I said, moderation is hard.
And why would you take Parler’s word for it? When your entire marketing is based on a lack of moderation and you have this insane backlog of offending content, but you look to their TOS as a source of truth and intent, you’re being disingenuous and willfully ignorant.
why would you take anyones word for anything? I'm sympathetic to the underdog that's being targeted so I have my bias, but I have a hard time watching any platform (I've never used parler) get targeted because of politics. I have a hard time believing that anyone truly believes parler was the primary reason DC riots happened just as I have a hard time understanding that people actually think this targeted de platforming will somehow create fewer extremists. In my mind it's rather obvious political targeting creates extremism and there are a number of platforms those extremists can use to communicate.
Lots of things are hard. It's not AWS's problem that your job is hard. If you can't do the hard work to run your business, your business doesn't get to run.
If AWS cancel any customer that fails to succeed to an entirely arbitrary standard at problems that are "hard" then yeah, it kinda is AWS' problem. Or more specifically it's now Silicon Valley's problem because when these firms make identical decisions within 24 hours of each other nobody in politics is going to treat them all as unique and special snowflakes. The left have seen that they can apply pressure to get anything that isn't controlled by leftists erased from the internet, so they're going to amp up the volume 10,000% now. And the right have been complaining for years that tech firms have been captured by the censoring left - how will anyone ever convince them otherwise now? Claiming that Parler was full of Nazis? It's a tired strategy, it doesn't work anymore, the left describe anyone who isn't the left as Nazis and fascists. It won't convince anyone.
That's obviously not the case. It's very clearly Parler's problem. I don't see why AWS should accommodate a customer just because the customer's problems are "hard".
The rest of your post is basically irrelevant imo, I'm not going to respond to rhetoric about party.
If you're 26,000 pieces of content behind, might 98 of those 26,000 be the ones you've been asked specifically to address by the other party in your contract?
Why is a backlog of 26,000 tasks acceptable? Why can't they auto-flag things upon report and hide them pending review? This is not a hard technical problem. This is a people and motivation problem.
Try getting 26,000 flagged operations behind when the flag is OFAC or underage porn and see who shuts down your business.
You think parler is a site of thugs because that's all you've seen. Just the same way you don't understand twitter to have tons of thugs because of what you've seen. More people have been killed and linked to #killallmen (which has trended nationally on twitter multiple times) than died at the DC riots. There's plenty of room for subjectivity, but I do think it's objective to say thugs exist on both platforms.
That's not correct. Amazon advised them that they were encouraging violence, and had already reached out to them about this issue. They had responded that they would use volunteers to moderate their content, but Amazon (IMO quite reasonably!) saw that they had not moved fast enough, and were skeptical that it would work anyway.
Then the violence erupted in the Capitol, and Amazon's hand was forced. They had been violating Amazon's terms of service, and they did not do enough to resolve the issue, in a timely enough manner. Therefore they no longer got to use the service.
So it was basically, "hey can you please change this... OOPS too slow LOL. Nope, not our fault, you didn't do shit, canceled!"
C'mon! IT playing dumb is so stupid, they knew it, they knew what company they were going to host. Parler's whole point was to host conservative voices, yet the attitude is to pretend it's a surprise, shrug and then have a stupid reason like they didn't act fast enough. It's not a genuine response, it's an obvious attack and an insult to anyone paying attention.
Isn't it the exact opposite? They were given lots of time to fix this and didn't. Something very bad happened which was partly caused by their inaction.
It seems the timing was more of a cover for what they already had planned, or at least not every chance was given. Small features in large apps take months, and big features easily take a year. It didn't seem in good faith IMHO, granted this isn't just AWS at the moment.
Ok, but that's not an excuse right? If your platform is too immature to be effectively stopping/mitigating child porn from being published, you don't get the chance to say "yeah but it'll take a while to write the code". They always had the option to shut down while they fix the problem.
Actually, it appears they had given them plenty of time to implement proper moderation practices to prevent incitement of violence. Their response was inadequate. They were removed from Amazon.
You seem to imply they only got 24 hours to resolve the issues on their service. That's not accurate.
Incitement of violence isn't measurable. The US had autonomous zones and communication was allegedly through Twitter.
It is a cheap excuse to take blame from the actual perpetrators to inconvenient platforms.
I like unfiltered platforms very much and Parler wasn't that attractive, so I appreciate them being the fall guy. But I also have problems with blatant different weights that are used to measure transgressions.
From Amazon’s POV, the same sequence of events may look like this: people were kicked off from Twitter; they sign up for Parler; the amount of insurrection planning on the platform skyrockets; FBI starts calling Amazon; leadership decides they’ll rather take a lawsuit than risk being involved.
If Parler was serious, the owners would have hand-moderated the specific complaints Amazon made. Their response is like a streaming service that responds to a DMCA takedown by saying they plan on making it possible to comply sooner or later rather than immediately yanking the content.
I'm inclined to think the Parler mgt preferred this outcome, where they get to play victim, to actually moderating content and making their users angry.
Parlor did not get thrown out of the bar because of their "conservative voices", they got thrown out because they threatened the other drinkers with knifes, shat on the floor and pissed on the tables while shouting 'Fuck Yea America !'
You imply that all "conservative voices" are raging fuckwits, and while I long resisted that big brush view its becoming harder and harder to do. Especially when self-confessed "conservatives" just assert that yea, that's just the way we talk and act, fuck off if you don't like it. And now the conservative snowflakes scream blue murder when the same rules are applied to them.
Well if they are not all like that... then why censor a whole network? I guess Parler must not be a private company... all other platforms censor their own way not according to American Law, yet other smaller platforms can't do it their way? Sure, they decided to use AWS, that was dumb in hindsight, but still the scale of it and timing is scary. In other words, you can't be a private business and use AWS, they will own you.
For contrast, YouTube was knowingly and illegally hosting pirated content for years before Google bought them and developed ContentID, and relied entirely on volunteer moderation (user flags) to detect it. Facebook has up until very recently relied entirely on user flags for moderation. Google web search is theoretically entirely unmoderated. And so on.
Valley firms built their financial success on being content neutral and even turning a blind eye to blatantly illegal content until they found ways to automate enforcement (or not), but are now forbidding competitors from being the same.
You don't recall Parler doing that either, because they didn't.
Now if you compare apples with apples, can you recall people using Google to research how to do bad things? Sure. Plenty of people who went to prison after police found they'd been searching for stuff like "how to hide a body" or bomb making instructions.
This does not read like they wanted to cooperate. 7 weeks is a nothing for a large feature. Apple gave them 24 hours which is a joke, if not an insult. Features are complex in large apps that are social networks (which in fact are dozens of apps under the hood, on the backend and frontend).
If they really wanted them to implement some content moderation, it would have been more time, not to mention a clear specification for the feature changes they want, to prevent the solution from getting rejected again.
Apple didn't give a reasonable timeframe to respond, but that is typical for them. The 7 weeks Amazon gave absolutely is reasonable: if this was a priority for Parler they could have put some effective measure in place.
>If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts
Ironically, this also feels like a false equivalency to me. I don't believe Parler was putting Amazon/AWS at risk in terms of legal liability (I'm pretty sure in the US you can only sue a hosting provider for material they host if it is copyrighted material and they don't take it down when they receive notices. A Google search didn't turn up anything else.) They also weren't at risk of bringing AWS down.
What really happened, and should be plain to anybody is that something really awful happened last week that shook the country to its core. Parler played a role in that happening, and tech companies didn't want anything to do with them because of that. Both for reputation reasons and I'm sure personal feelings of large swathes of their employees (including leadership.)
I don't actually think they were wrong for what they did. I think private companies should have the right to make such a decision. The problem for me is that these companies were in a position to wipe something out like this in the first place.
This isn't what the web was supposed to be. First it was the switch by most people to using a phone that is locked down as their primary computing device.
Now even websites are subject to unregulated private company control. After all - even if you set up your server somewhere, what's to stop CloudFlare or Google or anybody else who run these huge DNS services from simply blocking the domain? (assuming you can even keep one registered) Etc...
I often hear the argument "Private company, they can do what they want" but at what point does a private company become so powerful that we really do need the government to step in? I've also heard people say that this isn't a slippery slope because it's all terrorist/white supremacist websites so far, but I think to this article I read a while ago about how Apple had decided to ban apps that had anything to do with vaping. This was when some people were dying due to bad black market cartridges.
Vaping isn't illegal. It isn't hateful. It also isn't inherently harmful. People used those apps for legitimate reasons. Some of them used iPhone sensors through APIs that aren't available for websites/web apps. And Apple just decided "Nope, you don't get to exist anymore".
I was not a Parler user and I do not support the attack on the Capitol. I also don't vape. But both of these things do bother me. And they should bother everybody.
Vaping is, I think, fairly harmful. But it is absolutely clear that the government should step in and say no to these companies who are in the business of deciding which other companies are allowed to exist.
This isn't just about "other companies" though - that's what is so crazy to me about this. We've reached a point where the idea of creating and providing software is almost exclusively thought of through the lens of capitalism. That's so dystopian.
I notice it in other areas too like verbiage such as "business logic" or "product owners"
AWS doesn’t have the power to wipe people out that don’t tie their stack to them. Parler could’ve avoided this, it’s not AWS fault that Parler could t move.
How AWS-specific your code needs to be depends on which AWS services you're using and how you use them. An EC2 instance is just a Linux system, as is a Lightsail system.
Other systems like MinIO and Ceph have S3 interfaces for object storage, so the code could be kept. Operationally you'd need to retrieve it from Amazon S3 and re-store it. RDS is an export, transfer, and import away from being loaded into a normal database server, but that can take quite a bit of time.
Getting geo-sensitive DNS and implicit testing of backends out of Route 53 isn't so simple. Getting stuff out of Lambda and onto a commodity platform isn't quick and easy. If you have data in Glacier there's a substantial lead time to recover your first byte.
Depends how much prep they did beforehand. Lots of businesses have contingency plans for negative situations including needing to leave AWS, and they're far less likely to get booted. I’m not sure why they didn’t just start with Epik; they already host Gab and won’t give a crap about what Parler does.
FWIW the Parler CEO claimed 12 hours, an obvious falsehood, and that’s now being used against him in his lawsuit against AWS.
Most probably couldn't. But most will likely never have to think of that. Parler's inherent value proposition increased this risk and they were foolish not to consider and plan for that.
Risk management is part of the job. Businesses that don't do it properly will often fail. Sometimes this is an unfortunate thing, sometimes it's a happy accident.
Parler set themselves up for this by not going with their own servers but wimping out and using a cloud provider. Get a high speed line and host it yourself straight up. Save money too.
>Ironically, this also feels like a false equivalency to me. I don't believe Parler was putting Amazon/AWS at risk in terms of legal liability (I'm pretty sure in the US you can only sue a hosting provider for material they host if it is copyrighted material and they don't take it down when they receive notices. A Google search didn't turn up anything else.) They also weren't at risk of bringing AWS down.
You seriously don't think with the amount of publicity Parler was getting, that AWS' reputation was going to be hurt? When my Dad is talking about Parler and AWS it has become a PR nightmare...
>I often hear the argument "Private company, they can do what they want" but at what point does a private company become so powerful that we really do need the government to step in?
If the private company is "so powerful the government needs to step in" then it should be through breaking up a monopoly. But it turns out AWS doesn't have anything approaching a monopoly in hosting, so it would be absurd for the government to step in. There are literally THOUSANDS of other hosting providers out there.
What you're seeing is that nobody agrees with the hate speech Parler is selling, and nobody wants to host it. That is the free market at work.
>Vaping isn't illegal. It isn't hateful. It also isn't inherently harmful. People used those apps for legitimate reasons. Some of them used iPhone sensors through APIs that aren't available for websites/web apps. And Apple just decided "Nope, you don't get to exist anymore".
So don't buy an iPhone? Buy any number of android phones that don't require Apple or Google's app store. If you want the government to dictate who companies do business with, you aren't for capitalism or free market, that's all there is to it. Parler isn't a protected class, vaping isn't a protected class, nobody should be forced to do business with them if they don't want to.
>If the private company is "so powerful the government needs to step in" then it should be through breaking up a monopoly.
I definitely agree that the government does need to break up some large tech companies. But I don't agree that that should be the only form of regulation. I think the government should regulate technology companies in several ways. Here are some no brainers:
ISPs - Net neutrality required. No data caps allowed.
Device manufacturers - Right to repair. Can't lock down the device the way that gaming consoles and mobile phones (and TVs, etc...) often do.
Cloud providers - Greater privacy protections like they have in Europe.
>There are literally THOUSANDS of other hosting providers out there.
You're glossing over the other infrastructure examples I named. We're talking about a cumulative effect here. It makes me uncomfortable that key parts of the internet's infrastructure are controlled by private companies with little to no regulation on what they can do. And I feel like it's getting worse every year.
>So don't buy an iPhone? Buy any number of android phones
Not everybody gets to choose what phone they have. Maybe they got their phone handed down to them or donated to them and can't afford to buy a new one. For a lot of people, their phone might be their only computer. Also, vaping was just one example. Apple routinely blocks apps and only backpedals if the app creator has enough clout. They tried to do it with the open source blogging platform WordPress a few months ago.
If there were regulation in place that Apple could maintain their own app store, but couldn't block or make it difficult for regular users to install other apps then nobody to choose. Same thing with like a gaming console - buy a gaming console and you could install Linux and use it as a general purpose machine without having to break some encryption scheme.
It's clear that maintaining an operating system/platform is an expensive endeavor - and maybe it just isn't feasible for more than those two operating systems to exist. That's where regulation comes in. There need to be ground rules especially when the barrier to competition is so high.
>Parler isn't a protected class, vaping isn't a protected class, nobody should be forced to do business with them if they don't want to.
So companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they're not discriminatory/racist about it?
I am really trying to understand your perspective on this, because it's so obviously not true. Companies are regulated by the government and limited with what they can do in a lot of different ways.
Net neutrality is a form of regulation that I am advocating for - and it sounds like you're in support of it too which would seem to contradict this.
I was looking at some of your other comments on this subject and saw you posted this one day ago:
>Maybe Cloudflare et al should also be required by law to serve everyone regardless of content.
You're advocating for regulation of tech companies here too.
Let me clarify. I support net neutrality. Including DDOS protection in that is to ensure that you can't be taken offline even if every hosting provider in the world hates your guts and you have to self-host (as might be the case for a lot of the people and organizations being banned these days). And I'm not an expert on DDOS mitigation, so it might be that you don't have to require even them to serve everyone.
I was pointing out the irony that net neutrality was repealed under this same administration.
I am yet to be convinced that "neutrality" or a requirement to provide service regardless of content should be enforced by any government regulation above the network layer.
Companies IRL have the right to discriminate against their customers based on their speech. If I walk into your bar and start insulting other patrons it's totally legal for you to kick me out. And in fact if you fail to do that, your other patrons might leave and never come back.
