Edit: I'll note that Parler banned the DevinNunesCow parody account. They are fully capable of moderating when they want to, they just don't want to moderate calls for violence.
This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.
For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ).
> Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback.
The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
This isn’t a complex concept. The idea that a company can continually host people planning an insurrection and not get shown the door by the free market is actually a radical idea.
And that’s before we cover the fact that you are arguing that the government should force private companies to associate with people based on their political affiliations. That sounds authoritarian to me.
Either way, Apple selling a bunch of stuff gives you no right to access their equipment. Nor does it make giving the government the right to reach in and compel Apple to do business with people and entities they don’t want to. That’s authoritarian, and if you think that won’t be abused by a later administration, I’m not sure what you’ve been paying attention to for four years.
If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.
I agree. I was just taking issue with your analogy because your app getting banned from App Store isn't comparable to getting banned from the local Starbucks. On multiple levels. Acting like it is is misrepresenting the issue.
Pretending that anyone has a right to either is not only entitled nonsense, it's downright authoritarian. What is being advocated here is that the government should come in and force Apple to do business with fascists and terrorists against their will. Even if you imagine that this will encourage "free speech", and I promise you it will not, this is a power that will come to haunt us all if you give it to the government.
No one is stopping you from self-publishing your manifestos and selling them out of the trunk of your car, metaphorically speaking.
Or literally, in Josh Hawley’s case.
Should've thought of that before repealing net neutrality.
Now... is that one post beyond what HN should allow? Probably not, and it's not my call, we'll see what dang says. But imagine a whole community of people like you warning constantly about imagined terrors and existential threats. And everyone gets to one-up each other.
That's what Parler is. Before long you get senior thought leaders like the President's former attorney (or whatever Lin Wood is) expressly calling for the Vice President to be executed to stop an imagined "steal" of the election. And then the mob attacks the VP and congress trying to do exactly that.
It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence. And it all starts with content moderation. The reason this seems so extreme is that it should have happened LONG ago.
This is what Glen Greenwald was arguing that the left has been doing.
When The_Donald was on reddit, it was more easily monitored in one place. People who used it at least were forced to confront evidence daily that they weren't holding the majority opinion. And grownups from the platform could remove (and report to LE) the worst stuff.
When you ban those people from mainstream platforms, you do deny them some of an audience. But you also encourage them to make their own echo chambers and congregate elsewhere, which may be on the balance worse.
Now we see the same things happening with Twitter / Parler and Gab.
It's definitely hard to know where to draw the line. Karl Popper and all that.
I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since?
And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control.
But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).
It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.
e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.
I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?
Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
Can't be the only one. Reddit was a libertarian cesspool at the time, a crime for sure. RIP Mr.Swartz <3
Seems like a function of a democratic government, not Jeff Bezos. Because Jeff Bezos isn't the government. Well, maybe, but not officially right?
What more could the FBI want than to have every extremist in the country communicating from one centralized server on AWS? Sad. Now they'll probably adopt a secure decentralized communication strategy and form into cells that can't easily be tracked.. wait, this happened before didn't it
Every bit of his comment is a valid concern and Matt Taibbi had a similar and sadly predictive post about this a few weeks ago on this subject [1].
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...
"As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building)."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...
Contrast this with Parler, who just doesn't give a damn. Complete abrogation of responsibility, except to kick off accounts that make fun of their "influencers" (shout outs to Devin Nunes's Cow!).
Do you see the difference here? Do you see why there might be some, shall we say, recalcitrance to do business with the latter?
IMHO, incitement isn't real. It's just spreading blame to people who just made sounds come out of their head. It's barely different than a thought crime.
The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
If that's anywhere near the best case that can be made, Trump is toast.
There are others involved in this whole affair that have almost certainly crossed that line, and they should be made into an example by being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There are some things that are not to be tolerated in a democracy if you want to keep that democracy.
On January 6th, people marched on the Capitol, injured many Capitol police members, and broke in while literally calling for Pence's head and having erected a gallows.
On January 7th, Wood said "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST."
Is this incitement of violence? Why or why not?
Unless there was someone with an actual firing squad or what have you while he is speaking, it's not directed towards immanent lawless violence. Your own timeline points out that it was made a day later.
Now, that doesn't make it any less repugnant, it just means that this particular speech can't be incitement unless there's some other events that let it fit the standard.
Everyone has gone nuts lately. Even other lawyers like Ken White of Popehat were musing about some events being an "argument for the gallows" on Twitter.
I don't know that word. ;)
"imminent lawless action" and "likely" are the important words here.
Imminent lawless action here usually means there's a specified timeframe (as clarified in Hess v. Indiana). Given that many people are explicitly talking about January 18th and January 19th violent action, it's hard for me to see how this standard isn't met. Daydreaming the overthrow of the government and murder of specific elected officials a week from now is not protected speech, especially when made credible by violent action a few days ago.
