Entire companies have been destroyed because they rely on Amazon, Google, or some other service, and then have the rug pulled. Sometimes companies have even been destroyed, notably by Amazon, for having the wrong political viewpoints.
My rule of thumb is: Only use open source components, and only run my stuff on Linux. So that way I maintain full control over my stack, and stay mostly immune from the political rug pulls, and other kinds of rug pulls.
> Sometimes companies have even been destroyed, notably by Amazon, for having the wrong political viewpoints.
Ok, I'll ask: what company did Amazon destroy for having the wrong political viewpoint?
AWS hosts some pretty vile stuff without blinking. The last time a company made a big "woe is me, my ideas are being suppressed" claim against Amazon, it was Parler, and they weren't kicked off for their viewpoints. They were kicked off for operating a crime-ridden site with zero effective moderation.
Not too long after Parler was kicked off AWS, I was on a call with hundreds of representatives from power utilities about a modeling tool we were transitioning to. It was mentioned that the tool was hosted on AWS and someone suggested they have a fallback plan in case they got kicked off like "other companies".
Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis.
Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.
None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.
About Musk, once he took over Twitter, that mostly solved the Social Media "Free Speech" problem, because as long as the most popular gathering place in the world is free we're [mostly] all free. So you're right, there's lots of reasons for Conservative optimism.
> None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.
None of those businesses are part of the culture war, or if anything they're 'woke' businesses.
Thiel doesn't make money being conservative, he makes money on venture capital and running a big government surveillance business. Larry Ellison makes money price gouging on licensing. Elon Musk's main source of income is a 'woke' EV business. Rupert Murdoch makes money on tabloids, of which Fox News is just one flavor - and the tabloids are arguably 'woke' as they mainly pitch conspiracy theories that the 'normies' don't know about.
Twitter under Musk is no more free speech than it has ever been. They comply with the vast majority of censorship requests from authoritarian governments[1]. They most recently rolled over for Brazil's demands and are now fumbling their execution on paying the fines Brazil levied against them. Musk also censored Ken Klippenstein's account when he published a link to his Substack article about the JD Vance opposition research dump. So no, "free speech" on Twitter is just a slogan and a marketing campaign for low information news consumers, and it's working.
I wasn't classifying those businesses as "part of culture war" or not. I'm just saying it's a fact that conservatives have been, and still are, under attack, and are nonetheless "winning".
Insofar as Musk not being a Free Speech Absolutist (which I'm not either), that's not news to me or anyone else who knows and respects him like I do. Musk is doing everything he can to keep legal speech from being censored, whereas the prior owners would cancel people permanently for trite trivial things like a mis-gendering (that wasn't even done out of malice), or simply claiming there's two genders.
Regarding Democrats getting censored themselves: While I'm a strong advocate of Free Speech as a general rule, I think after what the Democrats did for a decade (on censorship) they SHOULD be forced to reap what they sowed. So for example, I would've been perfectly in favor of Musk, as a one time act, permanently cancelling everyone who had in the past called for censorship of others. Those people didn't want Free Speech when they held power, and thus they are the ones who don't deserve to have Free Speech after they've lost their power.
I don’t know about the political stuff that poster is talking about but this is true for quite a few small stores that transitioned to mail order as Amazon really took off. If you couldn’t handle complaints quickly enough or had too many flagged listings (stuff Amazon didn’t want to allow on the platform for one reason or another) you could get kicked off without much recourse except trying to open a new account and hope you were not caught.
You could see this as good for the consumer in cases where the abuse is bad but the store I was at in the 00s got kicked off for selling some Martial Arts equipment legal in 47 States but on a naughty list we were unaware of. We listed it in a few colors and that was enough to get kicked out.
I read up on that situation, and it sounded like the three letter agencies were working with Cloudflare all along. They never even asked them nicely to stop hosting lulzsec. To top it off, Sabu from lulzsec was an informer[1].
So Cloudflare wasn't bravely standing on principle, they were just doing garden variety collaboration with the feds.
Okay, so what? That you agree with the political motivation behind the decision does not make the decision any less politically motivated, proving that AWS does in fact kick out consumers based on politics.
>It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
You can be obtuse about it if you want, but this is basically what it means. The only innocent people that the documents could've exposed would be related to american intelligence agencies
One thing is for sure though, AWS has never terminated a website because they exposed Russian intelligence documents, or because they made non american classified documents public. If you are american, then you can obviously play dumb here but it is blatant for everyone else.
And even beyond that, caring about the clearance level of a document is inherently political, and they explicitly say that it was one of the reasons for their decision to terminate WikiLeaks' hosting.
“Human rights groups have asked Wikileaks many times to do more to censor information found in documents. They fear reprisals against aid workers, activists and civilians named in the leaked data.”
Okay? They didn't ask AWS to pull down the entire website though
And again, AWS cited the fact that the documents were classified as being one of the reasons for the termination. You can't get more political than that. Especially when AWS does not care about it when it happens in other countries.
The fact that people will disagree about what's political and what isn't is precisely why censorship, in general, is illegal. Because when people have power over others (including censorship power) it's guaranteed they'll abuse it, even if simply by being convinced their own interpretation of reality is correct.