I don't see why that shouldn't extend online. Except at the network layer. Because if you don't have that, you can't have any speech online. Which is also unjust.
I think this is self-consistent. Feel free to tell me if there are any holes in it.
First of all, this is a great reply and yes it does clarify your viewpoint. I really value that it's possible to have discussions like this on the internet.
>I am yet to be convinced that "neutrality" or a requirement to provide service regardless of content should be enforced by any government regulation above the network layer.
I agree with you. I wouldn't be in favor of a government regulation at the level of social media that would prevent specific services like Facebook or Twitter from banning things. But the bigger problem for me is that we've all just decided that it's okay for really fundamental things about the web to be controlled by private companies.
The web was designed to be an open system and it's slowly being more closed in. There's still areas of openness, but they get smaller every year. And every time there's a new layer of restriction added there's always someone to point out that you still can do x y and z, it's just 10-20% harder than it used to be.
When apps for phones came out it was "Well, you can always just make a web app. They have no control over that." but consumers are less likely to use a web app and you don't have the same access to the device.
Now it's "Just move to a different hosting company!" which is disingenuous for several reasons. First, any company they move to is going to get pressured to drop them in the same way. Secondly, even if they did find a new hosting company that was okay with them, the pressure would just get applied to a different point (like Cloudflare.) You can roll your own hosting system but it's prohibitively expensive for most people especially if the site has a lot of traffic, DDoS and regular hacking attempts. The fact that web hosting beyond the basics is complex and hard is the reason that cloud services exist and are so popular these days to begin with.
So yeah, I think we're basically on the same page. I don't see this getting better. But I still think it's worth pointing out.
>The web was designed to be an open system and it's slowly being more closed in. There's still areas of openness, but they get smaller every year. And every time there's a new layer of restriction added there's always someone to point out that you still can do x y and z, it's just 10-20% harder than it used to be.
I agree with the tone of your post, but it's not the web that's open (every website is created/owned/controlled by someone), it's the Internet as a whole that needs to be open.
>When apps for phones came out it was "Well, you can always just make a web app. They have no control over that." but consumers are less likely to use a web app and you don't have the same access to the device.
I understand your frustration, but while we have freedom of speech and freedom of association, etc.
And while you certainly have a right to start your own business, you don't have the right to force others to make it easy for you.
Again, I understand your frustration, but what you're arguing for just doesn't make sense.
Why should other companies be forced to change their business practices to make your life/business easier?
That's a rhetorical question of course, but you don't have to treat it as one if you don't want to.
I don't think OP is asking for protections that renters would not have from landlords. For instance, we all know that illegal activity gets you kicked out immediately. You can't be running a brothel or crack house on the one hand, and demand 90 days notice on the other. At least not in my state you can't. No court judgement is required either, the cops show up and arrest you, you're gone. (In fact, in my state, if a landlord does not boot you in a swift enough fashion, the municipality can confiscate his/her property.)
So that's fine. The rules should be approximately the same as the rental protection laws in the state hosting the data center. If you're running a service that is objectionable, but no cops or feds are knocking on the landlord's door, then there should be notice given that your provider wants to boot you. Again, if the owner has a fed asking him questions about you and your service, that owner should be free to act much faster. No one questions that.
I would assume there is not a fed at your landlord's door because you skinny dip in your pool. There is probably something illegal they suspect of happening at that point.
In this particular instance though, with the Capitol falling, it doesn't help. Because I have to imagine that when the Capitol fell, there were a lot of feds knocking on Amazon's door. But, yes, as long as you're not doing anything that feds are at the door flashing badges about, you should be golden. If you are doing something feds are asking your landlord about, worrying about your landlord is a poor use of your time. You have bigger problems. (In fact, it's probable that your landlord also has bigger problems at that point. Feds generally don't make courtesy calls.)
I feel like if you read some of the dump recently released then you might suggest it’s worse than merely “distasteful”. Seeing a person say they want to round up people registered to a particular political party so that they can skin and murder their families in front of them is obviously pretty awful!
I also hate this conflation of conservative views and people calling for murder. I have a lot of very conservative family who liked Parler but didn’t like being lumped in with all the Qanon galaxy-brains.
The dump is "hacked data" that if I remember from two weeks ago, is supposed to be grounds for booting it off of every platform, yet archive.org is hosting it now and everyone is promoting it instead of banning links to it.
Assaulting and killing a police officer is a crime in most, if not all jurisdictions, though I'm not sure if that lets your landlord evict you if it happened in the next town or county or state over.
Sure, a landlord can evict you for damaging the property the rented you. But was AWS “damaged”?
And landlords cannot evict you for being charged with a crime and cannot evict you generally if you are convicted of a crime (some exceptions no doubt).
Parler agreed to abide by Amazon’s moderation policy and it agreed that it was responsible for the content of its end users.
My landlord has a ‘no parties’ clause in my lease because my apartment is in a factory and someone could be easily hurt if one of the machines turned on. I agreed to this contract. If I break it my landlord is within their right to terminate my lease.
I don't know where you live, but here your landlord could absolutely not throw you out on the street the next day if you throw a party, no matter what the contract says.
Depending on where you live, they absolutely can terminate lease and evict for convictions on a huge laundry list of crimes: violent crimes, crimes that were conducted out of the domicile (especially drug convictions) anything that causes irreparable harm to people or property, etc. even in places with very strong tenant-friendly laws.
Parler hasn't been found guilty of anything in a court of law and given the free speech protections in the constitution, probably won't be, so this sub-thread is irrelevant.
The correct analogy is that a landlord cannot throw you out on a whim because they don't like your friends or your friends get in trouble. And that is true.
It isn't Parler that committed (or arguably, even facilitated, see Section 230) illegal acts, it's (likely, allegedly, some of) Parler's own 'tenants'.
But most importantly, as made explicit in your links, it looks like the landlord can NOT evict the tenant himself, and still has to go both through the justice and the police system ?
Also it seems like that when "illegal activity" is mentioned, it has to be declared illegal by some court, or at least have been processed by the law enforcement ?
Also I note that this only holds in some of the states. (So arguably the laws that allow that might be 'bad'.)
Finally, while it's not as bad for AWS, for App / Play Store it's like only having two landlords in the whole Western World, and get evicted from both (one of which still allows you to set up your tent in his garbage dump).
> AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS.
This is not what Greenwald claims. Do you have any opposing evidence ?
Legally they have the right to refuse service but ethically they owe the public. However "Free Speech" does not entitle people to Freely Lie. As we have seen the wrong words from the right person can cause the loss of life. The police officer did not deserve to die to further the political ambitions of a few morally/ethically bankrupt individuals.
Parler can recreate itself on another platform if they wish. Gab is still up. It is just as disgusting. The Constitution only guarantees that Congress shall pass no laws prohibiting free speech. The last time I checked Amazon or Twitter cannot pass legislation.
Free speech is prevented by the use of force. We held an election. The results where not what some people liked. They tried to cancel the people's voice. That is the real speech suppression here.
It was people with guns and lead pipes, not lies, that hurt and killed people.
The principle of free speech is the idea that open discussion and debate is sufficient to resolve conflicts of ideas. Using force to end discussion is not free expression.
Of course there are limitations when fraud, slander, threats, and the like. But those should be considered in trials by peers or judges as decided in a fair court with due process. Again, words, ideas, and fair institutions are the rule, not decisions by the involved parties who happen to have enough power to get their way.
Thought experiment: Let us say that Anthony Fauci, well respected Dr., had a brain tumor and suddenly started telling people during a live TV interview to do something stupid and dangerous like drink bleach or expose their lungs to intense UV. Stuff so dangerous and stupid that only an idiot would think of it..
If he's sick, you do not broadcast his mental illness out of decency and respect. That's not the interesting thought experiment. The interesting one is broadcasting true believers in their right minds.
In those cases, you make the best argument possible to refute that drinking bleach us harmful... which honestly isn't that hard to make. The hard part is building up a reputation as being someone respectable and respectful enough to deserve attention. I think that silencing of sincerely held beliefs undermines efforts to actually persuade, inform, and make progress (and peace!).
>The principle of free speech is the idea that open discussion and debate is sufficient to resolve conflicts of ideas. Using force to end discussion is not free expression.
Absolutely. However, not all speech is protected speech. At least not in the US.
Speech can also be part of a conspiracy. And conspiracy to commit criminal acts is a felony.
Which is, as I understand it, what the issue is in this case. Apparently (if you take Amazon's word for it, and once the dump from Parler is available, we can see for ourselves if that's true), folks on Parler were planning acts of violence and insurrection on Parler.
Again, that's my understanding. And if that is the case, it's not just folks exercising free speech. It's folks planning violence and insurrection against the US government. Those are absolutely crimes and not protected speech in the US.
Check out the Gizmodo article; all of Parler has been dumped, because Parler had no authz on links, and huge amounts of GPS metadata got dumped. They have Parler users practically down to the room in the Capitol (modulo the floor). The jig is up for this Greenwald argument.
The whole thing is such a terrible, short-sighted justification. The logic being used is setting a precedent to ban or backdoor any encrypted non-moderated form of communication. e.g., Signal and Telegram.
So... Parler is worse because there is _minimal_ moderation, but _no_ moderation is totally fine? That doesn't really seem consistent with any set of guiding principles.
I don’t use either service, but the critical difference in my mind is that telegram is point-to-point or point-to-small-number-of-points medium whereas Parler aspired to be a means of mass-communication.
In my mind, one holds a different level of accountability when sharing private thoughts with friends as opposed to when wielding an insurrectionist bullhorn.
No doubt radical groups are sustained by access to private encrypted messaging, but they cannot grow into the sort of movement that fuelled the attempted coup that took place on 6January without wielding the reigns of mass propaganda.
I am all for freedom of speech, but liberty is not a death pact. We can’t sit idle while this group, that very nearly interrupted the peaceful transfer of power, openly recruits and plans their next attack.
I think you have it exactly backwards. The actual violent intruders last week absolutely coordinated plans around bombs / guns / etc via DMs and small private groups.
The mass gathering was propagated via Twitter-style broadcasts sure, but not the actual violent plots. Those will effortlessly move onto Signal.
Many were almost certainly radicalised through social and alt-right mass media though. You can’t blame the opening at the end of the pipeline for the water coming out.
Furthermore, I was checking in on right wing sites like theDonald.win in the lead up to 6 jan. The loudest voices all argued that the Democratic Party had systemically rigged the election, constitutional remedies had failed them, so the only response available was to fertilise the tree of liberty.
I didn’t sneak into a private telegram group or discord server. This is what these people were saying openly on popular websites that anybody could wander into without so much as making an account.
The same was true of charlottesville, sure parts were undoubtedly organised secretly, but facists like Baked Alaska were live streaming the whole thing - complete with antisemitic commentary.
Saying something like “Refresh the tree of liberty” or “hang the traitors” etc. still doesn’t rise to the level of illegal speech or an imminent call to violence which is the standard under the law. In fact, if you were to claim language like that crosses the line we would have to pull books off library shelves because the same language has been used repeatedly by politicians in American History. I’ve also seen similar language used in reference to Trunp like “He will get what’s coming to him if he comes to our city” etc.
It’s distasteful but it’s legal and part of our political culture.
Distasteful speech is legal and so is kicking distasteful speech off your private platform. The primary limitation on what businesses can and can't do with who uses their platforms are that they need to avoid affecting protected classes.
If you think we need to protect MAGA supporters as a class, I just flat out disagree that there's any cause for it. That group of folks are largely already brimming with privilege that protects them (see walking away from storming the Capitol after killing multiple people).
If you think that the government should force private entities to not enforce consequences to speech they disagree with, I believe the government would struggle to prove that that doesn't itself impact the free speech rights of the private entities and it face immediate law suits to overturn such a law. The 1st amendment protects us from the government, not us from each other.
In the context of discrimination law, there is a commonly-held misunderstanding that "protected class" refers to a group of people, but actually, it refers to a classification.
A particular race is not a protected class. Race is a protected class.
Also keep in mind Parler and Gab were explicitly designed for the far right that claimed wasn't being treated fairly by Facebook and Twitter (which we now know is not factually correct).
> For those asking the basis for that last claim: I spent the weekend reporting on the removal of Parler from the internet, including reviewing lots of documents and interviewing people associated with the companies involved, including Parler.
> The article will be up shortly.
(The article is the one this discussion is attached to.)
"The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
Greenwald literally says in the twit you referenced that zero active Parler users were arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion.
Evidence says: "GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...
"The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
It only seems inconsistent because you are comparing apples and oranges, signal and telegram are in a different category entirely to parler and twitter.
either way we need a law so this can be adjudicated and argued, and a legal process. not just the whims of the biggest corporation and oligarch in the world.
That's the thing that's pretty dumb here. Regardless of what anyone thinks about what happened, the Parler owners should have expected something like this to happen and planned for it.
Sure, but they don't need a "cloud". Just a hosting provider that would sell them enough dedicated servers to run the service. Like how everyone hosted a website before 10 years ago or so.
You're citing protection for residential tenants - the rights for commercial tenants are generally limited to whatever they negotiated in the lease.
And the protection for residential tenants isn't due to the difficulty of finding new accommodation, but the consequences of not finding new accommodation - homelessness. It's substantially harder for commercial tenants to find new space than for residential tenants, but they do not enjoy such protection as residential tenants, because the consequences - going out of business - are substantially less dire.
Given that anyone losing access to AWS faces consequences more along the lines of a commercial tenant being evicted, rather than a residential tenant being evicted, this analogy does not work.
It's even another level down from that. I haven't heard about their landlord kicking them out of whatever office they have. That would have its own real world knock-on effects like the storage of valuables and confidential material.
Arguably web hosting is more important to Parler but that makes their lack of prior communication with their vendors like Amazon that much more inexplicable. There are (or were, last I checked) plenty of hosting providers that cater to controversial websites. They charge a premium for not doing this kind of thing. Seems like they tried to pinch pennies in the wrong place.
AWS, maybe, but for App / Play Store it's like only having two tenants in the whole Western world, and both have evicted you (though one of them allows you to put your tent in his garbage dump).
> If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing
I can't say I agree or that I find this analogy valid. Tenant eviction protection is, in part, to protect human life acknowledging the necessity of shelter. The same just doesn't apply to cloud computing.
It's an analogy. None are perfect. But people need livelihoods to live. It's not okay or fair to destroy a business arbitrarily and capriciously.
My lesson here is that the Internet is essential infrastructure, and once companies reach a certain size (Google, Facebook, AWS), they should be regulated similarly to public utilities.
An electric company shouldn't be able to cut off electricity to a crack house or brothel unless law enforcement first asks for it. Law enforcement should have due process appropriate to the situation; a terrorist attack should be cut off right now. A company making pirated copies of Windows should have their day in court. Your propaganda-believing gun-toting drunk crazy uncle should probably keep their electricity (which isn't to say he shouldn't be handled somehow, but perhaps committed to a medical facility).