Unless one of those "many people" is Lynn Wood himself, that doesn't count. You can't just stitch statements from multiple unspecified people together to meet the requirements. Now, he's said a lot of things and maybe there's something not mentioned here that I don't know about that rises to that standard, but the fact that you think that merely "daydreaming" can rise to the standard shows me that you probably haven't read what they were saying in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
I completely disagree. The context in which speech is uttered has bearing on whether it is likely to cause immanent [sic] lawless action. If someone else says January 18th, and you provide concrete suggestions and a plan to do so, without mentioning January 18th, you're not magically off the hook.
You're also contradicting Volokh, a well-known and well-respected liberal first amendment lawyer's analysis by vaguely gesturing at one of the cases discussed in that very article.
Yes, but immanence [sic] doesn't mean "right this second". It means at an understood point in the future, not during some undefined and indeterminate timeframe.
If everyone else is talking about violent action January 18th, and then you talk about people you'd like killed in the same general conversation, you don't walk just because you never specified the specific time yourself.
> You're also contradicting Volokh, a well-known and well-respected liberal first amendment lawyer's analysis by vaguely gesturing at one of the cases discussed in that very article.
Argument by authority. We have constitutional lawyers on the other side arguing the bar set in Brandenburg is met by Trump's comments alone. e.g. Niehoff, Somin (who writes on Volokh Conspiracy, too). Let alone after the additional context of a violent outbreak and more outright threats.
And where, precisely, is that proposition found to be found in law or precedent?
> We have constitutional lawyers on the other side arguing the bar set in Brandenburg is met by Trump's comments alone
And now you switch subjects again to Trump's comments when we were discussing Lynn's.
You're trying to gesture at an article you haven't even properly cited to blame a different person entirely which does nothing to establish that the authority gestured at even agrees with you in the first place.
Now, if you have, say, a link to a proper legal analysis saying here are these specific statements by Lynn and this is why we think they meet the tests based on these and these precedents, then go ahead and present that. But if you're just going to continue to switch topics instead of trying to make your claims more precise, then I see no reason to engage further.
Here, I'll even help you:
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/dlegates/URBS513/howtodoa.htm
The issue, so that we don't keep changing topics, should be:
Whether Lynn Wood's January 7th statement "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." meets the test for imminent lawless action.
"Let alone" circling back is too difficult to understand?
> Whether Lynn Wood's January 7th statement "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." meets the test for imminent lawless action.
And you don't think surrounding circumstances matter? E.g. would it be different to say this:
A) When there's an actual firing squad there, and Pence is 200' away? B) When you're at the front of a riled-up crowd, some of whom you know to be armed? C) When there had been violence and people hell-bent on killing Pence the day before, and others you're corresponding with are talking about mounting violent effort against the government in the next week? D) As part of the baseline political discourse when there is no armed crowd and no recent political violence and no conversation about a specific date? E) As part of a middle-school debate, when few tempers are inflamed?
The courts get to decide where "imminent" is, and we don't have a clear standard. This is why legal experts disagree. I think we can probably agree A is not OK and D-E is OK.
If we don't include 'C', it's becomes questionable whether Hitler's speech at the Beer Hall Putsch would be 'incitement', and it seems pretty clear to me that we should include it as such-- if not that, what is? Slightly veiling your coordination and inflammatory language gives you a blank check? I don't think so, and I would hope courts would agree.
I'm not likely to respond to you any further because I do not believe you are discussing in good faith.
(It is the latter.)
For the record, the case of the draft protestor being jailed is where the phrase "shout fire in a crowded theater" comes from. Food for thought.
"So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."
Perhaps that was the point you were trying to make, of course.
"Under the imminent lawless action test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely." [0]
There's two sub-tests: intention and imminence. Let's start with was it imminent: the plain text is clear, the time was now-- undoubtedly, the call to action was not an obscure point in the future. Supporters were to immediately go down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol complex. But what was Trump's intention? That analysis transcends the text as written. Therefore, we can't outright dismiss the speech as categorically not incitement, because the text alone is not sufficient in determining if the speech is incitement.
I posted his speech because my original comment's parent poster claimed Trump had not suggested his supporters make their way to the Capitol, which is false.
I'm not familiar with the geography of Washington D.C., but "walk down Pennsylvania Avenue" does not seem to me to be the same as "storm the Capital building".
Now, I suppose it's possible that some other part of the speech actually did incite violence, but if this is the worst part, it is not incitement to violence. Not. At. All.
Further, in that speech quoted, Trump specifically says to his followers that Democrats should not be voting.
This one ain't hard to parse.
I'm not aware that the demonstrators were toting guns.
Really, give it up. If you want to argue that Trump incited violence in this speech, you need to find another quote from it in which he does. The one above is absolutely not incitement, as is completely clear to anyone who is not blinded by partisan rage.
By the way, your country could do with less partisan rage right now.
Sorry dude. We don't play half-blind here for the sake of your argument.
And if you want less "partisan rage"--well, plenty of the chumleys who stormed the Capitol are still at large, we can sure start there! Somehow, in comparison, I think me chuckling at Parler getting their just desserts doesn't even rate. ;)
The oft-displayed photos show bats, a spear, body armor, helmets, etc. The QAnon enthusiasts arrested in Philadelphia were armed. At least one individual has been arrested for carrying a loaded pistol on Capitol grounds. It is utterly fanciful to suggest none of the rioters were armed.
