These sites all get eliminated when they are tied to a violent attack.

You can't expect everyone to love everyone. But violence is the red line.

Haven’t seen evidence of that in any of these cases, by companies, MSM, legal parties, or honest people—- especially when looking at riots earlier in the year.

However, even from a cynical pragmatist view the attack causes previously high engagement “viral” content that stirred controversy/discussion and most importantly ad views/clicks into something that advertisers will most likely refuse to allow their ads to be displayed alongside.

It essentially shifted from financial asset to liability and so the companies dumped it...

There have been tons of instances of mob killings incited on Facebook in other countries.

How quickly we forget the Arab Spring.

You can certainly find reports of people proudly sharing the videos of doing the lynching on social media. So I don't see why it wouldn't be organized via social media too.

"hate" speech is fully protected by the US constitution. Though I have to ask where you got the idea that in a world where it's ok to ban hate speech the powers that be somehow decided to only ban it in the case of protected classes? What a strange morality.

It certainly seems politically slanted in a single direction. Either way, I hope more people join the Fediverse and get away from these walled-gardens.

I’m a staunch free marketer and First Amendment advocate. I think this is a freedom of assembly issue. Amazon should not be forced to assemble with these customers.

If anything, this same group has fought for a more extreme version of this freedom through its don’t-sell-cakes-to-gays schtick.

(To be clear, I support e.g. the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to speech. They say awful things. But they have the right to. If they started organising murders or lootings of gay-owned businesses, on the other hand, I would not consider their actions protected.)

Also and because people were apparently deeply failed by their civics classes in HS, “publicly traded” does not mean a company still isn’t private. Private means not owned/run by the state.

i hope this isn’t news to you but there are all sorts of restrictions on free speech built up over the country’s history...

However, this does not apply at all to private companies. They could, theoretically, have ridiculous rules “Everyone must refer to themselves in the 3rd person or we ban you” and it is totally legal because it is their platform. 1st amendment applies to private companies only to guarantee their OWN right to free speech.

These are all legal arguments with a well-established history.

Much like gay wedding cakes or nazi cupcakes, you cannot force a company to host your content if they choose not to.

Elane Photography paid thousands and thousands of dollars in fines for choosing not to work a lesbian wedding at a time when lesbian weddings were not legal in New Mexico. They never got their money back. It's not as cut and dried as you imply.

Thats actually not true. There are numerous businesses that are absolutely forced to distribute your content, even if they don't like it.

The obvious example is the phone network, and other common carriers. There are a whole set of laws that do indeed force these companies to distribute your content.

Are you going to take the next step and consider AWS, Twitter, and Facebook monopoly carriers or service providers? Under their current definitions they are not and can cut ties with you for what ever reason they want (barring protected class issues I assume).

If you step back a bit too, there's another issue I have, which is that it seems to me these companies are coming down hard against the idea of free speech. Let's look at it this way: some group believes the Big Social Media Companies are being politically biased in a way they disagree with, in part because of active moderation that reflects decisions by that company about what's "correct" or "incorrect". So they say "hey we're going to start a new social media platform that we don't moderate." This gets used by violent extremists.

Then some other Big Tech companies tell this new company, predicated on unmoderated speech, to moderate their speech too or they will cut resources.

As others have noted, plenty of violent behavior has been organized on Twitter or Facebook, and it hasn't received the same sort of punishment and ostracism. So why Parler? Because some groups on it are supportive of Trump? Because it's the US government? It's hard for me to take appeals to quashing violent behavior seriously when they're so arbitrary in their application at some level.

At some level, it doesn't matter to me, because there's another argument, which is that the platforms should be very removed from the content on them, like a phone company. They could be promoting that, and instead they're going hard in the other direction, which is to support heavy "moderation" by monopolies. I don't want big business "moderating" speech, or having that much power to do so.

My political inclinations are very different from Trump or anything in these insurrections but I don't like the way it's headed, and I don't see the gay wedding cakes as remotely the same.