I don't feel good or bad about them being taken off-line, since I don't actually know what they hosted. I do feel bad about that decision being made by corporations behind closed doors.
It's more than just an analogy when the parent comment claimed that if you support one, you should support the other. I'm not disagreeing that the scenarios aren't analogous. I'm disagreeing that the same logic that makes one of those things essential to a functioning society should be tried to be wedged in as an argument for the other.
There is, perhaps, a slightly different power dynamic between you as a subscriber paying $9 a month, and you as a client of a huge near monopoly who can kill your livelihood at the whim of an algorithm.
That’s is because the electric company are monopolies created by the government. And unlike power utilities there are zero laws about which cloud provider you are forced to used.
Parler is not some rube. They are a company with access to legal counsel. They agreed to moderate their end users in accordance with Amazon’s content policy and chose not to. They made extremely stupid decisions they do not deserve to be coddled for.
Most utilities weren't created by the government. My local power company came from a series of merges of companies founded in the eighteen-hundreds.
The government, at some point, decided to regulate utilities. It certainly didn't create them or their monopolies. Most have a natural monopoly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly).
It was a good idea, at the time, and it's just helpful to update our list of what constitutes a utility.
>It's not okay or fair to destroy a business arbitrarily and capriciously.
Yeah! The employees of organized criminal gangs need to feed their families too!
They're honest, hardworking people. Why should they be penalized because the repressive system in which they live persecutes them for extortion, robbery, murder, sex trafficking and the like.
Arresting them and putting them in jail is just cruel and unfair!
>Arresting them and putting them in jail is just cruel and unfair!
Isn't this the point?
It isn't a responsibility of the electricity company or the landlord to investigate or apply punishments in criminal matters. Arresting them and putting them in jail is something the lawful authorities do, and there is a due process for it.
I think it's pretty analogous to a commercial tenant lease.
Commercial leases usually have limited contractual clauses to allow eviction of paying tenants within the, usually 10 year, term.
Of course because AWS/GCS/MCS are sort of an oligopoly, they don't have long duration terms.
Regardless of what end of this debate you're on, I wouldn't be surprised if more customers didn't start asking for lease terms.
If I were really any right-leaning media organization I'd really hesitate going to a cloud provider without some sort of durable contract. Think about - is Fox News at risk if it's on AWS? What about The Wall Street Journal? Even Bloomberg has pretty right-leaning opinion pieces often... should they be worried about their content triggering a backlash since there's no contract?
...or maybe we'll just see a resurgence self-hosted platforms?
> If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing.
Nope.
1. Kicking a company off of a cloud platform is not putting someone on the street without notice. Companies are not people, clouds are not beds.
2. It's the company's responsibility to manage risk, including the risk of getting kicked off of a platform. Most companies manage this risk by minimizing it - it's extremely easy, and well trodden territory. Things most companies will do is moderate content, it's pretty much dead simple. If your company won't do those things you'll have to mitigate risk in some other way.
3. You might argue "well companies aren't people, clouds aren't beds, but workers will lose their jobs". This is true, if the company has been poorly managed. But we already have nets for those situations. There's bankruptcy, unemployment, various tax benefits, notice to apply for a new job, etc.
I actually don't feel particularly compelled at all by your analogy.
Of course a landlord can throw you out on a moment's notice if your use of the property is illegal and presents a clear and present mortal danger to public safety.
Where I live, while the use of leased property in various unacceptable and/or illegal activities is a basis for canceling the contract and subsequent eviction (among other reasons more directly relevant to housing), one generally needs an order of court to evict a tenant if they protest. This applies to both housing and business proprties, though people's homes have greater protections.
Also, in some situations here the landlord may lose the grounds to proceed if they won't press the issue as soon as they become aware of it. This is exactly to avoid situations where the one side arbitrarily decides throw the book on whatever the other's activities they can pin down on them.
(Whether the comparison is adequate depends ofc if AWS has consistently made complaints to Parler about the objectionable content. Their message included a part where they pointed out they had requested moderation action earlier, so I suppose they have.)
I can see the issues relevant to cloud hosting are different enough so that analogies are not 1-1 anyway. In general, it is a good principle that content that encourages violence and other illegalities is removed from the public. It would be still also a good idea to have procedures where the hosted party could protest if they are engaging in illegal acts or other breach of contract claimed by other party and the enforcement is applied equally.
What kind of "clear and present mortal danger to public safety" would involve an eviction before contacting the authorities and likely arrest (followed by abandonment and eviction in absentia)?
Mere hearsay is not sufficient cause for eviction. Might be grounds for calling the cops, but not locking someone out of their home. For all the landlord knows it was a TV show.
Could you please find an example of a tenant being legally kicked out by the landlord himself without even involving the law enforcement or a court of law ?
Yep, on many states something as simple as doing drugs is enough to kick you out at a moments notice even if are making no damage to the property. A digital platform being used to orchestrate the destroying of government buildings as well as planning the kidnap of gov officials and making death threats should get more lenience? Get outta here.
Twitter can make a good-faith argument they attempt to remove content that is questionable or that incites violence–they can point to millions of accounts and posts they’ve removed for those very reasons. The ceo of parler can not.
This wasn't one of the ways Parlor was being used, was the ONLY way it was being used, there were not thousands of scientists, mathematicians or people from all the politican spectrum like Twitter there, so any comparison with big social networks is misguided to put it mildly.
Sorry, but I think you are being highly disingenuous. An ACTUAL equivalency would be a phone company throwing you off their phone system, while colluding with other phone companies and tech companies (not even related to the phone service) to also simultaneously ban you from using their services. Also, this is clearly politically targeted, while using words that hide this. Otherwise, please explain to me how all of them just up and decided to do this at once?
We as a society have said that is not ok for phone companies to do. Why are we making exceptions for what is now services that are holding a large portion, if not the majority, of online sites and services at this time?
Also, what evidence has been presented of illegal activity on this app and proof they were not following Section 230 law and refusing to remove it? How were they handling things differently from Twitter (or any social media site for that matter), who also has these problems with their service, and why is Twitter still able to be up? No, I don't mean AWS claims they weren't doing it. I want to know actual evidence. If the post exists, their should be screenshots of them still up now, no?
At this point, cloud services have gotten so large that they probably need to be regulated at this point as a public utility is.
To say AWS is the same as a rental/tenant relationship is laughable. If it was, there would be millions of different cloud services one could go to and this would be a non-issue. But, it clearly isn't close to the same.
Also, if illegal activity is being done (and this stuff was handled like a public utility, as frankly that is the size of these cloud services at this point), then that needs to be handled in a court of law.
I did read your post. You did not explicitly mention regulating cloud services as common carriers. If your policy suggestion is to enact more regulation for cloud services, and to treat them as common carriers, then I think things are little more clear.
What part of "At this point, cloud services have gotten so large that they probably need to be regulated at this point as a public utility is." was unclear? Please read posts in full before replying to them.
I think this is a form of what might be generally called "due process" -- something that is missing from many of the operational actions made by online platforms long before any of the recent incidents.
AWS cancelling a contract is not a criminal sentence. This is a business contract dispute between two private companies, neither of which is a part of the government. AWS took an action under the contract accusing Parler of breach. Parler sued in civil court to get the dispute resolved. This is nothing like locking people in prison without a trial.
Due process isn't some concept that is only applicable to government actions. IANAL, but I feel like contract law includes lots of elements of due process.
Due process is handled entirely differently in contract law than in criminal law. That's the damn point. Amazon cancelling the contract is entirely different from any situation in criminal law, where the state is already involved and the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt before one can act.
Buying a cheeseburger is also a type of contract. Can you imagine McDonald's having to reserve a court date to kick someone out of their restaurant for disturbing the other customers?
This is extremely reasonable especially in light of the fact that cloud providers intentional attempt to lock customers into proprietary apis that are designed to be challenging to migrate across clouds.
Tells us you don't understand the purpose of regulation.
The entire premise that regulation is bad is a disinformation campaign against rational thought. Do you understand how regulation comes into existence? Regulation is the result of someone, some corporation, some city, some legal entity abusing the public's trust to the degree a law is enacted to oversee future such situations because the general public has proved it cannot self regulate this aspect of the public's trust.
That is certainly the most optimistic version I've ever read of how regulation comes into existence. Nothing about this origin story rehabilitates regulations as a whole, however. Even if it were actually 100% true, it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad based on misunderstandings, the calculation problem, and other forms of unintended consequences. Clearly, there also exist examples of regulations enacted for less enlightened reasons.
The failure of our species to govern itself so laws are enacted is optimistic?
You're statement that "it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad" is sheer lunacy. Are you listening to yourself? If I listened to your logic, I'd expect airplanes to be falling from the sky, computers are not possible, and the moon landed must be fake - because they is no way, the misunderstandings, the calculation problem, the unintended consequences... humbug.
Kind of an easy question. What do you do if you find out a tenant is cooking drugs on your property? Same kind of thing is going to apply here. I imagine liability in either case is going to be a concern. I'm not worried for the huge hosts.
For a tenant: You call the police and they maybe get arrested. They're still legally allowed to enter the property until you evict them, which takes 30 days or more in most jurisdictions. You might be able to start eviction proceedings. You eventually sue them for damage to the property.
For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account.
In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days.
I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
Does action in such a case rely on accusation or conviction? This is a question, not bait, because I don't know but I assume it would require conviction which takes time.
DDoSing is already an illegal cybercrime in the US. A DDoS attack could be classified as a federal criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)[1].
Under Damaging a Computer, 1030(a)(5)
> The provision may also be used to prosecute
the perpetrators of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which occur, for example, when an attacker overwhelms a server’s ability to process legitimate requests by overloading the server with a flood of illegitimate traffic.
No, you're conflicting two different things. DDoS is obviously illegal as you're attacking someone else. The "forced to host a tenant that they object to" the other commentator is mentioning is regarding not liking their speech and ideas, not actions. Of course we should try to stop illegal activities that actively harm others. When it comes to Parler, it's unclear if Parler themselves were active in inciting the violence, just members who happened to be using Parler, or if they are related at all.
They are very similar. Both situations leave you in a situation where you are unable to respond quickly enough and can cause massive financial damage. Just because the situations are not identical does not mean they are not similar and that rules from one can't be moved over to the other.
I don't think google should be able to simply lock people out of their accounts and data without any notice for them to take their data out. I was hit by this personally when google docs locked on of the documents I was working on for school at a time I critically needed it. Their given reason was simply "tos violations" despite nothing in the document being a violation and they unlocked the document 2 days later.
You do not have a right to a Google account. You do not have a right to force them to store your bits on their servers. They offer a free service which they may revoke at their discretion. If you do not like those terms, you are completely free to use any of the other free mail services out there or host your own mail server.
I'm not saying I'm entitled to a google account, but I do think I should be entitled to fair warning that I am being kicked off. Google should be required to send me notice so I can get my data out and on to a competing platform.
Like with rentals, they can deny me service at the start, but once they take me on to the platform, short of a gross abuse of the service, I should be entitled to a warning before the service is terminated.
"I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. " Can a confectionary refuse to sell cake to a gay couple just because they are gay?
At least where I live, your home rental is far more protected than your business rental. It takes a lot to get you out of a house, definitely not a month’s notice under normal circumstances. It takes a normal breach of contract to lose your business rental.
90 days notice to spammers botnets and other undesirables? Ridiculous.
Edit: utterly ridiculous. Imagine applying the same standards to other physical businesses. Image a bar not being able to evict an unruly patron without 90 days notice or a court order.
This is frankly completely unworkable. And I think once the EU gets off their high horse they’ll find they have to accept that too.
Landlords? Let's take one step back. Just like in the Title I vs Title II debate, let's go one step earlier. WHY do we have these issues in the first place?
It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever.
Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am.
Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't
Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook.
Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line.
Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform.
You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have? Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!
Are you familiar enough with AWS contracts in general, and possibly the Parler contract specifically, to know they breached the contract? (Honest question, as you may be an employee of Parler, for example. HN is an interesting place).
I ask because contracts typically, despite their duration, contain a variety of exit clauses. In this case, Amazon could argue they were exercising a "compliance with laws" clause (if it was in the agreement) such as,
"<Licensee> will not use, or allow its products to be used, in violation of any laws or regulations."
It becomes a legal argument as to whether Parler's members that advocated violence against the government caused Parler to violate the clause, and whether that amounts to a material breach that triggers contract termination.
That is very different than a blanket statement that Amazon "breached that contract and bowed to the mob." In fact, Amazon can sue Parler for breaching the agreement and exposing Amazon to significant liability for (at the most extreme) aiding and abetting terrorism.
Note that I'm not arguing either way, simply stating what lawyers are likely discussing behind the scenes.
that is something that has to be proven in court, before playing any such cards
If that is the case and you defend it, then this is a very unique situation, where law is not enforced by state institution, but by Google, Apple and Amazon. The question is what law? As clearly it is not US law.
If there is breach to the law, then there should be article Nr of breached law, otherwise all of these arguments are nonsensical. Nowhere in the world - even in Saudi Arabia it is possible to be judged and sentenced by unwritten law - by nongovernmental entities. Otherwise it is unlawful lynching by mob and there are countries that allow those, but US kinda positioned themselves as a country that guarantees The Law. Now that guarantee does not work.
I don't have much to add to the sibling comment. It is purely up to the parties of the contract to determine if the other breached it. The remedies of that breach are specifically covered in the contract itself.
Nothing needs to be "proven in court, before playing any such cards." It needs to be asserted. Once asserted, there may be a cure period (the licensee might have 30 days to remedy the problem, otherwise the contract terminates).
The party may disagree, and could negotiate different remedies or timelines - again, no court is required here. However, if they can't come to terms, then they can pursue this in contract court.
Be aware that I'm not defending, or justifying, or taking a position on any of this. It's just how it is. If you don't like it, then work on reforming tort and contract law as opposed to stating on Hacker News that the basis of most worldwide commerce is "nonsensical."
It is not something that has to be shown in court beforehand. Amazon accused Parler of breach of their contract. That means the contract no longer exists. If a court finds that Amazon is the party in breach, they'll be liable for damages.
None of this is criminal law. It's contract law and it will be dealt with per the laws, procedures, precedents, customs, and traditions of civil jurisprudence.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Unless you know that the Parler/Amazon contract included a cure period, the specificity of that period, that Amazon hadn't notified Parler of contract violations previously (i.e., so they extended past the cure period), and also included no other relevant termination clauses (including termination for convenience), then we simply can't say that Amazon breached the agreement despite Parler removing content. There are a myriad of ways they could have fulfilled the agreement, and/or Parler breached the agreement with Amazon.
Please, separate legal arguments from emotional arguments. I'm strictly speaking legally.
Regarding Facebook, the choice to enforce, or not to enforce, a contract term is exclusively the right of the parties to the contract. Amazon may have unfairly chosen to enforce contract terms against Parler and not enforce those same terms against Facebook (for example; though I don't believe Messenger is hosted on AWS).