Have you even forgotten Trump's exhortation that the "second amendment people" might "do something" about Hillary Clinton?
In order to believe that Trump did not incite violence you must overlook the way he's been beating the drum and fanning the flames all along. Writing out his meandering, discursive speech tries to remove from the picture what we all know he means and intends.
If you believe X because of evidence Y, it does not follow that Z must also be evidence of X, just because you believe X (even if this belief is correct).
Not having the critical self-awareness to recognize this is likely to lead you to believe all sort of things that aren't really true, as you start thinking that everything you see confirms your existing beliefs, even when it doesn't.
Can you explain why exactly it isn't? This claim is repeatedly made, but it has no backing rationale which I would like to understand.
> "giv[ing] them the kind of pride and boldness they need" (not by intimidating them with threats of violence, which would of course be illegal).
You are immediately excluding lawlessness, which defeats the complete exercise of the test (unless you have additional context to provide, which validates Trump's mental state convincingly excludes unlawful behavior). The point of the test is to examine if there was intent for unlawful behavior. Again, that would transcend the text. We would have to place ourselves in Trump's mind, and examine further, and then create a compelling argument for or against mens rea.
Got anything else?
How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
Typically in such cases posts are placed in limbo - still present but usually inaccessible while legal questions are answered.
Courts should be making these decisions, not companies interfering in other companies.
Why?
Because at the end of the day these are questions "the people" need to answer, not unelected managers at tech companies.
A few people do not have the right to silence the voice of millions. That's what's happening, fundamentally, and it is being cheered, and you all somehow think this is going to end well.
But when you act like a ass in my house, you hit the road.
Are you allowed to screech racist diatribes to call for a riot at my bar’s open mic night?
Are you allowed to scream political speech in a shopping mall?
Are you allowed to use the PSTN to organize your criminal enterprise?
The Supreme Court has ruled that free speech on private property is still protected when questions of scale are introduced. There are circumscriptions on that, but it is still protected.
Yes, there are circumstances where the courts have found that private actors have crossed the line into acting like the government (“state action”) and therefore have to follow rules set for the government. But they’ve only done this for private actors that have literally built an entire town and run it like the government. The seminal case in this area was about whether or not the first amendment applied in a company town (Marsh vs. Alabama).
The courts have never found that anything anywhere close to AWS falls under state action. Not only have they not did that, but they’ve said that state action only applies in cases where companies perform functions that are “historically the exclusive domain of governments”, such as running towns. Given that providing web hosting has neither been a government responsibility, nor has it been exclusively a government responsibility, there is a 0% chance that the courts would apply state action to a company like AWS.
There is also no interest by any member of the court to expand state action, liberal or conservative. The last case on the issue saw dissent based not around state action, but whether or not the private actor in question had taken over a contract that constrained them (a private actor bought a former public tv channel). The dissent wouldn’t even cover a case covering AWS.
If I buy every ticket in Yankee stadium and turn it into a rally for Some political issue, is the management required to just deal with it? What law requires that AWS host people who want to overthrow the government?
The more people are involved, the more interest the state has in private property.
This is why for example we have employment and health laws.
Marsh vs. Alabama wasn’t decided because it affected a lot of people. It was decided that way because it was about a private company who literally ran an entire town. It was decided that because they were performing the functions of the government, the rules applied to the government should apply to them.
Since then, Marsh v. Alabama has been “limited to the facts.” Later precedent has clarified that state action only applies in cases where private actors take up duties that are “traditionally exclusive to the state” (Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck). No matter which way you slice it, AWS does not fall under this precedent.
He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.
Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have.
The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.
Every platform created for this reason that gains a large following does so specifically because it attracts people who recently got banned from some previous existing service for being terrible. See 8Chan post gamergate or Voat post-banning of r/fatpeoplehate. Not saying it's wrong to be pro-all-kinds-of-speech-allowed-on-platform-that-you-run, but those kinds of platforms usually only surge in popularity when a bunch of people get banned from a more mainstream platform where being a dick is against the rules.
Edit: don't want to make it sound like big tech companies like Twitter / FB and Amazon are "good" for doing this. They're only doing this because they feel pressure to do so. If the execs had a moral compass, they would treat every user the same, and ban people based on the same set of rules.
This does also mean that if it doesn’t die right now, eventually it will when the funders get tired of it.
The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect).
You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/
It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
although MeWe had quickly attracted racists and actual nazis too, though.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care.
But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.
> In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.”
> The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0]
Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users.
It seems to have worked out for Reddit.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...
We rely on AWS, and now I'm thinking this is a giant mistake - what if they unilaterally decide one day that our business is politically unacceptable because a bad person says nice things about us?
The upshot is that this will provide a huge shot in the arm to the decentralized web... and, of course, once people who are plotting bad things all move to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal it will be that much more difficult to figure out who the bad people are.
Yes. They absolutely 100% are the arbiter of what you can do on their platforms. They have not only the right, but the responsibility to kick you off if your actions threaten the continued operation of their platform, either directly or indirectly. And allowing the sort of speech that brings down a government is absolutely something that threatens the whole platform. Even if Amazon wanted you to storm the capitol, execute the VP, or whatever other dangerous stuff is currently being discussed on Parler, allowing that discussion to happen publicly on AWS-hosted websites would be a bad business decision.