Look, they were kicked off for their content. I hesitate to call their content "viewpoints" but it's become roughly synonymous with speech so I guess it kinda fits. Regardless, I'm happy they did it. I think there is room for "exception that proves the rule" type behavior. When the bridge too far is literal Nazis I'm okay with considering AWS to still be politically neutral. No ToS violation (which was flimsy at best) needed.
I didn't realize that death threats were a viewpoint.[1]
> People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC, with weapons on Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
> In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.
Parler was used to coordinate the Jan 6 attacks, and when they were caught with their pants down they promised some half baked scheme to have unpaid volunteers do moderation. It was demonstrably a joke and they were caught failing to moderate more attack planning that was happening out in the open on their app. I think Parler leadership got off easy on this, they frankly should've been in jail on January 7th for being accomplices and not merely getting kicked off AWS.
The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did (and very rarely is held accountable for whatever their users are posting, even when it takes literal months to moderate).
But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics. I'm not aware of any legal action against Parler so I don't think they were accused of anything illegal. The fact that you agree with the political reasoning behind the decision does not make it any less political.
Especially since the only time that they ever intervened for something like this was when it happened in the US. It didn't happen during the Arab Spring, or the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, or any other time where people used an AWS hosted platform to coordinate a coup.
> The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did
Other big social media companies generally own their own infra, so they they don't need to get into existential crises when their landlords go looking into their activities.
> But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics.
Not sure how you're able contort this argument together. Parler was involved in crimes. AWS didn't need to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt like the justice system did, they merely had to have a good faith belief crimes were happening on Parler and Parler wasn't making good faith efforts to mitigate them. They didn't merely fail to moderate, they basically told Amazon to kick rocks when they were provided with evidence of crimes on their platform.
It's honestly kind of insulting to cry about political repression when it was just garden variety crime the whole time.
How was it involved in crimes? Again, can you be more specific?
I agree with you about other social media platforms owning their own infra, by the way. But I'm not sure if that supports your point? If the only difference is that they own their own platforms, meaning they can do whatever, doesn't that show that AWS is actually unreliable for products like these? Which is what OP was arguing?
Also, it's weird to say that I was crying about political repression. My point was that your comment itself was arguing that they were still removed for political reasons. Which meant that you agree with the person you replied to, it's just that you think that it was morally correct which is besides the point.
And if Parler did commit a crime, or crimes, surely that would be public knowledge? Jan 6 lead to a rather intense series of prosecutions, so you'd think Parler would also face criminal charges. Unless you meant that it was used for criminal stuff, which is true. But that's a completely different standard, and one that AWS only applied to Parler (for obvious reasons). If you are saying that enabling criminal activities is a crime, then that would apply to other social media too (regardless of if they own their infra or no). Yet again, Facebook or YouTube has never been charged for anything like that.
It's totally fine since AWS was within its rights to ban them, but it's weird to argue that it had nothing to do with the politics of the situation. Again, AWS does not care about coups outside the US, which are just as illegal.
1) If you run the numbers on how many man-hours and cost it takes to moderate a popular platform, what you end up with is a situation where small players (like Social Media Startups) can simply never afford to get into the game, because of the moderation burdeon.
2) The other problem regarding censorship is that it has to be done by humans, and humans are not objective and benevolent. All humans will apply their own political ideologies towards their censorship decisions. This is true because your sense of morality is involved. That's what happened at Old Twitter. They were all Silicon Valley leftist moderators, and so they deemed conservative speech "immoral" and kicked people off for things even as mundane as misgendering or mere "impoliteness" to some "protected class". It got WAY out of hand. Thank God Musk came along and freed everyone.
Almost EVERY single conservative that was kicked off Twitter (before Musk bought it) was kicked for perfectly legal, and often perfectly polite, political speech.
Sure integration points to all that are great. The mistake is when your entire company can no longer function at all without Amazon AWS for example. I've worked at a place like that.
EDIT: Of course if you're sure your politics are completely left-leaning you'll have no censorship worries, because these platforms are mostly Silicon Valley run. Also since conservatives basically don't play dirty in this way, the conservatives won't censor stuff just because it's left-leaning. We're for protecting freedom of all legal speech and actions.
My concern is that people aren't building their own horses the minute it becomes feasible. The farrier now seems mystical and occult to a generation even though they're more than capable of picking up the tools themselves.
Worth mentioning Stripe among the destroyers. Sure a percentage of those who complain on r/stripe are breaking ToS, but it's evident that a substantial % are not. Stripe ToS allows them to profit from investing held funds. Once funds are held, nobody at Stripe responds. Has taken years for some to get their funds returned. I wonder how much funds they have on hold at any one time and how much they're making on it.
That's not really relevant to the problem at hand, which is the ability to integrate with the large and widely used tech giants' platforms. Customers do use Google Drive (unfortunately) and thus the need to integrate.
Entire companies have been destroyed because they rely on Amazon, Google, or some other service, and then have the rug pulled. Sometimes companies have even been destroyed, notably by Amazon, for having the wrong political viewpoints.
My rule of thumb is: Only use open source components, and only run my stuff on Linux. So that way I maintain full control over my stack, and stay mostly immune from the political rug pulls, and other kinds of rug pulls.