> It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad.
Parler wasn't dropped for making Amazon look bad. Parler was dropped for repeatedly failing to address blatant terms of service violations.
AWS still hosts the National Enquirer, the magazine that literally tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos. AWS is hardly in the habit of removing sites that make them look bad.
Parler has gained a reputation for being some sort of free-speech platform, but it was anything but. They had heavy-handed moderation that routinely banned people and removed content for not agreeing with the popular sentiment. They made a deliberate choice to continue to leave explicit calls to violence on their website, and they were removed from AWS for it.
Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.
If you listen to Parler's CEO arguing about being shut down[0] (interview with Megyn Kelly), he was saying that their tech rep at Amazon gave no hints that they were in danger of being shut down. It sounded like they were doing a decent job and they tried to remedy Amazon's issues, but Amazon wanted nothing to do with them anymore.
EDIT: to add, this is just his take. There is obviously 2-sides to the story, so hard to know the full truth here.
Facebook and Twitter don't own their data centers. If the DCs responded to the same pressure about hosting illegal content, the social media giants would disappear too.
Edit: the downvotes and rate limits are about to push me away from HN for good. This is ridiculous.
My platform is anti-fascism. I'm tired of people on both sides trying to shut down the other side.
No, literally all I'm saying is that a technical support liason at AWS is not going to be in a position to discuss legal issues regarding the customer's account. It's not their job. If AWS operates similarly to most other companies I've worked with, technical support staff are strictly forbidden from discussing legal issues -- that's the responsibility of the legal department.
> Facebook and Twitter don't own their data centers. If the DCs responded to the same pressure about hosting illegal content, the social media giants would disappear too.
Imagine if the power company, that provides the electricity for those data centers decided to stop working with them, tommorow.
Surely, you could recognize the issues with doing this? (Lets ignore common carrier laws for a moment, because it is not relevant to the main thrust of the argument, which is that this would be bad)
Which further underscores the perils of architecture built around a central point of failure once more, so far from what I've heard about Parler makes me think it was a den of mainly boomer aged crack-pot Qanon and Trump supporters.
In a way its a lot like 8chan, which also got censored after the last racist shooting, Hotwheels outright condemned this and went on record from the Philippines where he lives now and said he wished he didn't create the thing as the worst things he could ever imagined came out of there in masse, but he had no choice as a person living the US with a disability and no access to medical care and limited employment opportunities.
With that said, I'm indifferent to Qanon BS, and the latest storming of the Capitol underscores how pervasive the cancer that is social media is in deteriorating the social fabric in the US for so many (mainly disenfranchised, and poorly educated people) which makes me want to blame you FAANG types even more. I'm sure Russia and China have a hand in all of this, but that is to be expected after how the US intelligence agencies have weaponized every technology for nearly the entire last century around the World.
But in the end, people have agency and the choice to not use your algo optimized survielence based apps/platforms and fall trap to these abysmal outcomes. And the truth is so many of you people default to the 'If I didn't do it, someone else would' rationalization.
And as I've come to learn in my time in tech, especially in my (limited) time in Silicon Valley, many of you are immigrants on employer sponsored Visas or 1st generation migrants with family back home who need the money to survive, so I can't hate you as a person if that's your situation. I just want to clarify that I hate the system you operate with a passion because it lures you in with the delusion of prestige tied with bloated salaries for focusing your attention on the most pointless, and in modern times clearly dangerous, use of your collective talents and skills at these places when we have so many more real problems to solve.
What I can say is I just sincerely wish you do something worth redeeming you as a Human being as a side project.
This tired argument that Parler is an innocent victim of censorship is so invalid (by so much data) that it seems like a false flag. The moderation of Parler was designed to tailor to one viewpoint: Trumpism. It was an engineering echo chamber for a narrow set of ideologies and naked hate.
100% agree, he has a reason to paint a certain narrative. (I added my edit before you replied I think).
Either way, without knowing the full picture from both sides (like a court case going through discovering to fully put out the communciations between Amazon and Parler), we don't know the answer. We see that Amazon canceled Parler with little external communication. And we see what Parler is saying. Amazon could share what they communicated with Parler (assuming they legally can), then we could see another side to this story.
It would be nice for this court case to go through discovery, then we'll know who said what and when. But until then, we have very imperfect data and have to weigh it as best we can.
“In mid-November 2020, AWS received reports that Parler was hosting content threatening violence, in breach of the agreement. Executive 2 Decl. ¶ 4. On November 17, 2020, seeking to better understand Parler’s approach to content moderation, AWS provided Parler two representative examples, asked whether “this type of content ... violate[s] [Parler’s] policies,” and asked for “more detailed information on [Parler’s] policies and processes for handling and mitigating” such content. Id. & Ex. D. Two days later, Parler responded that it had referred one of the examples to its “regular contact for investigation.” Id. Ex. D.
Over the next seven weeks, AWS reported more than 100 additional representative pieces of content advocating violence to Parler’s Chief Policy Officer, including...”
I'd be interested to know their response time to remove the content. And how that compares with other social media players.
As well, these are just responses, not actually discovery. I'd be interested exact timelines of things and how emails played out within Parler and within Amazon. Amazon's response is just their take on it trying to justify their own actions.
I've seen a copy of an email exchange between Amazon and Parler from Nov/Dec (which is difficult to Google for at the moment) which was shared publicly.
Amazon bring up some examples of posts that concern them. Parler say they will look at the post that constitute actual threats but have a policy of not removing content like the post that's just a long, content free screed of racial abuse. That alone can easily be considered violation of Amazon's conveniently broad AUP.