It is 100% their job to police their customers, it always has been, it always will be. This isn't new, it's just how a responsible business operates. No business has ever been immune from the actions their clientele takes, and business have always dropped clients they didn't want to be associated with. (And "seditionist" is not a protected class that is legally prevented from discrimination)
People offended by AWS’s stance, please help explain the differences in aforementioned violations.
The only odd part of all of this is why now? AWS should have banned them during formation. They tolerated it because of Trump being in power. This is the only cowardly hypocritical thing I see with the recent bans. All of a sudden cat is acting like a Lion in the cave after the Lion has left.
That's the point. Booting Parler off of AWS isn't illegal either. You know, conservative principles of free enterprise and all. AWS isn't government that will protect free speech.
While AWS will act on anything that's reported, they are well known to do absolutely nothing in addition to that to stop the rampant usage of their platform to spread child pornography, unlike FB and other platforms which invest heavily in stopping the spread of child abuse material.
Amazon AWS really don't care about what goes on their platform unless it becomes a potential PR issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...
I guess in theory I wouldn't have an issue with that, but in practice a lot most of the time there isn't really an alternative.
That is a completely absurd false equivalence. The decision to host content that could get their entire company shut down by the US government is not anything close to the same as the decision to host content that is critical of their company.
But yes, if they wanted to make that decision, it would be completely within their rights. It would be a dumb decision, as it would turn away a huge number of their customers, but it would be within their rights. (Comparatively, the decision to turn away violent hate speech will deter very few of their customers on a global scale)
Except it's not an equivalence at all. I'm simply saying (and evidently correctly at that), that your justification would also apply to this other situation.
> It would be a dumb decision, as it would turn away a huge number of their customers, but it would be within their rights.
Well, that's where I totally disagree. The vast, vast majority of customers wouldn't be in violation of it, so they have nothing to gain from switching and morality is at best an afterthought.
They're arguing that this action is fine because they own the platform, so they can kick off whoever they want to. Do they accept that this also includes justifying kicking off people generally thought of as good?
They're not saying that kicking off people critical of them is good (i.e. something they personally approve of), but they're saying that it's reasonable.
What a waste of time.
I am not going to read everything you ever type in order to have the context to understand you.
1. What if it turns out that Facebook Groups were utilized in the effort by some in the mob to capture members of Congress in the Capitol and hang the Vice President, and that some of this was explicit ahead of time? This isn't theoretical -- keep in mind that the group planning to kidnap Gov. Whitmer organized on Facebook. Did Facebook play a role in promoting people to join that group? This creates not just PR problems, but also hiring problems. Who wants to write the algorithm that recommended a hate group and play a role in radicalizing people to violence?
2. A key moment from the Congressional hearings into tech companies was when Jack Dorsey, asked if the cure for bad speech is more speech, replied: "All of our policies are focused on encouraging more speech. What we saw and what the market told us was that people would not put up with abuse, harassment, and misleading information that would cause offline harm, and they would leave our service because of it." It's hard to fault these companies for wanting growth, and kicking people out can actually encourage that growth!
3. Young people are often the most profitable audiences. And many of the key creators for those audiences are also young. It's a serious problem for YouTube if their brand becomes Rudy Giuliani instead of [whatever makeup vlogger is popular right now]. This is similar to point (2), but slightly different. Even a smaller audience can be more profitable.
To the "no alternative" point, I'm sympathetic to anti-monopoly efforts. Mostly for my own left-wing reasons: https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/imagining-a-democrati...
But also, these efforts should be broader than just the technology companies: http://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org
That said, even if you took these actions, it'd be hard for any company that wasn't taking moderation seriously among people planning violent overthrows of government. (Which I think is a good thing. Companies should care if armed insurrections are openly being plotted on the merits, not just for business reasons.)
Hate speech is definitely an issue, but I want the government, who are democratically elected and (should) serve the people, to take care of it.
Anti-monopoly efforts are nice, but the required scale of them seems incredibly unrealistic for anything that isn't far off into the future. Especially because it seems likely that for internet companies other countries would simply step in (unless you put up some china like internet firewall...).
Unless you're suggesting government should just ban hate speech? I don't favor that, either, but maybe I should ask for clarity here.
>Unless you're suggesting government should just ban hate speech?
For 'published' speech that is, essentially like libel. I know that censorship laws can be dangerous, but it realistically just strikes me as the lesser evil. You evidently can't just let that stuff openly fester, but I simply can't imagine a situation where the government would suppress 'good' speech but a company with equal power wouldn't.
You've lost it...
The historical context is that prior to 230, imperfect moderation would be used as proof that a service could moderate but chose not to. This created an incentive to architecturally design systems in a way that made moderation impossible (or at least strongly encouraged services to pretend moderation was impossible). So Congress enacted Section 230, so partial moderation wouldn't be turned against you.
Kind of funny in this context. But attempts at moderation, even bad ones, are very much in line with the history of the bill. And of course, we're talking about AWS's private right to associate with whom they want, not government action. 230 doesn't really enter into it except as a metaphor of sorts.