That's completely irrelevant; so far as I know, no law says all parties to all contracts must be treated equitably.
You will have a compelling argument when and if law enforcement chooses to crack down on child porn on Parler but not on Messenger. In this case though, you're comparing apples to baseballs: their similarities are vastly outweighed by their differences.
The terms of the contract likely are just that AWS will give them their money back. Pretty much all contracts have some sort of clause to allow you to break it with some penalty.
I... don't understand? You were an unpopular speech platform. I worked in porn for 20 years. I know what it's like to get kicked out of AWS, so does John Young. Why weren't they dockerized and prepared to move containers and backups at the drop of a hat? Why didn't they have hot spares elsewhere? There are literally thousands of hosting companies running the gamut from penny-ante to larger platforms like Rackspace, operating in a hundred countries, many of which don't know and don't wanna know what you're doing. The same is true to a lesser extent of registries. And Apple/Google kicking you out of their stores? You can still bookmark a mobile-friendly web app onto the home screen of an Apple device. You're not going to lose Qspiracy fans and nazis just because they have to do an extra step to get to your site.
Nevermind that maybe, just maybe, if your platform users advocate for violent revolution, you're going to have a harder go of things. Prior to approximately October, 2001, there was a taleban.com too. I didn't read any hand-wringing when they got the axe. Newsflash: At least Tor can't remove you.
The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom.
"The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom."
I think its more boring than that. Their platform was built by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Things like soft-deleting posts and auto-incrementing post IDs. This is why it was so easily crawled in a day before the shutdown.
This is the real answer. It was very clear they had no competence to make an app of this scale. It would have collapsed under its own weight before long.
The most common criticism I'm aware of is that it leaks information about your system and its users. For example, you can gauge growth by how fast ids grow, and relative age of accounts. The former is potentially financially valuable. Often the latter is exposed properly through the UI, but the that can be a choice, rather than exposed due to an implementation detail. There are likely other criticisms as well.
It makes it easy to crawl. If you're trying to get all of the user profiles for a given website and all of the URLs look like foo.com/user/123 it's easy to download all of them, whereas foo.com/user/1234-abcdef1234-1234 is much harder to guess.
There's nothing particularly wrong about it. Twitter does something like this with a bit of timing thrown in the mix, which is why some smart-asses have made self-referencing tweets:
I believe they also for a long time had a public API^.. and I'm pretty sure they soft-delete posts (bonus that they could revive the tweet down the track if it was a 'mistake'). I don't think the Twitter team are amateurs though.
Having monotonically increasing IDs for non-distributed systems removes the possibility of duplicate IDs. In distributed systems ID conflicts are unavoidable, and you might have less conflicts if you generate random IDs, as well as it becomes difficult for an attacker to guess IDs.
^ likely it would have been rate-limited, which isn't a problem if you've got a large pool of users you can authenticate with
> Having monotonically increasing IDs for non-distributed systems removes the possibility of duplicate IDs.
In parler's case, having monotonically increasing ID typed as signed 32-bit integer _guaranteed_ duplicate IDs once they reached 2.1 billion unique items. This is well-known failure mode, and yet it took them by surprise.
Okay.. I concede, 32-bit is a rookie mistake. I didn't know that. Wow. Did they not account for millions of daily active users in a Twitter competitor...
Exactly, these people don't want to put in the work. They just want to use shortcuts, but just as you're not entitled to an account Twitter, you're also not entitled to a cloud service provider.
Parler hasn't seen 1/10th the the deplatforming that The Pirate Bay has seen for example, yet that managed to survive throughout the years and is still up now. The reality is that whoever was running Parler had no clue what they were doing.
Its more that nothing they do can overcome the fact that everyone has blacklisted them. You can't run a site on the internet without having ISPs and DNS registers on your side at least. Even if they rehost somewhere else they will just be hit with the next level of blocks and have wasted the money rehosting.
Who says it is the end of the story for Parler? They came on the scene many years after Twitter and Facebook. They have a lot of catching up to do, with a lot less money at their disposal. In the early days, Twitter ran on Ruby on Rails, hardly a scalable decision, either.
what a ridiculous comment. it was a crowd of some of the dumbest people alive - some attempting to kidnap, injure, and kill lawmakers, some thinking that by entering the building they'd find an OVERTHROW GOVT button. Idiots.
anyone that tries to both sides this shit deserves eternal shame
I personally just want a social network were I don't have to worry about being banned every minute. (Not sure if PArler qualifies, but I suppose it is their selling point).
Depends how much time it will take them to be back up again : if it takes too long, most of their potential users will have moved on, for instance to Gab.
What makes you think they can't attract talent? There are plenty of libertarians in tech that would be willing to work with them, including this SRE right here. I think they had other issues. Perhaps they were just out of their league and didn't have the leadership capable of fighting fires while simultaneously recruiting, scaling, policing, etc. Typical successful startup skills that many people don't have.
I’m responding to a person who made this assertion, but designing your site in a way that non-users can archive all media uploaded to it seems like a good sign!
apparently it's harder for them to get back than they thought.
I guess they are now facing the equivalent of the Holywood blacklist. Dockerized setups will not help if you can't get an alternative host.
"Matze said that Parler had faced trouble in finding a new service provider, ... He also said that others had refused to work with Parler: "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_onli...
It is probably easier to find an alternative hosting platform when you are booted from AWS because of porn. In the case of parler they also might need to migrate more data.
Their lawyers bailing gave me pause. Suggests things are substantially more serious than Amazon, Apple, Google, and Twilio suddenly finding a paying customer distasteful.
I don't think it's unreasonable for Parler to attempt to create the same kind of mainstream platform that these other services enjoy. Their service is not criminal in nature. Regardless of what some may claim, their service is simply a social media platform. If you're a technical user you can probably figure out the 'Darkweb'. You can't blame them for not wanting to restrict their userbase to only technical users. They're trying to be a viable alternative to the Silicon Valley giants. That's a reasonable thing to do.
They provided ~90 example out of millions of posts and comments. I signed up to see what all the fuss was about and didn’t see any examples of violence whatsoever, other than some nutty conspiracy stuff and some vaguely violent language that wouldn’t be out of place on Vox or Mother Jones.
If a platform has ANY illegal content what standard is then acceptable? If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? If someone found 90 examples of calls to violence on Twitter would that make it OK to deplatform them too?
> If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%?
This sounds like you're trying to get us to pretend along that Parler had a moderation policy that was in any way effective, equally applied, or not just pandering to the crowd it was trying to entice.
> They provided ~90 example out of millions of posts and comments
This argument is problematic. In any criminal endeavor, what most of the criminals do isn’t illegal or even unusual.
When HSBC was laundering cartel money, they also served regular customers. They processed credit cards, gave loans and so on. 99.9999% legal activities and yet they were fined billions of dollars for fascinating money laundering operation of few murderous warlords.
If that’s your logic, then clearly Facebook and Twitter are 1,000x as guilty as Parler, considering that they have hosted extremely violent speech. The genocide in Myanmar, for instance.
This is about money and power, nothing else. Facebook is “too big to fail” so clearly it will never face any consequences, while Parler is a random little site that’s easy to pick on.
I do not object to the claim that FB/Twitter etc. are no better. I am simply pointing out that "arithmetically most of the things they did are harmless" is not a good argument. Most of the things Bin Laden did are benign, Him studying eating, partying, watching TV, taking a dump, playing a ball etc. probably accounts for %99.999 of his actions and being a horrible terrorist is just %0.001 of who he is, if we are looking for a benign/illegal ratio.
IMHO social media needs to be regulated, companies should not be able to simply cut you off from the rest of the public and you shouldn't be unaccountable for your actions and there must be ways for harm reduction. (if you tell/share a something, them maybe people affected by it should have right to equal exposure to challenge it. i.e. their POV could be attached to your post and everyone who interacted with your post receives a notification that the post was challenged)
Wouldn't the platform be protected by section 230? I imagine a large part of the reason Parler even exists is to abuse section 230, or get section 230 removed so they can then go after big tech, or call people hypocrites when only their service gets removed. But as it stands, isn't the service protected?
> The law allows for companies to engage in “good Samaritan” moderation of “objectionable” material without being treated like a publisher or speaker under the law.
My understanding is that the law simply says that doing _some_ moderation doesn't make you the publisher.
Perhaps mine is a bit of a strange/controversial view among the HN crowd - but I find the conflation of "right to free speech" and "right to a platform for said speech" to be odd.
I don't agree that "infringement of free speech" can happen in a commercial context. The right to free speech is the right that you cannot have government force act on you for what you are saying; e.g. the government has no right to tell you "don't say this or it will have consequences". As for private contracts: Trying to enforce "free speech" that must not be infringed upon in private contracts would also mean all NDAs are always void, and would be a huge intrusion into another liberty: That of entering into arbitrary agreements with each other.
The .cn regulator cracking down on Ant Financial because they did not like what Jack Ma said is an infringement on free speech. A private business actor deciding to terminate a contract because they don't like the business partner is not.
Free-speech-as-legal-right and free-speech-as-moral-principle are different: the legal right exists to uphold the moral principle. You're probably correct when you say the legal right can't be infringed in a commercial context, but the moral principle can be violated by anyone.
I think a lot of confusion comes from people who only acknowledge free-speech-as-legal-right encountering people who support free-speech-as-moral-principle.
The issue to me is that people view free-speech-as-moral-principle often as a binary choice. It's either "you allow all speech or it's immoral"
Here's the rub, I think most people also support limiting extreme speech. IDK that there are many (any?) defenders of someone shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.
That, to me, indicates that the morality of limiting speech is more than just a simple binary choice "any limits are bad, no limits are good".
That's what "Free-speech-as-legal-right" is really trying to get at. It is the law trying to make the moral arguments for what free speech is and isn't and when it can be morally curtailed.
To me, the law has struck a decent balance. I don't think it's hugely immoral for a social media company to moderate their own content however they choose. Are downvotes in HN immoral? I don't think so. Do people here in HN believe flagged content is immoral or content that goes against the community rules? I don't think so.
To me, the only way this would be an issue is if Parler had no method to get their platform running. That's not the case. They can self host if they so choose. It isn't unreasonable for them to do that (many companies do).
That being said, I DO have an issue with ISPs choosing what content their customers have access to. That is mainly because a lot of people DON'T have a choice of provider. There is often only 1 high speed choice in a region. For them to filter or block content is a major issue.
> It's either "you allow all speech or it's immoral"
Not really. There's not currently any huge controversy about banning spammers, DDoS attacks, or child pornography. A few fringe groups will argue it, but most sensible discussion concedes that censorship is useful and we need limits.
Tech companies aren't deciding what viewpoints are allowed. They are exercising their right of freedom of association.
Parler's moderation policies caused their own problems. They decided they wanted to be a platform friendly to violent extremists. Their noted lack of moderation of violent rhetoric, calls to violence, and planning of violence made them a pariah.
Amazon is free to associate with whoever they want. They don't owe service to Parler or anyone else.
So tech companies are editorial institutions? I thought they were platforms.
And it's not as if you can just go to the social media network down the street. Sites like Parler are trying to be those alternatives, and it's a tough business to even be #2 in.
Higher quality people might not like the seedy pawn shop in that strip mall with all the WW2 memorabilia, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to try to do business.
Where do you get me suggesting cloud provider companies are editorial institutions? That's just asinine. By choosing not to business with Parler they're exercising their freedom of assembly. They can't be compelled to do business with Parler. This has nothing at all to do with editorial anything. AWS is just infrastructure you pay to use and have to agree to their terms of service.
No part of AWS or Twilio fall under common carrier regulations. They can choose with whom they do business. They would and do cancel service for clients doing illegal things or against their TOS.
Amazon doesn't owe Parler a viable business. Parler made themselves into a toxic environment that drove third parties to abandon them.
>The issue to me is that people view free-speech-as-moral-principle often as a binary choice. It's either "you allow all speech or it's immoral"
I disagree with this argument not because I disagree with your conclusion, but because the issue is much, much darker.
It's not that folks are claiming "you must allow all speech," it's that they're saying "your free speech rights aren't as important as mine. As such, you should be forced to host/amplify my speech even if you don't want to do so."
That's not advocating for free speech, that's demanding that some folks' free speech rights be limited in favor of those of others.
And that's not only wrong, it's hypocritical and morally reprehensible.
In college we had preachers that would come on campus and scream about homosexualality. They were some times directed in their criticism.
These preachers set a great example of batshit old guy. Some times an amateur philosopher would debate them. Usually everyone in the audience came away convinced if the horrors of homosexual bigotry.
Where are people to see these shining examples and learn not to go down that path? How do they sharpen their arguments or even know the opposition?
You can hope for this, but polls show a large group of Americans listened to the years of obviously false information topped off by the recent months of "election fraud" disinformation, and ended up believing the batshit old guys. It would be nice if things worked out rationally, but that's not a guarantee.
It's hard to differentiate between people who are different flavors of "more extreme than one's self"
If you're coming at this from the point of view who sees considers private companies doing the bare legal minimum to be fine and acceptable than pretty much everyone who think private entities should be more accommodating to speech than that is just going to look like various flavors of free speech absolutists/extremists.
I'm not sure that free-speech-as-moral-principle applies to platforming speech vs. not platforming speech. Everyone is free to say and think and express themselves as they want to, and this seems totally separate from a right to reach millions via the work of others.
Like all moral principles, everyone interprets it differently, and your interpretation probably differs from my interpretation.
My personal belief about why free speech should exist is that it helps us discover the truth, both morally and factually. As such, I think we should make spaces accessible that allow any idea to be discussed, even the ones we currently think are wrong, and if we limit speech we should do it such that no idea is rendered inexpressible. However, I understand that not every space should be a complete free-for-all, and I have no problem with limiting the way in which an idea can be presented to ensure politeness or harmlessness.
Within the scope of this belief, I find it obviously okay to deplatform speech up until doing so harms our overall ability to discover the truth. Past that point a tradeoff exists. I think that the removal of Parler is a tradeoff between the free speech of its users, vs the self-determination of Google, the potential harm done by Parler, and the existence of other spaces where ideas can still be discussed. While I therefore find removing Parler to be acceptable, I still feel that the moral principle of free speech must be applied to that decision, even if it's outweighed by other factors.
1. The moral principle of what should be platformed (which you agree is not everything)
2. The moral principle of free speech (which is what is in the constitution preventing the government from preventing freedom of expression)
>I think a lot of confusion comes from people who only acknowledge free-speech-as-legal-right encountering people who support free-speech-as-moral-principle.
I think we can agree that there is confusion but not on the type of confusion.
Even free-speech-as-moral-principle has limits, as defined by John Stuart Mill, who said that free speech can be curtailed when the expression causes harm. People get confused about this because they think free speech means all speech is free of consequence.
Inciting violence, coordinating death threats against individuals, and other similar expression causes harm.
