I will note that whatever antitrust beefs people have with Big Tech, Twitter isn't really in that league. Twitter's market cap is something like 4% of Google's and 6% of Facebook's. I think conflating the two issues here is unhelpful.
If Twitter and Facebook (being multibillion dollar companies with a decade or more to build these algorithms) haven’t solve this problem yet, how can any upstart possibly compete with them? They’d be shut down as soon as users started posting content on their fledgling services.
Algorithms can help, of course. But the problem is mainly a human one.
Seems like the more objective the process can be shifted (by moving away from human decisions), the more effective/fair the process becomes.
Anyway, it sounds like you may work in this space, and, therefore, might have further insight, which I am very interested in hearing about.
It is definitely an Achilles Heel for social media platforms.
The way you get reasonable consistency, whether it's humans or machines, is by establishing clear standards, using them for training, and then continuously monitoring results. It's not perfect, of course. But nothing is.
“Five million people were active on Parler on Monday, which Mr. Matze wrote was an 8-fold increase in user engagement from the previous week.”
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/nov/10/parler-says-i...
This doesn’t seem like a problem that could be solved with more human eyeballs.
This whole "Parler can be better than Facebook because they are smaller" argument is just as illogical as it sounds.
Also, you don't thin smaller groups, companies, whatevers are easier to control?
It depends on what one thinks the foundations of free speech are. For a long time, hate speech has been used to suppress particular groups. In practice, if people with social power can scare disfavored groups into staying quiet, free speech is harmed. Harmed more, in my opinion, than by hate speech restrictions.
In practice, any platform has to choose between hosting abusers and hosting their targets. They will only get one or the other. Given that choice, I would rather boot the abusers. To me the goal of free speech in a democracy is about a maximally informed populace so we make optimal decisions. To the extent that any group wants to convey information, they can do it without abuse. But allowing abuse, especially that targeted at particular groups, limits speech more deeply.
I don't know that sympathy has anything to do with the merits of their case.[1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jun/27/aclu-assist-kkk-...
*edit--formatting
The 1st Amendment does not protect all free speech. It simply bans the US government from passing laws that limit free speech.
for AWS, it will come down to whether they’ve defined situations where they can end their agreement / contract (MSA/EULA) with Parler. Btw, that’s the argument Parler is making that they had an agreement with AWS and not they’re in breech. The feee speech comment is weaker than arguing a binding contract exists.
Of course, it sounds like they have the default MSA with AWS. So, likely has terms very much in AWS’s favor. Also, I’d say they probably have some type of clause related to activities that could hurt AWS’s brand equity as be grounds for early termination.
Bottom line: as the cases referenced show, the government cannot limit free speech with laws - 1st Amendment (read full text). Private/public companies can do whatever is in their contracts that customers agree with at sign up.
That is an interesting proposition, but I wonder what would fill the void created. I believe advertising does not increase consumption per-se, but that it redistributes it among a different set of product and services, so who would be the winners and losers of such an effort?
TV channels and magazines know how this works. If the page is about fashion, sell ad space to clothing companies. If the page is about travel, sell it to hospitality companies and tourism boards. If the page is about politics or finance, sell it to people making catheters and stair lifts.
It's much less creepy than trying to spy on everybody who reads the page, and then looking for an ad that fits your warped understanding of their preferences.
At its simplest, it's the ad network deciding that you were recently seen visting toyota.com, so it'll show you 4 ads over the next hour for Toyota vehicles, to help cement that association. At its worst, it builds up an individualized profile over the course of months from thousands of websites (with google ads everywhere, you bet!) and allow advertisers to practically target viewers based on a psych profile.
What kind of evidence are you looking for exactly?
Why do you believe this?
Almost zero chance this happens, imo. Big tech spent _heavily_ on Democrats (98% of contributions [0]) and the Democrats have complete control for the next 4 years.
an awfully prescient allocation of funds.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-electi...
If you’re implicitly depending on the presidential veto to block Republican attempts if they take control of congress, then yeah that’s fair.