Invoking it also doesn't let you reclaim a DoD contract you lost, or restore public opinion of your company.
(also, protip for trying to convince anybody of anything: don't start out with an assumption that the person you're talking to is ignorant. Replying with "read up on..." is always insulting)
Section 230 says that ISPs are not treated as the publisher or speaker of what their users publish or say. That does not mean that prosecutors cannot try to find companies criminally responsible for allowing users to post illegal content on their platforms, especially if they have knowledge of such content. See Backpage. And even if the companies win, the battle itself is quite damaging.
Furthermore, Section 230 says nothing about how the court of public opinion will treat the provider. These companies are thinking about more than just the legal repercussions. If their business suffers because people do not want to do work with companies that support this kind of content, then all the Section 230 protections in the world will not bring in revenue.
You're right with the second paragraph though, in the US de-facto monopolistic companies are allowed to discriminate their customers regardless of public interest. Visa and Mastercard is allowed to ban Wikileaks from receiving any donations at all (thank God for cryptocurrencies) since they posted info about war crimes and Amazon is allowed to ban social networks that doesn't fact check.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't be that way. Public interests needs some protection, even though companies are the suppliers.
A recipe: 1) Create a bunch of accounts on your competitor's platform. 2) Post awful things using those accounts. 3) Screenshot them as proof that said competitor isn't taking moderation seriously. Make sure to do this before the posts are flagged/downvoted. 4) Send screenshots to all of the vendors that supply services to your competitor.
Voila, competition problem solved.
5) Hire a mob and storm the capital of the United States in an act of sedition, linking the planning and encouraging of the attack to your competitor's platform.
I don't blame Twitter, the company for what happened in Portland this summer, which is sort of the entire point of Section 230 protections. I don't like Twitter or Parler or Gab or Facebook for what they've done to civil discourse, but that doesn't mean I think any of them should get their hosting yanked for it.
In fact, it will almost certainly make things worse. All of the attacks on 4chan and 8chan over the years only served to make them more popular - it's like people have amnesia about the Streisand effect.
If it is, well, then you should probably reasonably actually be concerned about AWS shutting you down.
The right to threaten people with death is, weirdly enough, not actually a right.
Parler has decided not to cooperate, and Amazon is taking the next step, which is terminating that relationship.
Amazon is a business, and can choose to do business with just about anyone they'd like, based on their stated terms. This isn't some weird turning point, and in fact, the email provided shows that Amazon isn't making this decision out of nowhere.
That is literally my point, the 'rules' don't matter. The post that I responded to claimed that somehow there was no slippery slope here because they have rules after all.
>Amazon is a business, and can choose to do business with just about anyone they'd like
Well, that's how it currently is, but this doesn't apply to all businesses. An electric provider can't just cut you off because they don't like you, maybe it'd be a good idea to implement something similar for services that provide equally critical digital infrastructure?
Nothing is stopping them from changing their rules. But if they change their rules from something good to something bad, one simply changes one’s opinion of their rules.
You pole vaulted right over the slippery slope there.
But I'll indulge you: Regulate these companies like public utility. Make laws that specify which content is not allowed (e.g. no hateful content, or whatever) and let the courts be the arbiter.
For example Twitter argued [1] that Trumps statement of "75 million American patriots" could refer to the hundreds of Capitol rioters and that his statement of him not attending the inauguration, which Biden supports btw, was a signal that it's a safe target to attack.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
Sure you can. Even if some of the circumstances will be different, it seems pretty obvious that this did not happen because of the simple facts in evidence regarding Parler, but because of the broader context that a lot of people were beginning to try to pressure Amazon to drop Parler. One could easily envision how this could also be successful in future cancellation campaigns - if a company makes a mob outraged and the company isn't going to reform on its own, then one can naturally escalate the deplatforming effort by going after any company-related apps or service providers. Do we really think this isn't going to happen absent a riot? We already have the rhetorical justification: "This is just private actors showing you the door."
Parler does not want to moderate their platform of violent rhetoric, because their customer base is there to engage in violent rhetoric. If you think Parler should have the right to allow their users to continue to threaten violence to people, well, that's still not a slippery slope, because there is no precedent being set here other than "Amazon will not allow unmoderated calls for violence on their platform."
Amazon always will, and always has, had the ability to terminate users for just about any reason. This is not them doing that, since they've provided a clear solution for Parler which is "stop allowing your users to make violent threats", and they've provided apparently an abundance of examples. Examples which Parler has not taken action against.
For many services with millions of users, if you keep your head down, it can take them quite a while to notice you're in violation of your contract... but yes, if you make a bunch of people angry, one of those people is going to notice you're on AWS, pull up the AWS AUP that's published right on their website, see that you're in violation and report you.
This should be obvious to everyone. The AUP is not a confidential agreement.. and everyone can see where your server is hosted.
The article seems to suggest that it's calls for violence that have violated its ToS (presumably agreed upon at time of hosting or earlier).
> it seems pretty obvious that this did not happen because of the simple facts in evidence regarding Parler, but because of the broader context that a lot of people were beginning to try to pressure Amazon to drop Parler.