I understand that. Not disputing that. But that is an entirely different (as in not the same) thing than being the source of the violent/illegal threats or incitement.
The comment I was responding to was misleading IMHO ("the speech Parler is being kicked off AWS for").
As you point out, they aren't being kicked off "for speech" they are being kicked off for insufficient moderation of someone else's speech, which speaks to the difficulties of being an at-scale content provider.
Content moderation at scale is hard and expensive, but so is regulating emissions from industrial processes, and we don’t (or at least shouldn’t?) throw up our hands and say “let’s not bother then”.
Again though, we’re getting lost in the weeds here. Parler’s entire selling point, and the only reason it had any users or any product, was the implicit promise that “we won’t moderate content”.
Yeah, when you advertise your platform as "Twitter but without the strict moderation", and then people find a ton of calls for violence on your platform, it's a little hard to argue you were actually trying to moderate said content.
Maybe they were, it'll be tricky to show it for certain from our vantage point, but it certainly doesn't help their case that the whole point of platform that they weren't going to moderate said content.
And wink, wink, nudge, nudge because everyone knows what they mean by that.
You can’t build a platform for organizing murders, knowingly allow users to organize murders on your site, and then claim it’s not your fault because technically you aren’t responsible for UGC. Surely there’s a line where it’s just a veneer of an excuse.
Is it possible to build a platform with user generated content that is agnostic regarding the content in the same way that a traditional telco is agnostic about the content of phone calls (or SMS)? Is the difference that the messages are private rather than public?
We don't expect telco's to create filters or to independently moderate or to block the content of phone calls or SMS messages and basically legal mechanisms must be used to trigger any action against a subscriber. I realize that this is largely due to the legal framework of a "common carrier".
What I'm asking is, what would a "common carrier" look like for platform that had user generated content? Perhaps it isn't possible?
Sure. I think you might have a decent argument there for 1:1 messengers or email, but even then, texting spam is now a big problem.
The problem with a social service behaving that way is everyone who tried the "anything goes" approach over the last 30 years started idealistic either gave up and added some rules or became a toxic cesspool.
That makes sense to me. There are zero social environments on earth where some type of obnoxious behavior won't get you thrown out. Why would the web be all that different?
--
To be clear, this is a hypothetical about idealists acting in good faith. Over the years we've also seen bad actors feign utopian motives to try and avoid responsibility for their actions, which is a different conversation entirely.
> Is the difference that the messages are private rather than public?
100%. Absolutely.
> We don't expect telco's to create filters or to independently moderate or to block the content of phone calls or SMS messages and basically legal mechanisms must be used to trigger any action against a subscriber. I realize that this is largely due to the legal framework of a "common carrier".
Not only do we not expect it, but the more privacy-oriented people expect it to not even be possible, and use things like end-to-end encryption that make it impossible for the carrier to know what the messages contain.
You answered your own question. Yes, it _is_ that messages are private vs public. Telco has no concept of public. Everything is direct communication. Similarly, you can talk to as many people as you want on twitter in DMs about doing illegal things, and if none of them report you, you won't be cancelled. (I cant confirm whether or not this will trigger a law enforcement investigation or not though). This is why so many spammers user forms of Direct communication. Because the spam ads/posts/etc are usually moderated into oblivion.
Well no, what I was trying to imagine was something beyond messaging that included public, user-generated content but analogous to common-carrier status.
But perhaps there simply is an inherent problem with being a platform for user-generated content and that it requires somewhat robust moderation to avoid being cancelled, sued, or arrested.
> Well no, what I was trying to imagine was something beyond messaging that included public, user-generated content but analogous to common-carrier status.
I think you need to define was "common-carrier" means.
As far as I'm concerned, once a message is deemed to be intended to be public, "common carrier" goes away for the service that is going to be broadcasting that message to others. The copper/fiber/etc. lines between me and Twitter are still a common carrier, because even though my Tweet is going to be public, the individual TCP packets going to Twitter are still intended to be private.
Yeah, I wasn't really talking about that sort of thing. Just trying to speculate on how you could build a platform that supported user-generated content and resolved the difficulties and bias inherent in moderation mechanisms -- a vibrant digital public square that wasn't overwhelmed by bad-actors.
Any moderation system is going to have inherent bias whether it's humans moderating manually or an algorithm.
Any system for publicly posting messages that isn't moderated will be overwhelmed by bad actors, since bad actors will nearly always be kicked off of moderated platforms.
It is odd. I've tried
(unsuccessfully) explaining it like, you have a right to free speech, but you don't have a right to use my phone to call people, or use my database to store your opinions.
There's a difference between refusing someone service because they're black, or queer, and refusing a corporation service because their user base stormed the capitol to disrupt a free and fair election. If those men had found Pelosi, Schumer, or "The Squad", the same people they've been talking about killing for years, what do you honestly think would have happened?
That's one of the ideas behind why these platforms which facilitate so much societal communication should not be treated as private corporate entities with regards to free speech they should be treated as public utilities
(1) There is a better solution. The problem is that they are monopolies. So bust the monopolies. Require interoperability — a proven solution in other industries. A service needs to be treated as a utility — meaning large amounts of regulation — when it is a natural monopoly, meaning there’s no practical way to avoid a monopoly. That’s not the case here. Don’t use a ton of regulation where a much smaller amount will do.
(2) It doesn’t solve the problem. A social network utility still needs moderation. How would making a social network a utility make the moderation decisions better than what you’re getting now? Complicating things, in the US the first amendment means the government can’t establish laws to limit free speech, so a public utility would have to be a minimally moderated cesspool.
I think consistent standards about it what is and what is not free speech and what is and what isn't protected and what is and what isn't allowed to propagate on a big platforms is something that's good for the culture. so I see making them public utilities that are regulated as creating that overlap between the state definition of free speech and the corporate enforced reality.
Perhaps mine is a bit of a strange/controversial view among the HN crowd
Actually yours is the predominant view of those on the left and HN in general - “they are private companies so deal with it”. From a purely legal perspective, that view is almost certainly correct.
The issue is a societal one. Half the country isn’t just going to sit down and shut up because a few liberal billionaires told them to. They’ll create alternatives, and then we will have not just a philosophically divided country, but effectively two Internets - one for conservatives and one for liberals. Where does it end from there? Do hotels and restaurants in California demand to see proof that you are a registered Democrat before you are allowed to patronize them? Do liberal employers start carrying out mass firings of conservative employees?
We are seeing the beginnings of a country of ~300 million people being cracked in two, on a much deeper level than has ever happened before. I can’t think of something less American than a bunch of business owners ganging together to strangle the life out of a small business because they disagree with the politics of some its users.
> Actually yours is the predominant view of those on the left
Actually it is the predominant view, left and right.
Except in this specific case, where the right doesn't like it.
> We are seeing the beginnings of a country of ~300 million people being cracked in two, on a much deeper level than has ever happened before.
The Civil War may beg to differ. The real issue is that we've never reconciled the divergent view point from that war. Race is still the largest dividing factor in this country and this incident was about race (and ego) more than anything else.
Except in this specific case, where the right doesn't like it.
Show me an instance where anything remotely close to this happened - right leaning businesses banding together to take a left-leaning business entirely offline by cutting off all services to them. I’ll wait.
Civil War...
The Civil War occurred at a time when actual physical war was the predominant way that societal differences were settled. That is no longer the case, except perhaps in the minds of some of the idiots that stormed the Capitol.
But on an intellectual level, this event with Parler is akin to an act of modern civil war. When you endeavor to kill an organization, are you not in a sense declaring war on them? Further, was this action not designed to frighten others into getting in line with the ruling party, lest they suffer the same fate? While no guns were used, those seem very similar to the actions normally taken by those engaging in civil war.
You’re right. But Apple, Google, and Amazon all colluding for the singular purpose of warning others that conservative speech will get their businesses instantly killed by the largest and most powerful companies on earth? That sure is.
> Show me an instance where anything remotely close to this happened - right leaning businesses banding together to take a left-leaning business entirely offline by cutting off all services to them.
An example is pirate sites or underground drug sites. Those are largely blacklisted -- and fit into a (far) left-leaning philosophy around a class of freedom. I'd argue most of those are less extreme than Parler.
> When you endeavor to kill an organization, are you not in a sense declaring war on them?
Isn't that what Trump wanted to do with the NFL after Kaep took a knee?
> Further, was this action not designed to frighten others into getting in line with the ruling party, lest they suffer the same fate?
Sure, in the same way that death penalty is meant to scare murderers.
You're trying to make this out to be a site of critical thinkers espousing different views that are being trampled on, while most everyone else recognizes it more like a revenge porn site.
Sure, in the same way that death penalty is meant to scare murderers.
You are comparing the exercise of freedom of speech to committing murder. Not quite the same thing in my opinion.
An example is pirate sites or underground drug sites. Those are largely blacklisted -- and fit into a (far) left-leaning philosophy around a class of freedom.
Those sites are offering illegal goods and services. That is why they are offline. Companies are generally ordered by law enforcement to take them down. Again...hardly comparable.
> You are comparing the exercise of freedom of speech to committing murder. Not quite the same thing in my opinion.
The point is they weren't only exercising free speech. They were inciting a violent riot.
> Those sites are offering illegal goods and services. That is why they are offline. Companies are generally ordered by law enforcement to take them down. Again...hardly comparable.
Again, the calls to march into the Capitol, provocation of violence, etc... are also illegal. But you won't find our government ever willing to take that stand. The distinction is less clear than you suggest.
Lets put it this way, no one is suggesting to blacklist the WSJ or the National Review. The Parler is the equivalent to an Antifa social media network for planning attacks on right wing establishments.
Have you ever been on Parler? I had never heard of it until the left decided to cancel it and it made news. So I went there a couple of days ago, and saw nothing of which you speak. Certainly nothing that would equate it to an “Antifa social media network”.
Speaking of Antifa...if Parler is equivalent to it...it’s bit hypocritical that they still have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/antifaintl?s=21
I did go on Parler a few days before the Capitol attack and it was pretty crazy. Not everything was violent, but definitely a different take on virtually everything. And definitely calls towards violence and overthrow mixed in. Haven’t been back since.
Note, Parler does have a Twitter account too. I have not heard people looking to ban that — so really not hypocritical at all.
Interesting, because I went on there after the attack and found nothing of which you speak. I found no plans for attacks, calls to violence, or anything else. There were a few links to pro-Trump news articles, but that was about the most “right” thing I saw on there.
OK, you were on a very different version of Parler than I was on. And different than the one that Amazon noted in their response to Parler or all of the various articles that I've read written about Parler. Maybe we all just ended up in the bad part of Parler.
Right, we are talking about social norms. The social norm for most transaction commerce seems to be, that if the fees are paid and the services isn't "abused" (in a criminal sense) then the private beliefs of the purchaser don't matter. The grocer should still sell lettuce to heinous racists.
But we are starting to break that norm, beginning with the natural wedges: commerce where the service or product _IS_ enabling the purchasing in a direct way. The question is if we can stop at _direct_ enablement or whether it will continue to indirect forms.
A scary example would be for Square to start refusing to process payments for ideological reasons.
I suppose one could argue your scary example has already occurred. I believe stripe cut off Donald Trump [1]. As a non-American, I don't really care about Trump and may be a bit ignorant here, but I find the big tech companies cutting him off under "inciting violence" a bit of a stretch. To me, it's actually extra scary to cut off a politician's fundraising for disagreeing with their "politics".
This is why I mentioned square, not stripe. Anyone acting more like a utility or common carrier. Stripe is good, but there are many other comparable options out there. But my local coffee shop only uses a single POS systems. The latter seems more sinister to me, especially since they would be taking an action that is potentially independent of the their customer (the business).
For stripe, the example would be refusing to process any CC payments (as a consumer) for registered republicans whatsoever. Beyond it being foolish commercially, it is much more intrusive than a refusing a direct 1:1 contract.
>it's actually extra scary to cut off a politician's fundraising for disagreeing with their "politics"
Except that's not what happened. Stripe didn't cut off the Trump campaign's ability to raise funds. They didn't block access to their bank accounts. They didn't freeze their assets.
Rather, one company (and they aren't even close to the largest player in that industry) chose not to process online credit card transactions for them.
The Trump campaign has many other online payment processors that it can do business with. They can still accept donations via many other means (checks, bank transfers, cash, etc., etc.).
A single company (which is just a group of people) decided they didn't want to do business with another group of people.
Stripe, it's shareholders and employees are under no obligation to do business with anyone.
And the fact that the customer is a political entity strengthens that, as their right to support (or not) any particular political entity, candidate or position is integral to a free society.
>Rather, one company... chose not to process online credit card transactions for them.
I don't see how people can make this argument with a straight face. If you accept that this one company should be allowed to decide to cut off someone for ideological reasons, you tacitly accept that all companies could cut someone off for the same reason. Hiding behind it being "only one" right now is to use a technicality to dodge having to defend the principle you are implicitly advocating. The action isn't more right or wrong because one or more company is doing it--you either defend the principle at full usage or you disavow it.
>I don't see how people can make this argument with a straight face. If you accept that this one company should be allowed to decide to cut off someone for ideological reasons, you tacitly accept that all companies could cut someone off for the same reason.
I'm not people. I'm just me and don't represent anyone else except myself.
As for it being "just one company," that isn't really important. It could be 10 or 100 or 1000 companies and I'd say the same thing.
And not because of the content of the political views being (or not) supported.
It has nothing to do with any of that.
If the government can force Stripe (or anyone else) to support a particular (it doesn't matter which one either) viewpoint by forcing them to associate with a person or group they don't wish to associate with, then they can force me (or you, for that matter) to do the same.
I can't and don't speak for anyone else. For me, it's about specific constitutional rights. I don't and won't support abridgement of those rights for anyone, whether I agree with them or not.
If you believe that it's just fine for persons or organizations to have their freedom of association rights abridged, then you are anti-freedom and stand in opposition to the liberties and ideals in my constitution.
And if that's true, then so be it. But don't try to pretend that your argument is anything other than an anti-liberty, anti-democratic (small d) one.
>If you believe that it's just fine for persons or organizations to have their freedom of association rights abridged, then you are anti-freedom and stand in opposition...
This is utter nonsense. For example, abridging a company's right to not "associate" with minorities/gays/etc, i.e. their right to not serve them, is not anti-liberty. If the goal is maximizing liberty, it takes targeted regulation to achieve the maximal state. Ensuring everyone can participate in the economic and social infrastructure is a feature of maximizing liberty.
>This is utter nonsense. For example, abridging a company's right to not "associate" with minorities/gays/etc, i.e. their right to not serve them, is not anti-liberty. If the goal is maximizing liberty, it takes targeted regulation to achieve the maximal state. Ensuring everyone can participate in the economic and social infrastructure is a feature of maximizing liberty
I didn't realize that I needed to specify that this didn't apply to protected classes[0]. I assumed that was understood, but I guess not.