Amazon appear not to have chosen to terminate or threaten to at the time, presumably on the basis they were getting plenty of money and relatively little grief for hosting them, but it puts a very different perspective on the idea that Parler was caught completely by surprise, and would have cleaned up everything they could if only they'd had more time and resources.
Note that Parler’s very first reply to AWS defends hate speech and misunderstands the first amendment:
> The first example, as hateful as it is, would not be deemed a violation of our terms of service. Following Nadine Strossen (New York Law School, ACLU), Parler does not ban "hate speech" insofar as it would be protected by the First Amendment.
By the time of the filing, Parler realized this was mistaken on both counts. As noted in the judge’s denial:
> “Parler is not asserting a violation of any First Amendment rights, which exist only against a governmental entity, and not against a private company like AWS. And indeed, Parler has not disputed that at least some of the abusive and violent posts that gave rise to the issues in this case violate AWS’s Acceptable Use Policy.”
Just to underline that first sentence, for end users on Parler, or Twitter, or AWS, “First Amendment rights” are not a thing.
Since he cultivates and tolerates a customer base of Trump supporters, Q-Anon followers, virulent racists, gun nuts, virginal misogynists, frustrated incels, white supremacists, violent seditionists, death threateners, and Twitter rejects, then what reason do you have to believe that he doesn't lie as freely and easily and file as frivolous lawsuits as Trump himself does? What has he ever done to earn so much benefit of the doubt that you're heaping on him, against all the hard evidence we can already see with our own eyes?
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
Ok but dropping the National Enquirer would make Amazon look even worse.
And keeping National Enquirer doesn't make Amazon "look bad"... you are mixing issues here. National Enquirer itself may not be pro-Amazon, but they'd be that way whereever they are hosted. Their existence on AWS, though, does not impact Amazon one way or the other, because even those who dislike what they publish, aren't generally claiming they should be denied hosting.
Also I think dogpiling is often confused, intentionally or not, as conspiracy. It seems like a lot of people really really wanted to drop them but weren't brave enough to make the first move.
I really think this is a significant part of the whole thing. Tech companies are conspiring to ban Trump from their platforms so he cant speak, they just want to do it but dont want the ridiculous backlash from going first.
It's not society not being okay with they are doing that makes it intersting.
It's that the subjects of multiple anti-trust probes and companies known for on the down colluding in the past happened to be the ones pulling the plug.
You can argue it was "everyone" having a problem with it, but keep in mind that the Valley is not "everyone". That's the funny thing about conspiracies. Everyone whose in on it flatly denies it, even when it is obvious.
Not saying there was one mind. Just pointing out that assuming "management in the Valley" who have go/no-go on firing customers equates to "everyone" not being okay with it. It does not build confidence to many when unilateral decisions by execs shape the landscape for everyone else. Also yes, some of that population who aren't okay with that likely buy in to more conspirarial thought as well. Doesn't change the facts of the matter.
Similar to how a car accident is interesting, perhaps. My wife checked out the site just to see if it was really that bad. She concluded it was. No doubt many installed it for the same reason.
You'll find that large corporations tend to average out to having fairly similar thresholds for "oh, these guys can fuck right off from our service".
No conspiracy is needed. Same thing happens in neighborhoods - assholes tend to get a reputation as "the asshole neighbor" pretty rapidly. There doesn't have to be a neighborhood meeting to decide this; it just happens.
> Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.
Isn't that mainly due to their amount of revenue? Are newer services supposed to be shut down because they can't(yet?) compete with Twitter on budget for moderation?
Moderation scales with the size of the site. Obviously a tiny little web forum with a few dozen users isn't expected to have a Twitter-sized moderation team -- but if you're at a few million users and growing fast, you're expected to have some plans in place.
That sounds good on paper, but what happens when your revenue doesn't closely correlate with the number of users? Hypothetically, a site can have a million users but have a shoestring budget. On the other side of the scale, Twitter not only has the support structure to mass moderate but they have investors providing millions of dollars. Hiring a full time moderator isn't trivial; it's thousands a year per person, which can be tough for a website that operates on mere thousands to even a few million.
> That sounds good on paper, but what happens when your revenue doesn't closely correlate with the number of users?
I mean, moderation or no moderation, your overall costs are going to roughly correlate with your number of users. If you can't come up with some kind of revenue stream -- be it subscriptions, advertising, or donations -- your site is going to be a money pit.
Besides, depending on what kind of site you're operating, moderation can sometimes be managed by volunteers. Some high profile sites like 4chan make that work pretty well. But it depends on having dedicated volunteers who can agree to enforce rules, which isn't always easy.
> but what happens when your revenue doesn't closely correlate with the number of users?
Then you stop chasing growth at all costs or you go under/lose business partnerships/etc. Sounds like the free market to me - I don't get the idea that a business is entitled to existence no matter what, whether or not it can afford to pay labour (or even get enough volunteers) to do its work.
Parler wasn't dropped for making Amazon look bad. Parler was dropped for repeatedly failing to address blatant terms of service violations.
AWS still hosts the National Enquirer, the magazine that literally tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos. AWS is hardly in the habit of removing sites that make them look bad.
Parler has gained a reputation for being some sort of free-speech platform, but it was anything but. They had heavy-handed moderation that routinely banned people and removed content for not agreeing with the popular sentiment. They made a deliberate choice to continue to leave explicit calls to violence on their website, and they were removed from AWS for it.
Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.