So I don't see how what you say is indeed obvious, since Amazon's relationship to Parler suffice to explain the termination, absent any public sentiment or pressure.
Perhaps your argument would be bolstered if you can provide an example of a service with similar volume of calls to violence that has not yet been booted off.
That's capitalism in action. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I do not see how Twitter is any different to Parler here if I can still find both of this content (and the users responsible) on their platforms. Perhaps the moderation on Twitter has a bias to one camp or its users have a heavy bias to only reporting the content that they think 'violates the ToS'.
The fact is, both social networking sites here have this content hosted on AWS and either have a poor or a bias in moderation of this content.
There is a test for this decided at the supreme court level: inciteful speech can only be prohibited if the speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action."
I’ve sent a message to sama & pg asking to add this to the YC list of ‘requests for startups’. I hope they hear.
For those lurking, this is a tremendous opportunity and real need as you have half the country desperate to let their voice be heard while being aggressively silenced and de-platformed for political reasons.
You can have a monopoly on free speech.. just kidding , purely decentralized. Hit me up with your hot ideas and Go chops.
I really, truly believe that any startup idea has to pass the child pornography test. Most B2C companies have to deal with this at some point if they allow user to user interaction.
A decentralized platform as advocated for could not survive if it's not capable of censuring things. You have to censure for child pornography--it's illegal to host it. Court actions around torrents have held that the sites hosting them are not decentralized--The Pirate Bay is at fault for hosting illegally obtained content. Same thing with this--as long as hosting child pornography is illegal (and it should be, not debating that) you won't have a mainstream "decentralized" social media site[0].
This follows for all the other stuff that's going on. Inciting violence is illegal. That, plain and simple, is why Trump was removed from Twitter. Twitter even waited until his violence actually killed people. Even Parler recognizes this[1] and has started censuring, because it could be sued into the ground for inciting violence. If you think that there's a technological solution for this problem--you're missing the bigger picture. Big social media tech _loves_ this stuff--people talk about it all day--they even donate to the groups that help organize it[2].
We're not missing a technological solution--we're missing a legislative one.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/02/parler-...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/09/parler-reportedly-removed-...
[2] https://documented.net/2021/01/republican-attorneys-general-...
I like the idea of a decentralized platform, but I agree that the solution has to be a legislative one. What's being lost is the "national conversation" on the subject and now private companies are deciding for everyone. Billions of people are now being told they don't get to decide how they interact with society; instead, literally a few people are deciding on behalf of billions. There is very little way to spin that as a positive result. This is what democracy is literally for - "we all decide together what we want the rules to be". I'm... honestly so saddened to see that people can't see that.
If "the people" decide, and what's happening now is what everyone votes for? Great! I may not like it but at least we know that we used good means since the means determine the ends. Right now, the means we are using is literally corporations acting as governments - making decisions for billions.
Re: idea has to pass the child porn test: agree. There's a few others too like illegal incitement etc. A platform needs a meaningful way to detect and remove this (not only because the law requires it, but this is a protective measure to ensure everyone gets to interact on that platform instead of it just disappearing).
If this is something you're interested in, I am as well.
Once upon a time, we called that "The Internet." Good times. Good times.
But clearly, they have been. 74 million Americans voted for President Trump in the recent election, and now a bunch of techies in California are unilaterally saying that they shouldn't have a platform, and giving their support to the other side of the political spectrum. This doesn't look good for the average Republican or Conservative.
Twitter also has a much larger audience to push hate and violence to.
If it has since been removed, that's due to moderation!
"Hang Mike Pence" has been trending lately. I don't like anyone promoting violence.
I installed it long ago to see what all the fuss was and never used it and didn't give them a damn thing.
This seems to be another way of saying 'if you don't agree with this view, you are likely stupid'. That's not a great opening, and in general if one finds themselves thinking their view is the only intelligent one, they should consider it a sign they are only considering a strawman of alternatives and not the real views held.
I'm also curious as to what AWS's stance is regarding ISIS or radical militants in other regions of the world. I genuinely don't know the answer here.
That looks like government behavior to me.
No, everybody is. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of every citizen and corporation to act in accordance with democratic values.
At the end of the day, democracies aren't built out of laws written on paper -- they're built on the everyday decisions people take such as voting, arguing over issues, and condemning non-democratic bad actors.
Just as people can protest in the streets against undemocratic abuses of power, so corporate entities can and should deplatform people and organizations that explicitly, violently threaten our democracy.
It's up to every person and corporation to be their own arbiter. That's the ultimate safeguard of democracy.
If AWS waited for a court order, it could very well be too late.
Exactly, everybody is. In a democratic society, everybody decides together what the rules for things like this are, not 2-3 tech CEOs.
I say, draft laws around this and let the people vote on them. Then at least we'd have some basis for doing things like this.
While the government is the only entity /legally bound/ to not restrict speech, it is also untenable to have a government that cannot touch it presiding over an oligarchy of corporations that are wholly censorious. If free speech is critical to a democratic society (which it is), it is necessary that corporations do what they can to uphold it.