Yes, there are a number of groups (see link) which individuals and businesses are barred from discriminating against. But in this circumstance, that's irrelevant.
Because political affiliation is not a protected class under federal law, and even where it is (CA, NY and a few other states) that only applies to employment issues, not business-to-business contracts/transactions.
The right to political association has never been abridged, nor should it be. Any suggestion otherwise is, as I said, anti-liberty and anti-democratic.
Political choice is a bedrock principle of our system. And forcing anyone to support a political viewpoint they do not wish to support violates both settled constitutional law and the ideals of a free society.
Nitpick about protected groups if you like, but there's no "there" there.
The law is the law. We are a nation of laws. We are not a nation of "do what hackinthebochs wants."
There you go again, hiding behind technicalities to dodge the interesting discussion. Laws aren't magic; protected classes aren't magic. The laws reflect our understanding that abridging liberty in some narrow cases served the greater good in some manner. My argument is that some restrictions on liberty serve to maximize liberty more broadly. If you want to argue that political viewpoint should not be one of them, you have to actually make the argument. Simply citing the law doesn't make your case.
Political choice is a bedrock principle of our system. And forcing anyone to support a political viewpoint they do not wish to support violates both settled constitutional law and the ideals of a free society.
Given that being “censored” by sites like Twitter is also a big complaint of the far left (because it has happened a lot), my hope is that splintering to alternative sites won’t be so binary. Having 40 Twitter clones seems better to me than having just one or two.
>Where does it end from there? Do hotels and restaurants in California demand to see proof that you are a registered Democrat before you are allowed to patronize them? Do liberal employers start carrying out mass firings of conservative employees?
Except those are false equivalences. It's not "conservatives" that are the problem. And they aren't.
They have just as much right as anyone else to their point of view, political preferences and to advocate for them as anyone else.
However, those who would use violence, intimidation and lies to advance their political goals are not conservatives. Or liberals.
They are, at best criminal thugs and, at worst, radical insurrectionists bent on destroying our constitutional republic and the rule of law.
And calling such folks out for their behavior isn't a slap at "conservatives," because those who are honest when they call themselves that (at least in the US) want to preserve our constitutional system of government and the rule of law.
Don't conflate the two. Because they aren't even remotely similar.
Glenn Greenwald never disappoints me. He is spot on once again. For years all of these conspiracy theories, calls for violence and allegations of fraud make it to the front page of Twitter/Facebook/YouTube for any user that shows interest in similar topics. However, the day that a competitor decides to openly embrace this content, Silicon Valley goes against it like a pack of predators.
I guess they want a monopoly in being the only platforms allowed to subvert democracies.
It was actually the day Silicon Valley realized Parler was a platform for recruiting, planning, and executing a violent insurrection to end democracy in the US that they all ran in the opposite direction.
Perhaps these companies are all secretly happy for the excuse, but there’s no question they did the right thing in this case.
The president and his supporters are unrepentant, proud of their successes, and will do more if they can.
Let's look at how great of a point Greenwald is making.
> they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections.
Not stripping EXIF data, getting social security number from users, using the trial version of their IAM system, poorly coded allowing everyone to exfiltrate the data and god knows how many other exploits. So much for privacy...
> As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family
Yeah, what happened to that? Looks like they suddenly stopped caring about that, and no one ever managed to corroborate the obviously fake news pushed by NYP. Let's not forget how Carlson went on a whole fake drama about "losing incriminating papers", but then when UPS found the papers, suddenly Carlson says he no longer wants to spill secrets about hunters private life... What?
This whole thing is BS. The Pirate Bay was deplatformed orders of magnitude harder than Parler ever did and they survived just fine. Parler was just created by a bunch of people who had no clue what they were doing, and they crumbled by their own inaptitude.
>no one ever managed to corroborate the obviously fake news pushed by NYP.
At least two of the messages were DKIM-authenticated by an unrelated third party. Combine that with:
* The FBI, the DOJ, and the DNI all refuting the "Russian disinfo" theory
* Biden's campaign explicitly refusing to call the emails inauthentic
* Pics of Hunter in compromising positions
* The laptop being the subject of a grand jury subpoena
...and there's more evidence pointing towards the story's legitimacy than away from it. In fact, that leaves the only real thing pointing away as "it's a sketchy-ass tabloid", which is adhom at the end of the day.
Greenwald is unrecognizable from the Snowden era. It’s like a dementia victim morphing into a completely different person. Very sad to see him like this. The Hunter Biden article fiasco is embarrassing for him, and this makes it appear he is just doubling down in tabloid garbage right-leaning-for-attention nonsense.
The US has one of its worst, most cruel, presidential administrations in its history and the only subject he is obsessed with critiquing is the left and media and tech companies.
Agreed, I just checked and their web view is a readability nightmare, though thankfully it does not apply to mailing lists. (I read a couple of Substack publications via email, but am unwilling to pay for it or publish through it myself as infatuation of folks like Greenwald with it and Kik background lend it a dubious aura.)
As with almost everything with these lower quality right wing media content, there's a whole lot of brouhaha, and then suddenly it all goes silent and they're never called out for their lies. They just sweep it under the rug and move on. Meanwhile, whenever the NYT gets something wrong, they come out publicly with a redaction, and people use that as proof that NYT is "fake news". I've never seen right wing news ever write a redaction for the countless lies they've posted.
Just last week, all of right wing media was full of posts about those 3 people at the capitol being antifa. Their proof? A cropped image of Q Shaman at a BLM protest (coincidentally cropping his Q sign), and a Google Image Search finding a photo of the other two guys on phillyantifa.com, even though clicking on the page showed that it was an article about white supremacists.
Feel free to come back and post here once the hunter biden "fiasco" gets resolved, but the fact that Tucker Carlson suddenly decided that he no longer cared right after receiving his "highly incriminating secret papers" tells me everything I need to know about the drama.
Yeah, I think the laptop mostly smelled like bullshit, but still think there are legitimate concerns around Burisma and whether pay-for-access happened.
There is zero credible evidence about pay for access. Meanwhile the people spending their entire life digging through Burisma seem to not give a single shit about the hundreds of pay-for-access story surrounding Trump and his properties. Foreign countries literally booking dozens of his properties for months inhabited.
Trump's own children literally got jobs at the white house, ffs. The hypocrisy is deafening.
And one politician being corrupt doesn't mean that they are all corrupt. Get back to us when there is actual proof of corruption and not the same right wing rage machine making all kinds of baseless allegations.
Thanks for this. Society needs to start setting a higher bar for public discourse all around.
Tired of these bullshit conspiracy theories running rampant on certain media platforms. There have been dozens of them since the election alone and not a single one has been validated. You would think people would be tired of being obviously fooled over and over, but it seems every time another fake story comes along, they take the bait.
This whole rant looks like a personal thing for Greenwald. Ever since leaving the Intercept because of the Biden story he became very narrow minded. He's definitely in the wrong about Parler. The platforms have a rightful expectation that you can moderate the content on your site and it was proven that they have the right tools for the job. It was also shown that a huge part of the moderators were indeed MAGAs. It also seems to have incentivized users to spread disinformation [1]
Additionally: wasn't there a post recently about the investors being unknown? I read speculations about a Mercer involvement but other than that little is known. How can Greenwald make naive assumptions like this only looking at the public figures? Aren't there connections to Russia that had to be investigated? (Can't find source right now, it's on HN though)
I'm not seeing the contradiction here. Are you suggesting that Greenwald denied that Parler was used for planning/coordination? Perhaps you missed this paragraph?
> It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
It's ad hominem, and Greenwald has always been incompetent. Just look at his PRISM reporting, which he still hasn't issued a correction for and just never talks about anymore (not a single mention in his pardon rant on Substack) after apparently finally realizing how embarrassingly wrong his reporting was.
It was entirely wrong. The slides he published very clearly showed that it was an integration project with the FBI. The companies sent the FBI data for specific accounts under court order, and that is the only data that PRISM ingested. Greenwald thought the NSA could access arbitrary accounts' data. He could easily have gotten this right (like the New York Times did the very next day and CNET and the rest of the tech media shortly after) if he had bothered to figure out what each piece of the diagrams meant or if he had consulted anybody who understood computers at all instead of just a high school dropout SharePoint admin — you know, journalism.
IIRC that was Snowden’s claim too and he worked on it (I don’t have an exact text quote since this is from the Citizenfour doc), and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.
Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act. Without Greenwald and Snowden the New York Times wouldn’t even touch the topic.
> IIRC that was Snowden’s claim too and he worked on it
Snowden did not work on PRISM, nor did he ever claim to. He had failed a test necessary to even see data collected under Section 702, so he couldn't so much as see the data that PRISM ingested. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden-tri...
> and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.
No. It goes through the normal court order process where the company will push back if it isn't legit. Section 702 court orders can only request data for non-Americans outside the US, and the company that gets the order will have a good idea of whether this is true for a particular account.
> Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act.
The only illegal US program that they exposed was phone metadata collection. The pair of illiterates thought that PRISM was something supremely sinister (that anybody with the most rudimentary computing and reading skills can easily figure out it isn't), so they hyped that story a lot. People corrected Greenwald on Twitter on day one, but it took years for him to understand how much he botched that story, and his ego prevented him from issuing a correction. Instead, he just stopped talking about it and now only ever mentions phone metadata. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...
Where did he move the goal posts? From the article...
>Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube
The tweet you linked shows a post on parler dated November 16. That's not evidence the poster was an "active user of Parler". In fact, it suggests the opposite. All we know is he made one post in November.
He's not listed as part of the 13 people charged by the DoJ. It's possible that he was arrested later. But Glenn didn't lie here.
So the parler exec probably looked at this list, checked to see if any one of these people used his platform, and found none did. Then he told Glenn. However, more people have since been charged.
Glenn is absolutely right here. If anything, the article needs an update because of all the authoritarian shit (new patriot act, sending rioters to gitmo, etc) proposed over the last week.
I’m not dismissing him because of one mistake, I dismiss him because the only lens he looks at anything through anymore is how the it’s all actually the left or the media’s fault.
With the state of American politics today, saying "I don't think we have enough evidence to conclusively tie ____ to Russia" is sufficient evidence for a significant chunk of the population to accuse the speaker of being "in the pocket of Russia". Unfortunately.
But his main point is that free speech is curtailed unevenly, which isn't false.
You just feel betrayed that he went from criticism government to criticizing corporate, and to calling out the double standards in the culture that protect liberals, and punish conservatives, which as a "tolerant centrist" you should be against.
Instead you call him a gimp while it's your attitude that sounds like unapologetic hypocrisy feverishly licking the boots of whoever you're no longer allowed to criticize... As George Carlin (i think) said, that tells you who's in charge and what they fear. I'm sure they thank you for supporting their cause.
In the early 1990s, if you wanted to have an online presence you needed to buy hardware, connect it to the internet and run some software on it.
If Parler had done this, the ways they could have been "destroyed" would have been:
1. refusal to provide DNS for their address
2. refusal to certify an SSL certificate (not absolutely required but more than just a detail in 2021)
3. refusal by an ISP to carry their bits
I believe that even the progressive end of the tech community would have been extremely negative about any company that did any of these 3 things. I also think its very unlikely that any of them would have happened, though the Gab case provides some evidence to the contrary.
Instead, Parler followed the unfortunate dumbification of online presence over the last 20-30 years, and instead of doing the above, contracted with a large corporation to take care of things for them. The large corporation decided they didn't want to do that anymore, and Parler lost its online presence.
Parler is not exactly unique in having made this choice. But perhaps the consequence of the choice they made might convince more people/organizations/corporations to think a bit more clearly about the type of hosting infrastructure they really want/need. If Parler had followed the self-hosted pathway, I think it is extremely unlikely (though sure, not impossible) that they would be offline at this point.
I don't the know the details of that case (and I don't expect the WE reporter does either). It seems as if GoDaddy refused to continue hosting the site. That's quite different from providing just DNS for a server owned and administered by the organization.
From linked article: “As a result, we[=godaddy] informed the site yesterday that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another registrar, as they have violated our terms of service" i.e. domain, not hosting.
Their registrar is and was epik.com, starting in 1997 according to whois records.
I can't find an obvious link between godaddy and epik (though one may exist).
Their current DNS service is provided by ... AWS :)
I'm not convinced that the quote from godaddy is technically informative here, though using the word "registrar" would seem to be more indicative of something other than hosting.
> I guess "Creation Date" refers to the original registration of the domain anywhere rather than with the current registrar.
Correct. Even more interestingly if you backorder a domain name owned by another person and that domain name expires, the creation date reflected in the WHOIS record once you obtain it will be the previous owner's creation date, not the date you obtained the domain. I think this behavior varies by registrar but that is how it seems to function on GoDaddy.
Transfers between registrars do not usually reset the "Creation Date". Actually the creation date field is not correct anymore for most domain names. Some registrars just show a fixed date such as 1985-01-01.
I think this is an English thing. That “widely trafficked forum” means to me that it is popular. If I wanted to imply they were a part of trafficking I would write “ar15 a popular forum for the trafficking of firearms” or something like that. Trafficked does imply the illegal part, but the way it’s written that makes no sense.
I definitely forgot about 4, but since the colo provider is also likely the ISP, I think this is effectively covered by 3, generalized to "ISP cancels its contract based on your bitstream or other reason".
5 doesn't really cover the scenarios that I think we're talking about. Yes, if you believe that we live in a fascist, near-fascist or just plain punitive state, then fear of law enforcement is probably going to make this concern rank fairly high for you. But I think for most of us, if law enforcement is coming to remove your servers from a colo facility, something much bigger is going on.
Do you think Parler's servers would still be in their possession if they had bare metal at a colo? I'm pretty sure the USSS would have already grabbed them to investigate threats against the life of the Vice President and Congress. In fact, being in the cloud probably saved them.
It's a good question. Did the USSS do anything re: investigating Parler while it was still up on AWS? What did they do? Did they grab servers? Did they grab anything?
From your question & answer, I assume that you think it likely that the USSS (or FBI or whoever) would have moved to grab the hardware had there been hardware to grab?
Also, the pirate bay is still alive to date, so clearly it's doable. They've seen orders of magnitude more deplatforming than Parler did and they survived it, same for sci-hub. This is proof that it very much is possible to survive online, Parler just doesn't either doesn't have the skills or doesn't want to put in the effort.
They want to make as much noise about it as possible, because Parler has an axe to grind. If they got back on air too quickly they wouldn’t be able to make such a fuss.
I'm waiting for the not so distant possibility of power companies deciding to cut service to companies who host services they don't approve of. This is not a joke.
For: yes, we should have regulation that ensures net neutrality, right down to "complete ignorance of the bitstream".
Against: ISP needs to cover more than just the last mile, and for everything except the last mile, competition seems like a positive thing (though potentially wasteful).
So I'd like to see all physical layer providers bound to absolute net neutrality (service and contracts can never be pulled based on contet), and the last mile regulated similarly to other utilities.
