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.
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.