Twitter, Facebook and Google’s social services (gmail and YouTube) are at their heights or just behind them. The cycle for when tech companies are devoured is coming to them. I’d wager something like PeerTube will take a big part of the void YT will leave behind, as the market for censorship-resistant video will grow along the growth of forbidden opinions. Centrally planned government interventions without fail do fail.
Markets and prices are like a force of nature.
Has it ever been? Probably the best known use of the word in many countries is The Troubles.
It's the incitement that we should be concerned about, and balancing restrictions with peaceful freedom of expression.
Could you please ban these topics then ? After all, this thread is a political discussion and imbalanced or biased statements naturally invite responses to correct them.
The bottom line is that a certain amount of political discussion is inevitable here, and users (all of us, on all sides) need to learn the skills of doing that while remaining within the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's definitely doable, as many HN commenters demonstrate every day.
not to mention one of the instigators of this entire thing has been the president of the united states. his actions have consequences that are 100x order of magnitude than your rioter on the street.
Parler is founded on the idea of absolutely unmoderated speech. Even if they win this one, the writing is on the wall for them.
EDIT: This is not as true as I thought. Interesting information below!
They claim they are for free speech, but they aren't even close. They remove all kinds of things, just not enough of the things that Amazon wanted.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...
“If a man is pictured chopping off a woman’s breast, it only gets an R rating; but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman’s breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?” — Sally Struthers
What is it you wanted them to do? I think it's pretty reasonable to not have "See me on Parler @ParlerLovesNaziPussy" as that content that Parler could not control outside of their platform.
Restricting usernames seems like a prudent move, even for a free speech platform.
They are criticizing them because they heavily advertised to people that they should go to parlor claiming that it was meant to fight for free speech because Twitter and other platforms were restricting free speech. Except Parler itself was restricting free speech on it's own and thus people are rightfully pointing out the hypocrisy. It shows that Parler wasn't in favor of free speech, it was in favor of "our side".
One of the major allegations in the lawsuit is that the company took down everything that Amazon wanted, and that a few days ago Amazon apparently replied that they were "okay" when the materials they asked were taken down.
Seems like this will be one of the facts to establish in the suit, however it's part of the body of evidence to support the idea that 1) the suspension was a termination and 2) the termination was unwarranted which in my opinion as a complete lay person seems less sure of proving.
Absolutely untrue. Parler isn’t a free speech site. Gab on the other hand is and even they moderate. Their policy is to only allow first amendment protected speech, but that excludes quite a bit.
Naturally, if such a platform is dominated by extremists then extreme speech will remain effectively unmoderated (I can't speak to the fraction of the [former?] Parler userbase that is/was made up of violent instigators).
[1] Kara Swisher's interview with the Parler CEO on the Sway podcast (I haven't actually used Parler beyond taking a look once out of curiosity)
You are not really watching if you think that is what is happening. They are controlling the narrative. They are promoting some topics and pushing down other. Facebook deleted WalkAway, a group that had full moderation, did not allow any posts which called for violence, and which was pure political speech. Reddit is deleting each and every sub that goes against what their management believes; over 2000 have been banned last year only.
They are not paying lip service. They are directing narrative. They are banning things they don't like. They are deciding which scientific exports are orthodox and which are banned. They are controlling language. They are controlling thought. If you don't think that's happening, then they are controlling your thoughts as well.
This is the most dangerous time for us to be in and this will not end well. Censorship is the tool of cowards. Censorship is the tool of authoritarians. We are literally watching Big Tech and Big Media openly rewrite history. We are in 1984 + Fahrenheit 451 and half of us have bought so far into this narrative of protectionism we do not see it at all.
The way I see it, Amazon (or Facebook etc) didn't censor Parler in the unilateral and totalitarian way you allude to. At some level, every company has to have the freedom to choose who they do business with, every person has to have the freedom to choose who they associate with. Amazon just said "no, I won't sell you AWS anymore". They didn't threaten Parler, Amazon does not have the power or authority to threaten Parler; They didn't and can't prevent Parler from choosing another provider. What's happening here is that Parler knows that no one else will voluntarily do business with them either.