Looks like they can refuse to issue you a certificate:
>"ISRG may, in its sole discretion, refuse to grant Your request for a Let’s Encrypt Certificate, including for any lawful reason stated or not stated in this Agreement."
>"You also acknowledge and accept that ISRG may, without advance notice, immediately revoke Your Certificate if ISRG determines, in its sole discretion, that [...]
(v) You have violated any applicable law, agreement (including this Agreement), or other obligation;
(vi) Your Certificate is being used, or has been used, to enable any criminal activity (such as phishing attacks, fraud or the distribution of malware);
(ix) ISRG is legally required to revoke Your Certificate pursuant to a valid court order issued by a court of competent jurisdiction;
(x) this Agreement has terminated; or
(xi) there are other reasonable and lawful grounds for revocation
"
OK, so I was at least somewhat wrong, since presumably (xi) is the means-what-you-want clause.
Refusing to grant the initial cert. seems unlikely for a new organization, so revocation is the key problem. And indeed (xi) is a problem there.
I wonder if LE really thinks this way. Their primary role is to say "foobar has certified that they really are foobar". I wonder how suspectible they are to the sorts of considerations that have driven FANGT to take the steps that they did.
It's likely more of a failsafe. All CA's, registrars, DNS providers, CDN's and hosting providers have some variant of that wording so that they can terminate your account without facing legal recourse. It's easy to miss it, some AUP's are massive and default to tiny font.
easy - think about the pain and toil of standing up a webapp in 1992, compare it to logging into aws and spinning up a template that uses managed databases and lambda functions with some templating engines, write minimal code, lots of configs, etc.
the latter requires much less knowledge and enginnering than the former.
That's only true if you plan to use some of the many AWS "services".
Get an instance, choose some linux distro image that comes with ssh and nginx installed, start it up, configure a few files, grab an elastic IP, you're done.
I set up the first public web server in the pacific northwest in 1993. It wasn't that hard, but mostly because I already admin'ed the machine(s) it ran on anyway.
OK, "dumbification" is unnecessarily antagonistic. But one can bring up an online presence today with astoundingly little knowledge of the technology or the implications. So maybe "massive simplification" is a fairer, nicer and more reasonable tone.
You also need DDoS protection. Cloudflare has booted people off for naughty speech before and got away with it, so no reason to expect anyone else in the game wouldn't.
Was that when the CEO penned a letter that started "I kicked X off the internet because I was in a bad mood this morning"?IIRC, even they felt this power was a bad thing at the time, even if the instance of it was ok
It is material to any discussion of whether or not AWS, Amazon or Silicon Valley or corporations in general have "Monopolistic Force" abilities in this area.
I fully agree, and even with all these points I don't think it's likely.
1. You should be running your own authoritative DNS, it's not hard. The only thing that can really happen to you is your registrar pulling your domain name, so you need to have a bunch registered piratebay-style. You should also own your IP space but that can be a bit pricey -- but once you own it it basically can't ever be revoked and you can advertise it to whoever you wish.
2. I sincerely doubt Let's Encrypt / ISRG would blacklist a domain name for cert issuance. Even if they did there's a whole lotta roots in the trust stores, I'm sure you'd find an issuer happy to make you a cert for a fee.
3. I deal with T1/T2 carriers in $dayjob and I promise they don't give a triangular shit about what you push through their pipes, given the constant stream of phishing/spam/ddos/malware they're happy to carry as long as someone pays the bills.
> 2- Signing an SSL certificate is a one-time thing.
Certificates are definitely the weak spot here, as many of them already have a poor track record regarding security so probably poor spines too. Certificates requires central authority somewhere in the chain, and if they don't let you in, you don't stand a chance. Self-signed certificates are not gonna fly for most parts, unless you teach people to self-validate certificates with out-of-band ones.
I'd say the same about CloudFlare some time ago when it comes to blocking "enemies" that are not explicitly breaking the law, but here we are. Never say never, and even if an organization would never do such a thing today, who knows who is controlling the organization tomorrow.
TOS and documents like that are written by lawyers. What an organization might or might not do in practice has almost no bearing to their "subscriber agreement" and other legal documents.
Yeah, here I thought the same would happen if technology companies started banning people without any anti-criminal justification but again, here we are. Parler built a platform that could be used for bad, so instead of letting the country deal with the bad outcomes of the platform (like how we deal with Twitter and Facebook), the "modern" western world decided, without any intervention from the government, that Parler is not allowed to exist anymore.
Technically yes, but no issuer will provide long expiry certificates anymore [1]. They won't be recognised by major browsers even if they do anyway.
Some still sell 2 or 3 year certificates but that's a marketing ploy. You pay the price for the next 3 years in advance but you still have to renew it every year.
When we used to talk about "monopolies", we referred to specific private enterprises. But these companies aren't actually monopolies. Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on social networking, there's Twitter and TikTok and Snap too. AWS doesn't have a monopoly on cloud infra, there's GCP and Azure and Oracle and Digital Ocean too.
The author knows that these companies aren't actually monopolies, so he insinuates that the whole region (Silicon Valley) is a monopoly. And one of these companies (Amazon) it isn't even located in the Silicon Valley region; it's located in the state of Washington.
So really the author has expanded the target of the ire to a whole industry. That is to say, the tech industry has a monopoly on the tech industry.
If Amazon isn't a monopoly (or at least close) then why is Amazon facing action or under investigation for antitrust from Congress, the European Union, the DOJ and 3 states?
The European Commission is investigating Amazon based on "distorting competition in online retail markets" [1]. I don't see a claim by the commission that Amazon is a monopoly. You can be investigated and have antitrust related actions applied to you without actually being a monopoly [2].
Further, the investigation is related to Amazon's retail marketplace business, not Amazon as a provider of cloud infrastructure. What is congress investigating Amazon for? I think you need to be more specific.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law "In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws that regulate the conduct and organization of business corporations and are generally intended to promote competition for the benefit of consumers."
1) Antitrust accusations include participating in anti-competitive behavior, which may or may not be with a company who has as a monopoly.
2) Antitrust accusations are relatively low cost to make and sometimes used as cheap political tools to score points with a base, despite not having a chance to go anywhere.
All the investigation as far as I know is on the web store side of their business, with Amazon Basics specifically. The blog above is talking about AWS, which is a different side of their business.
Meta: Hey @dang and crew, I just want you all to know how much I love this community and all the hard work you do- reading articles like this makes me aware of how much effort it must take to keep HN a fun civil place. Thank you for all your efforts.
As someone who makes a boatload of money in large part because tech companies are not regulated, I have to say - it's time to regulate large platforms like utilities. You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house. All you can do is sue (if that). It should be the same with oligopolistic cloud and social media platforms, since "breaking them up" doesn't really seem workable.
I think the line is 'due process under color of law'- The legal framework would/should make any action automatic and any debate is done under the court system.
> it's time to regulate large platforms like utilities.
Not if we aren’t first regulating lower levels of the internet infrastructure that way. Starting with ISPs, DNS providerd, etc. And even if we were doing the lower levels, it still wouldn't be, but we might relieve the perceived need.
What amount to algorithmically assembled personalized magazines, like all the newsfeed-focussed social media outlets, are pretty much the least utility-like and most-media-outlet like (hence, the name) parts of the internet, and regulating them like state-directed utilities makes as much sense as treating the New York Times as a state-directed utility.
Lower levels should definitely be regulated or split up if practical. I think busting monopolies is better in general, but sometimes (like for existing utilities) it makes more sense to regulate a "natural" monopoly.
Facebook is not really an "magazine". In this analogy, it's more like a print shop or a point of sale, except that 3 giant corporations own all the printing equipment/all the newspaper stands, and they decided to stop printing/selling NYT because some opinion piece in there used bad language.
There are degrees of regulation; people on HN tend to like "net neutrality", and I don't think many people are against anti-discrimination laws for businesses, so why not "hosting neutrality" where cloud platforms, oligopolic in particular, don't get to kick people off their hosting just because they supposedly disagree with them?
Currently I have at least 5 different that I can choose from and probably quite a few more that I am not aware of.
I do not have anywhere near this level of choice in Social Media.
In my opinion the question of whether or not these companies should be regulated has nothing at all to do with whether they more resemble media companies or they more resemble utilities.
> I do not have anywhere near this level of choice in Social Media.
You don't have to use social media to be online. But if all 5 ISPs decide to cut you off, you can't even access your social media accounts.
Seriously, secure the lower parts of the stack first. This administration went and did the exact opposite of that by repealing net neutrality. I have no sympathy for them if their ISP cancels their accounts. It's called reaping what you sow.
129 million people have access to only 1 broadband provider. That's 40% of the country [1]. With wireless carriers maybe that increases to a little bit more, but they're prohibitively expensive usually to run as your main home internet connection.
For social media you have: Facebook (Instagram, Whatsapp), Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, WeChat, TikTok. And these are just the ones with > 100 million users. You can find way more with users in the tens of millions or less.
>makes as much sense as treating the New York Times as a state-directed utility.
This just reminded me there are laws, such as changing one's name, which require things to be announced in one or more prominent local papers (which laws depends on your state and local governments).
I'm not totally sure if that's evidence against making a "utility" social media or for making a "utility" newspaper.
Both newspapers and social networks are multicast, but a newspaper is one-to-many and a social network is many-to-many. There's a material cost to publishing a newspaper that doesn't exist with electronic social networks. I don't know if a utility is a good analogy for a social network platform, but I am confident a newspaper is not either.
Yep; so someone should have called whatever the Fed equivalent of police is to investigate specific people calling for terrorism. Not unilaterally ban the entire site.
Come think of it, in my original analogy, it would be more like cutting power to an entire condo building because one resident is broadcasting death threats.
How are you planning on accessing Facebook and Twitter if Comcast boots you off their network because they're allowed to? We don't even have net neutrality anymore.
I'm going to agree with the parent comment: The question of ISPs being a public utility or not is crucial for this discussion because it goes to the core of the issue of what should be a privilege and what should be a right.
If you can be booted from Amazon because it's a private company then you can also be refused service by your ISP. And there's an argument to be made that, at some point down the chain (AWS, DNS, ISP) you should have a right to internet access. Should Amazon be forced to offer unconditional access to Parler? Probably not. But right now there's nothing stopping ISPs from cutting people's internet connection just because they don't like what the customers are doing with it, and that's a much thornier issue.
Regulating ISPs like utilities would delineate a clear line in the sand for problems like this.
Forcing the equation by talking about this from the perspective of ISPs is a lot easier in my head.
Other technologies that build upon the basic connectivity are much more subjective in their entitlements. I.e. you could run your own DNS name servers, so perhaps something like DNS or DDoS protection is viewed more as an open-market opportunity on top of the utility.
The barest of essentials for a self-operated cloud service would be IP connectivity, public TLS CA and domain registrar. Maybe we should look at these technology features in the same way we do frequency control, voltage and standardization in the electrical grid. DNS, compute, storage, DDoS protection, et. al., would be analogous to all of the various appliances you have connected to your electrical system at home or work.
>I'm going to agree with the parent comment: The question of ISPs being a public utility or not is crucial for this discussion because it goes to the core of the issue of what should be a privilege and what should be a right.
I'd go further than that. Requiring ISPs to be dumb pipes (that means no port blocking or throttling, among other things) can reduce the power and influence of the large social media players by making it easier to host your own data[0][1][2] and share what you want with whom you want.
No middlemen, no abusive data mining/tracking, etc.
But doing so requires that ISPs are not gatekeepers, just suppliers of bandwidth/routing.
> You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house.
This is a bad, needlessly hyperbolic analogy. The reasons there are regulations prohibiting the shutoff of utilities is that these are basic needs without which people can be directly harmed (often very seriously, if you cut off heating in the winter, etc...).
There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account.
I'm not saying I disagree that some level of regulation is appropriate. But this issue is (for somewhat obvious reasons) being wildly overstated. Parler was shut down for explicitly violent rhetoric which inspired real political violence, period.
Surely everyone agrees that this particular speech should have been banned, right? We just disagree about the specifics of how it should be done. If so, why are we screaming so loud about "Silicon Valley" showing "Monopolistic Force"?
Is hyperbole really the answer here? Or is it an attempt to deflect discussion from things that seem a little more important at the moment?
No, I don't agree that "this speech" ought to be banned, and also not in this particular manner. First of all, were %%ge of Parler posts contained incitement? I honestly have no idea, but I suspect it's by far not the majority. More importantly, Brandenburg case is a pretty good standard for banning speech as far as I'm concerned, and it's a pretty high bar. What %%ge of Parler posts met THAT standard?
> There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account
Canada considers internet access a basic human right, and it's pretty clear the rest of the world will move in that direction shortly.
I think it's very clear you can harm a person by cutting them off from the world / loved ones, news, etc. Especially in communities that have no outside access other than internet based.
Maybe not Parler specifically, but certainly internet access. And if the vast majority of the world and people around you are getting news and info and social life from <website>, it could be argued that denying access to <website> will harm a person.
>> There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account
>Canada considers internet access a basic human right, and it's pretty clear the rest of the world will move in that direction shortly.
Having a Parler account and having access to the internet are two different things.
Funny that you mention Canada. Parler would likely have trouble existing as a Canadian entity due to Canada’s hate speech laws and the courts’ propensity to leave carriers exposed to liability for hosting content that violates those laws.
Also, the Canadian government has a broad power to restrict speech in times of crisis through the War Measures Act. They could easily have switched a site like Parler off if a similar event occurred.
That also doesn't remove your access to the Internet.
They also weren't banned. Their hosting provider refused to continue hosting them. There are thousands of competing companies out there they can take their business to.
This is like all the grocery stores choosing not to carry brand of product in their grocery stores. You didn't lose access to the grocery store. That brand can start their own grocery store and host their own product if they want to.
And similarly: likening the banning of one site that was a hotbed of rhetoric akin to (or directly related to) a serious incident of political violence to the "vast majority of people around you" losing all internet access is senselessly hyperbolic and unhelpful.
If we grant that the reason we're currently in this crisis of democracy is that people are addicted to an outrage machine (stop the steal, #resistance, whatever), then maybe it's our job to get us off the train.
Why can't banning Parler just be about banning Parler and not an assault on democracy or whatever? I mean, we all agree that the kind of speech banned should be banned somehow, right?
I don't think the comparison is between social media access and electricity access. The comparison is between access to internet and access to electricity. You just picked a specific case of "internet access" to make it look more silly and easier to defeat.
Using that same technique, I can say "Comparing internet access to being able to use your toaster is the height of disingenuous absurdity". You can see why this technique isn't really legitimate and should be avoided in public arguments.
Well, sure, how about access to electricity for the purpose of broadcasting? In some other fork I posted an example where Russian govt has extra-legally shut down a live opposition broadcast by cutting power to the studio.
This is not a switch, but a spectrum. Monopolies/oligopolies should be either broken down or regulated. Electrical companies should be more regulated, cloud providers less regulated, social networks perhaps much less regulated.