As for you other concerns, the conventional wisdom around HN is "Don't build your business on third party infrastructure/services". If they close your account because 'a bad person says nice things' about you, or just because they don't like your face, that's a known risk. There a numerous examples of cloud providers (especially google) shutting down accounts. Its nothing new, and should be accounted for in your business plan.
It'd be great if people could move past these extremely cliche arguments and start addressing substantive ones instead of living in some theoretical free speech bubble where a meritocracy of ideas and the superiority of truth are assumed as implicit, without regard to real-world experience.
If you are violating their AUP, you should be concerned they might cut you off.
If you disagree that those posts called for violence, I'd like to see the mental gymnastics you come up with.
That's not a great analogy. It's more like a banquet hall agreeing to host a far-right rally, which in turn causes the hall's caterer to sever all ties to the hall.
But to your broader point, either AWS is a privately operated company or it's public infrastructure, I don't believe it can be both. There is absolutely nothing stopping the owners of Parler from running their own servers either.
I think you are right that they will move to more fringe parts of the web, but I think that is just how regular society works. A society holds some values, and if you don't hold those same values within a certain margin or actively work against them in this case (non-violence), that society pushes you to the fringes.
I’d suggest reviewing section 1.4 of the service terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AUP (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/)
In any business, your conduct is meaningful. If you decided to start facilitating a white supremacist insurrection, my company’s standard terms allow termination, and we would.
No. AWS asserts the right to deny access to its infrastructure for violation of its terms of service, and the right to determine what those terms of service are.
I think this is an opportunity for someone else to sell infrastructure with zero content restrictions. There is clearly a market.
Infrastructure providers have already decided they get to police their customers, eg. cloudflare dropping stormfront or other white supremacists as customers.
EDIT: To be clear I agree it is entirely worrying that infrastructure that takes up a significant amount of the known internet is under the control of a large corporation that can seemingly decide to boot people for violations of terms of service. I just want to disagree that this is new. It's not new. It's old and well-established by now. If we want to change this, it'll have to be through a law.
No, there are other hosts. But... is it really so wrong to be glad that someone is trying to arbitrate this? Parler was a persistent host to exactly the kind of violent rhetoric that turned into Wednesday's coup. At some point we have to make a call and shut stuff like that down, right?
I mean, yes, it sucks that the overlap between "conventional republican politics" and "rhetoric inspiring real life violence" is so high. So surely there is some friendly fire here on speech we'd like to keep. But... I don't see why Amazon should be responsible for letting this fester like it has either.
If it had been happening on GPG-encrypted email, would that be better?
As far as the honeypot idea: I guess you have to balance that against the danger that these communities will fester and grow. To be blunt: Parler isn't a planning tool for Serious Terrorists, it's a casual internet feed for people who aren't sophisicated enough to use encrypted email or Signal.
The danger to Parler isn't that it's a place for a tight team to plan an overthrow of the government, it's a place for millions of MAGA fans to be convinced that overthrowing the government is a good thing.
Amazon had to choose between appointing itself a censor or being complicit in fomenting violence via offering their services. Both choices suck, but that's sometimes the way cards lie.
> once people who are plotting bad things all move to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal it will be that much more difficult to figure out who the bad people are.
I think society's main problem here is the normalization of conspiratorial thinking and the radicalization that ensues. People have always been able to plot in secret and I'm not worried about law enforcement hypothetically being unable to monitor all wrong-thinkers thoughts in real time.
In some respects I think this recent spate of censorious actions (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter) could be the ideal outcome in that they've always had the implicit power to censor and the public has pretty much shrugged. If society is now forced to reckon with how much of public life it has ceded to Mr. Zuckerberg's whims all the better. If decentralization comes to the web, and tech monopolies and oligopolies are cracked open to competition I will shed no tears.
This is how the US has worked for at least 100 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_fil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory
From just off the top of my head
Further I want to draw a distinction between a rating group which certainly encourages censorship but does not have the ability or authority to carry it out and what we are seeing here. The Comics Code Authority worked by voluntary agreement of mainstream distributors and the underground comix scene immediately popped up to challenge it. The Hays code was enabled by a (IMO) bad supreme court decision and after that was overturned quickly crumbled to a more reasonable (again IMO) system of rating. The Parental Advisory labels, despite the intentions of their founders, were reduced to being audio nutritional fact boxes. Any traction they might have got was granted them by distributors like Walmart and collapsed shortly thereafter when the internet changed music distribution.
I'm actually very curious to see who will be willing to accept Parler's business.
The next move for Parler would be to build their own data center and buy service from ISPs.
And B2C ISPs can discriminate because Republicans, you know, ended net neutrality.
Are you ok with hosting violent content?
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
I'm pretty sure you know why this cannot be tolerated.
I don't even like Parler, but I think this is a dangerous, dangerous precedent that will only turn up the temperature.
It reminds me of news I have heard of other countries where dissidents start losing access to internet and communication channels. I remember it was in Egypt, Iran and Serbia IIRC.
Now it appears to be happening in the US, how it woul6happen in the US (corporations instead of the government)
Looking at it from outside. It deffinitely looks bad: Imagine if the same thing was happening but to the other side (it would look kind of like The handmaids tale).