If there were three wedding cake companies in the entire English-speaking world, and wedding cakes were a universal requirement for getting married, I might feel the same. In fact, in some ways I do feel the same, but I also would say maybe there should be a lot more wedding cake companies.

Twitter and Facebook made a concerted efforts around 1st-party paid employees that are responsible for macro-moderation across their platforms. Parler instead just replied "our volunteer moderators will handle it". Even reddit has 1st-party moderation, despite their large volunteer moderator community.

Sure the government could interfere and make more laws and regulate but the typical conservative position would not be in favor of government meddling....

Businesses are almost as big as state governments, but are undemocratic. They are run like dictatorships. If you don't like this, you don't like markets.

Us on the left have been fucking telling everyone for years that these companies are dangerous but everyone else embraced them.

These companies yanked the plug on many leftist communities and dozens of social media networks for sex workers. To this day VISA and Mastercard don't allow payments to come in if the website is mainly sex related.

Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.

The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.

Other than that, this is spot on. Conservatives have been happy to tell everyone to let the free market decide, only to cry foul when the market makes a decision they don’t like. Turns out you can’t have it both ways.

Also, it seems that these moves by tech companies are acting in unison (Apple, Google, Amazon) to the satisfaction of one political party (that just happens to have won 2 branches of the federal government).

It’s also possible that this truly just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Regardless, my general inclination with regard to these companies is that we should have a free market but break up any one that gets large enough such that getting kicked off presents a moral issue. VPS is highly commoditized, so I don’t really care that they got kicked off AWS, but Facebook and Twitter are a bit thornier.

If it isn’t then morally they should side with the party who is against violence.

If it isn’t then financially it is prudent to side with the side that will keep the advertiser dollars flowing. (Biden won 70% of the economy and the majority of the people, especially the wealthy and well educated)

I'm pretty sure our tax dollars fund DARPA. [+] A substantial portion of the technology we're talking about here was funded by Public money.

[++] So when making all these fine points about discretion of private companies regarding the use of their platforms, it must be remembered that none of FANGs would even exists without technology and both military contracted private and academic research that were funded by American taxpayers' money.

Taxpayer funding has no bearing on the commercialization of products down the road. It is not a special case of intellectual property...

Issue is not IP. Did I mention IP? There are extant congressional records of discussions in Congress regarding gifting this technology to "business" in service of the American public (one presumes). There is an implicit social contract at work here.

>Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.

>The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.

There was no inaction. The inactivity was intentional. Things were going great. Bank balances were going up, everything was centralizing, everyone else putting off the difficulty of learning to actually make something and keep it free.

The last 4 years has injected more jade into my worldview than the rest of the years of my life combined.

It is very hard to write a clear set of rules about where the line is.

Parler repeatedly refused to take down TOS violating speech. As far as 99% vs 1%, well persecuting the majority for the actions of a minority is very “patriotic” and an american tradition just ask a muslim ;)

Platforms sanction calls to violent riots from Black Lives Matter and Antifa. So this is all fully based on the political feelings of the platform.

Edit "Platforms also sanction the use of violence by nation states".

Many HN posters: "We love free markets, every company should follow their own rules and do what they want"

Company bans violent and insurrectionist speech as is their legal right

Many HN posters: "No, not like that!"

If an American platform hosts public officials who use that platform for political purposes, then it should follow that all American citizens should have access to engage, comment and react.

Public officials relying on private platforms for public policy purposes, fundraising etc seems absurd and grotesquely undemocratic.

Strongly agree on public officials using private platforms for policy, but they must have seen something attractive about it. Free people and whatnot...

“The market” seems to reach this conclusion en masse immediately after it’s clear that the political and regulatory winds have changed.

I don’t know much about Parler, and for the record am about as opposed to Donald Trump and his supporters as one can be. I view these moves by tech companies quite cynically.

This is not about fiduciary duty, nor is it about legal liability, this is a Silicon Valley hivemind moving in unison, arguably as a result of unhealthy discourse on their own social medias.

Edit: Thanks for correcting my ignorance.

No is just the rich elites who fear getting the rope (which they know its deserved)

Liberal vs conservative is just divide and conquer