I frankly don't think social networks are that important at all, but I am trying to account for my biases. For many people and organizations, they are not really like a newspaper, a comparison many make here - they are more like a printing press, or a radio transmitter or something. If one company owns the entire radio spectrum or all the printing presses, it ought to be regulated.
I agree 100%. The mega-tech corporations enjoy legal protection as a platform vs a publisher. They are clearly taking an opinionated stance re content moderation and should lose their legal protections as a platform and become liable for content like a traditional publisher.
"If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" I regret to inform you that you are wrong."
While it's a shame when the HN crowd takes down a site due to us mobbing it, given the number of folks who are seriously confused about Section 230 I wouldn't mind if techdirt took that hit.
It would save me (and you) from having to post that link every 25 minutes or so.
I'm pretty sure what GP is saying is that they think it should work differently (to note, I disagree, although my position is that moderation for platforms like Facebook/Twitter, where visibility is off-by-default, should ideally be limited to targeted removal of explicitly illegal content, and there should be some regulation to that effect for platforms above a certain market share by some definition).
>I'm pretty sure what GP is saying is that they think it should work differently (to note, I disagree, although my position is that moderation for platforms like Facebook/Twitter, where visibility is off-by-default, should ideally be limited to targeted removal of explicitly illegal content, and there should be some regulation to that effect for platforms above a certain market share by some definition).
That's as may be. However, none of that is the law.
I strongly agree that Facebook, Twitter, et al have disproportionate influence due to the strong network effects of their user bases.
And I believe that we should take steps to limit that power and influence. However, modifying/repealing Section 230 is not the way to do so.
In fact, reducing or eliminating the protections of Section 230 would have the opposite effect, because only those with deep, deep pockets could continue to operate in a world without Section 230.
I made other suggestions[0] which I think could help by providing other places for people to go.
Any success would depend on folks voting with their feet. Let's make that easy to do and give people a better, more positive experience, with more privacy and choice and less ads and tracking, and people will run away from these monsters.
I'll say it again. Repealing/weakening Section 230 would hurt everyone else much more than it would hurt Facebook and Twitter. In fact, it would significantly harm free speech on the Internet -- which is what Section 230 was designed to (and has done for 25 years) protect.
I think the solution is the opposite. This would be removing the section 230 protection from any platform that moderates lawful content, other than technical things such as spam or attempts of intrusion.
Any enthusiast message board would be unable to remove political offtopic material without losing section 230 protection. I don't really want to wade through a bunch of political ranting when I want to learn about the best graphics card for the newest AAA game. But on that same site I may want to read about some potential defamatory claims about manipulation of benchmarks.
If the removal is done by the moderators not affiliated with the platform, this rule would not apply. As long as the platform (host) itself does not engage in political moderation. So you would create a community within a platform and moderate it as much as you want, as long as you are not an employee of that platform, just a regular user.
I've never used Parler, but I find it strange that most of the discussion around it is based on characterizations of the platform without evidence, so I was interested to see an article with actual evidence.
But the evidence in this article didn't seem to match the claims. To prove that Parler banned people with different political views, they show a screenshot of CEO John Matze posting this message:
>To all the ANTIFA supporters who have been spinning up Parler accounts... next time you should leave your chat server private... Im pretty sad you guys kicked me out... PS. Your VPNs can't save you
The article author treats that as evidence that Matze indiscriminately kicked out people who identify as part of Antifa. I think it's hard to tell from that screenshot alone, but my reading of the quote is that Matze found a public chat server where Antifa members were conspiring to create Parler accounts strictly for the sake of disrupting the platform. I don't view this as political censorship.
The article also paints Matze as hypocritical for banning Parler users who disrupt conversations by spamming porn or pictures of feces. That doesn't seem hypocritical to me, either. You can be welcoming to alternative viewpoints while still enforcing rules that encourage constructive discussion.
Yeah you might be right about the antifa post, but the CEO should call them spammers and trolls instead of ANTIFA then, because the he's banning spammers or trolls then, not people specifically for being antifa. He also shouldn't be publicly posting in an excited way about banning them. Finally, only right-wingers and generally people who don't like antifa capitalize every letter of ANTIFA, so that just further makes this post horrible PR, and seems like he's gleefully banning political views he doesn't agree with.
It's funny how the same group of people who say things like "government should get out of the way of business" cry foul as soon as those unregulated businesses do something they don't like.
Do they ask for the state to intervene? Then it is inconsistent.
If they are just unhappy with the way their hosting providers behaved, and what arguments they used to explain their eviction, then, well, it's understandable.
If they are asking the state to enforce any contracts/agreements then that is very much consistent with a laissez-faire stance.
The 'Freedom of Speech'-line of reasoning is invalid in a laissez-faire context, though it _is_ however an argument I'd expect to bee seen as valid by several large crowds between the political extremes.
I agree about the freedom of contract, and assume that the terms of service likely included the right of the provider to cancel the service and terminate the contract at any time, without giving any reasons.
The problem I see that everyone sees e.g. Parler as so toxic that they expect their reputation to increase, on average, for kicking them away. It's the low tolerance to dissent and the high social opinion pressure what is troubling, not the action.
Section 230 of the CDA is the government getting in the way of business; granting these businesses privileged immunity such that they can have all the advantages of operating as a common carrier, while actually operating as a publisher.
Take away that government-giveaway, and the problem is solved.
Take away section 230 and now companies can be sued for what they're hosting, and so they will more aggressively start banning people.
Also you can't realistically remove section 230, the risk is too high. Say a rogue user uploads an illegal image to your site, you've now hosted this illegal image which is a felony. Even if you delete it quickly, you've already committed the crime by hosting it in the first place. It's completely impractical to run any internet service without this protection.
Huh? I’m not remotely confused, but it would seem that you are.
Without section 230, companies can carry whatever content they like, but they’re legally liable for it.
A common carrier is not responsible for the content they carry, as long as they carry it for customers without discrimination.
In exchange for serving the public good, common carriers are granted the privilege of immunity.
Section 230, however, eliminates that exchange — a government grant of privileged immunity, in exchange for nothing — while also having editorial control over what they publish.
Imagine how HN would look without moderation, if it allowed everyone to post "without discrimination". Then tell me that Section 230 was a bad idea.
The only reason you're able to have this conversation with us is because of Section 230. Without it, the only people left on this site would be spammers, trolls, and racists.
Are you suggesting we didn’t have conversations like this, quite successfully, on Usenet and other message boards prior
to the CDA being passed in 1996?
And why don't we use Usenet anymore? I'm too young to have used it, but Wikipedia offers a hint: "Almost all unmoderated Usenet groups have become collections of spam".[1] There were other factors too, but this seems like a major one. Who would want to stay on an unmoderated, spam-filled board? You have freedom of speech but there'd be no one around to listen.
The evidence suggests users like moderated spaces. Otherwise wouldn't your utopias of unmoderated free speech still be flourishing? Why aren't you on Usenet right now, and making your arguments over there?
>Section 230 of the CDA is the government getting in the way of business; granting these businesses privileged immunity such that they can have all the advantages of operating as a common carrier, while actually operating as a publisher.
Section 230 doesn't "grant these businesses privileged immunity." Section 230 applies to all persons and all devices connected to the Internet in the United States.
It provides that you cannot be sued for something another person says. That's it.
And it applies to you and me and Hacker News and fuckfacebook.pro and Twitter and your github repo, your favorite twitch channel and any other internet user or resource when more than one person can share bits.
If there was no section 230, it would destroy free speech on the Internet.
Let's take HackerNews as an example. Without Section 230, if the owners of HackerNews continued to allow up/downvotes/flags, they would be liable to be sued for any content they did not delete that anyone chose to sue over.
Given that they almost certainly can't afford that sort of liability, they would have three choices:
1. Do not allow any third-party content (user submissions, user comments), which would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of the site except as a place to drop PR pieces for YC companies;
2. Do not perform any moderation at all. Which would include spam, porn and all other manner of ridiculous, offensive and/or irrelevant material, or;
3. Shut down the site.
And that would be true for all sites (including github repos, mailing lists, mastodon instances, most web sites, etc., etc., etc) except those with deep enough pockets to be able to fight the innumerable lawsuits.
Who would that be? Facebook, Twitter and Google. The very people you decry would be the only ones who could afford the liability in a world without Section 230.
> Section 230 doesn't "grant these businesses privileged immunity." Section 230 applies to all persons and all devices connected to the Internet in the United States.
This is specious; said blanket immunity is a privilege, and we do not demand any concessions in return. We allow platforms (happier?) to profit from the benefits of operating as a public square and an editorial publisher, simultaneously.
> If there was no section 230, it would destroy free speech on the Internet.
Prior to the CDA’s passage in 1996, the internet provided almost unlimited, unhindered free speech. What we have now pales in comparison.
If you think existing protections for common carriers and “mechanical distributors” are not strong enough, then we can surely update them for the internet.
However, that does not even remotely begin to justify the give-away that 230 represents. If we’re going to grant the privilege of immunity to platforms such that they can safely privatize the public square, we ought to demand they actually make some concessions to operate like actual public squares.
Mark Zuckerberg was asked whether the companies are synchronizing who they are banning with a special platform that was created for it, and Mark didn’t answer.
Everybody can see that in the last few years banning got centralized, there’s no real competition between the big companies anymore on free speech. Like others have written it, it’s a cartel at this poimt.
None of those would immediately take Parler offline. Parler quickly found new lawyers, obviously, as they were able to release a very well-written complaint yesterday that described how AWS broke the law in several different ways when it gave Parler the death penalty at the height of its popularity.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence though. It could be that the CEO was also trained not to respond to questions that could be twisted around in an anti-trust allegation.
This article makes me sad, because I used to support Greenwald. It's surprising he doesn't know the definition of monopoly (i.e. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter do not compose a monopoly).
In the US there are two mobile OS options (Android and iOS) with a combined 99.8% market share. And large companies like Microsoft (Windows Mobile), Amazon (Fire OS), and Samsung (Tizen) haven't been able to grow their market share, so the barrier to entry seems pretty high.
even if that's true (it is and it isn't, but the pedantry isn't important), what you're saying is effectively is that a duopoly over mobile devices is the same as a monopoly over the internet.
that's patently untrue. it's untrue in the simplistic sense that you can access the internet with non-mobile technology, and its even untrue in the slightly less simplistic sense that an organization can provides its online presence as a website (gasp!) so as to avoid the need to have an app available on corporately-controlled stores.
> two mobile OS options (Android and iOS) with a combined 99.8% market share
Not to mention the fact that if you're kicked out of only one of the two you're basically finished if you live on network effect. If Google decided to kick Whatsapp out of the Android store, even those who have iPhones would have no reason to use it any more.
I mean Greenwald has also asserted that no Parler user was involved in the insurrection, which is a straight-up lie. The fact his work has such an uncritical following on HN doesn't say much could about HN's pretensions to offer high quality discussion.
> I mean Greenwald has also asserted that no Parler user was involved in the insurrection, which is a straight-up lie.
Actually, what is written is, and I quote, "a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler." But I'm sure that was an innocent mistake on your part, not a straight-up lie like you accuse Greenwald of.
While this differs in form, it doesn't seem to differ in substance.
"a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler."
So Greenwald reports that there were 13 people, a number small enough to stretch credulity, and they all happen to be inactive. The thrust of this statement, that it was a handful of inactive accounts is functionally the same as saying that there weren't any Parler users involved in the insurrection.
13 inactive accounts vs no accounts has little meaningful difference in meaning.
>I mean Greenwald has also asserted that no Parler user was involved in the insurrection, which is a straight-up lie.
He did not make this assertion in the article. Quote:
>Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.”
Edit: on reading the article, his source for the assertion seems to be Parler employees: "Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler."
He reported that on Twitter as "Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero."
I think that's bad journalism even if you agree with his conclusions. It's single-sourced and the source has every reason to downplay their involvement in the events of January 6th. I think that at the very least, Greenwald should have checked those 13 users to see if they had active Parler accounts, rather than just taking Parler's word for it.
Further, the number is inaccurate. The DoJ press release (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/thirteen-charged-federal-cour...) says 13 people were charged in federal court, and 40 were charged in superior court. That was as of Friday; I can't quickly find info on whether or not more people were charged over the weekend, but then again, I'm not a professional journalist.
The fact that there's relentless pro-parler, pro-insurrectionist takes hitting the front page, but Amazon's detailed rebuttal to Parler's legal claims or technically quite interesting citizen investiations of the attack on the US Capitol tells you a lot about HN's worldview.
Cartel may be a better term, but the argument holds. The point is they collectively wield undue market power and function as a de facto collective in the use of that power.
According to the CEO of Parler, their bank and payment provider, law firm, and mail and texting providers all cancelled as well. What are you supposed to do then? Store cash in boxes? Receive cash through mail?
Parker was destroyed when their business partners exercised freedom of association and cancelled on them.
How do HN readers, who I presume would generally support safe harbor provisions for free speech, common carrier rules etc, not find it deeply alarming that this is happening? Even if Parler hosted straight up illegal content, surely the proportional response is to block those accounts, not the entire platform? If no, why aren't we deplatforming Twitter or Facebook next?
Blocking individual accounts is something Parler can do (and chose not to), not Amazon/Facebook/Google who don't have access to the contents of those accounts (at least not easily).
Also, it's worth looking at some of the hacked info that was released - Parler had a serious moderation system, but it was used to make sure people had MAGA viewpoints, not to prevent violence. This is not some free and open platform, it was a controlled one that purposely built an echo chamber of violent rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc., and while they may not do an ideal (or even good) job at it, the fact is they're broad platforms used for a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people and are absolutely not comparable to Parler.
I can remember very well calls for violence in twitter against Nick Sandemann. And I remember very well those calls for violence not being removed at all.
Also, during the riots of 2020, it was extremely common to find calls to violence in twitter that weren't deleted.
What's your point, that they apply TOS inconsistently? I don't think anyone will disagree with that assessment. They let Trump violate the TOS for 4 years.
They are perfectly within their rights as a private business to make those exceptions. Is it fair? No. Would we much rather they apply things consistently? Yes.
The question is, do we want to enforce who and what they can and cannot allow on their platform via law, or do we want private businesses to control who they are allowed to do business with?
Because Parler was explicitly designed to host reprehensible speech, and was not making a good-faith effort in censoring their platform. Those hosting the platform decided "nah, we don't want to be associated with this" and cut them off.
These free-speech advocates still have the ability to create mastodon instances or a listserv or something else where a company doesn't have that leverage over them. They still have options and this crying is overblown.
I am actually comforted by the fact that people are allowed to espouse views and ideas that I personally find reprehensible.
However, I do not find psy-ops to undermine our democracy by Russia and other parties to be freedom of expression, any more than they have a right to use platforms to rob a bank (something I'm grudgingly somewhat sympathetic toward).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=5