You're making the argument for why this choice is not "free" for AWS. Not only do they lose a paying customer, but they cause some of their customers to debate the risks of doing business with AWS. It's precisely this balance of capital (including goodwill) that gives private companies the freedom to choose with whom they do business. Customers are the lifeblood of a business, but every one of them is also a potential liability. Every severance of a relationship with a customer carries more cost than merely the lost revenue.
So no, AWS _alone_ is not the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society -- the market for serving infrastructure is vibrant and competitive. If nobody in the market will do business with a given customer, well, that's capitalism for you.
(and just in case it wasn't clear, I applaud AWS making this choice, and hope the market at large will do the same)
HN is extremely ignorant on such matters. But the truth is every hosting provider in the world does this in one way or another, as they all belong to some jurisdiction with some people, organizations, governments having power over them, being able to pressure them, etc. You always had to think about it, just some of us for some services in some countries more so and earlier.
Luckily on the tech side and organizational side it's not that hard to protect your service from such primitive soft-power censorship attempts. Torrent sites, political websites, vpn, tor, proxy services, porn, darkweb have been doing this for years very successfully. You just need to be careful about jurisdictions you choose for your domains, registrars, hosting providers and you have to separate hosting providers for internet facing servers from the hosting providers for the backend infrastructure, then host internet facing servers in a bunch of different countries with dns failover and some automated setup of new servers to be able to quickly and painlessly switch and try providers. Obviously backend hosting providers shouldn't be able to deduce what you are hosting there at all and it should at least be hard to deduce for frontend ones, have some decoy stuff ready in case they ask, but encrypt everything, encrypt communications with backends, use proxies or even tor if paranoid they can deduce what you are hosting by IPs you are tunneling to, etc. This way you can even keep using AWS for most things without giving AWS power to boot you, just not for internet facing stuff. And once someone boots you from one of your frontend providers - you just switch to a new one in another country.
This is the part that I don't get. Why is this part up for debate? What is the truth? What's the evidence one way or the other?
On one hand, Parler was the platform a bunch of right-wingers and domestic terrorists used to coordinate a half-non-violent half-violent storm on Capitol Hill. Parler didn't moderate that, and therefore they are being shut down by big tech who has deemed they deserve to be censored.
On the other, I'm sure we could find some like... radical Islam groups on Twitter/Facebook, no? Or is that the difference? Twitter + Facebook appropriately censor content and Parler didn't and it's as simple as that?
In particular, your beliefs and understandings are not held by some of the people who hold the kind of power being discussed in this comment thread.
-- Khamenei wanted to eradicate a people: https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1003332853525110784?l...
-- Chris Cuomo said protests didn't need to be peaceful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezGyemHna_k
-- A rapper sang about how to rob Chinese families because "they don't believe in bank accounts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFxOsUe0I8o
And what about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRnmnxVtDqg That's okay because the right people claimed that Kavanaugh was a rapist?
18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
There isn't any rebellion or insurrection going on, these are protests. We all know what a US political protest looks like, we've been watching them for years. There isn't anything especially new here.
Trump was looking into this in his final weeks so they're more than happy to pile on. Now Biden has an opportunity to extend government control into more facets of people's lives and Democrats never waste an opportunity to nudge us towards totalitarianism. The technology companies know this, so they may be making a "See? We're woke too! We agree with you - we banned all the Conservatives just like you would have anyway - no need to regulate" statement. The problem is, it may end up being a Faustian bargain.
even more worrying is the Cheynne complex where Trump flew to, I have a feeling he is planning something unthinkable.
Well, if by “current” you mean “since the adoption of the Bill of Rights”, and if by “companies and medias” you mean “everyone, as to how they will use their own voice and property to promote messages”, yes, to you've correctly understood Constitutional free speech.
Imagine if this was a white or asian person making a rap video about how to not rob blacks because they don't have any money. Twitter and social media would explode with rage.
Can people on HN explain why this double standard exists in America?
It's okay to punch up but not punch down. Doesn't that already say a lot about the racial hierarchy in America? Doesn't this suggest that society considers blacks to be at the bottom of socioeconomic order and need to be "protected" at a politically correct level but refuse to offer the same vigilance when it comes to their economic well being?
5 people are dead from the Parler-coordinated attack on the US Capitol. It's post-cautionary principle now.
You are not arguing in good faith here.
This was a violent protest and you are absolutely arguing in bad faith (by ignoring most of what we now know about the events that took place).
[0] https://www.ourquadcities.com/news/national-news/capitol-mob...
Online providers don't have that immunity. Everything ever said by their users has the potential to severely impact their financial health if the public reaction is significant enough.
Who decides it?
Take a look at these: https://mobile.twitter.com/GriffinMalone6/status/13480046828...
Are these threats of imminent violence? I'm confident that a reasonable person would say yes.
So basically Apple is demanding that Parler waive its section 230 protections while lobbying to maintain its own 230 privileges.
https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/13477362322567987...
This is a special case that sits within a much broader question of where, how, and whether speech is regulated online. We clearly haven't gotten very far along in that discussion yet, but society needs time to even be able to have that conversation intellectually and legislatively. If a peaceful and orderly transition of power is unable to occur, unfortunately we may never be given that time.