Almost everyone in the industry has turned their back to Parler on their own. That cannot be censorship in the same way the lonely kid who no one wants to play with cannot be described as being censored in any meaningful sense of the word. Honestly I find it a worrying trend to be sure, but to portray individual free actions as censorship is to make the concept of censorship meaningless; It conflates the real dangers of authoritarian censorship with ordinary choices & biases that we take for granted every day.
Wat? Dude, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook's moderation policies are clearly left to far-left. They've done no blanket banning for calls to violence from the left. None of these people have had their pages, accounts or posts censored:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eQzLcO5qhY
and they clearly called for the types of violence we saw in 2017 and every year since up to and including now:
edit: but yes, your point about labour is spot on. I can see that happening next for sure.
I'm okay with this. We've had Republican/Conservative vs. Democrat/Liberal in every other form of media that I can remember. What's wrong with that split with "Social Media" or with hosting providers (think publishers), etc.
The problems seems to be that conservatives thought these services should be neutral but the services themselves have not thought otherwise. It will sort itself out over the next five to ten years.
Google Apple Facebook Amazon for those unaware
funny acronym too, because of 'making a gaffe' can kinda be, making a GAFA.
I agree with you that there definitely will be a new relationship between gov and tech in the next 4 years.
Maybe some policy to make it easy for some new company/startup to disturb/compete ?
Big Tech and Media is not where we make our stand because all the other evil mega-corps are doing it too?
Circa 2017, liberals were arguing adamantly that Russia tampered with the presidential election by exploiting the curation algorithms that these companies employ--if we can believe that these algorithms are powerful enough that they can swing an election, why should we entrust that power to a handful of companies with tightly aligned interests (irrespective of whether or not they can secure their algorithms from outside tampering)? Why should we be content with this kind of hyper corporate oligarchy? To own the cons?
Note that "breaking the companies up" isn't the only way to bring them to heel. With respect to social networks, one interesting approach would be to decouple one's social network from the specific platform through which one accesses their social network by requiring social media companies to use open protocols that upstarts can equally implement. This would increase competition, including allowing non-ad-based platforms (with all of the inherent ethical issues associated with that business model) to compete with these companies. It would also prevent these companies from shutting down alternative interfaces that circumvent their tracking. Most importantly, the competition would weaken them to the point that they're still profitable but not a threat to our democracy.
I haven't considered this possibility well enough to say with any confidence that it's a particularly good solution, but it seems interesting and appealing from this distance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXuk-WSDDRw
Apple may have banned Parler and then Google just decided to go with it, followed by AWS. However, it may also be equally valid they colluded via private channels to make this happen. BOTH ARE EQUALLY POSSIBLE.
Discovery in this kind of lawsuit may lead to the answers. If they did collude, that is a strong argument for anti-trust. Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.
It honestly doesn't matter what you believe about Parler's user contributions. That's the entire point of Section 230. From what I've seen they do make a good faith attempt to delete all illegal posts with direct calls to violence. Section 230 doesn't prevent Google/Apple/Amazon from being forced to have them as customers.
You are protected if you're a minority and a business refuses to give you service based on that status. Opinions and viewpoints aren't protected, and maybe they should be.
If you in any way praise this legal yet blatant corporate censorship because it fits your views, you will be next. We are not on a slippery slope. We are in a god damn free fall. If you don't see it, they will come for you next and no one will be there to speak for you.
No, that's fucking targeted attacks against opinions they do not like. This is absolutely not business as usual. Everything about this is massive and it's morally reprehensible. It may not be illegal, but it's fucking wrong and insane.
It also shows that Big Tech is afraid. They're afraid and they're cowards. Regulating speech and language and blanket censorship are tools of authoritarians, not of people who believe in democracy and liberty.
Show me a single nation where censorship lead to a more free and open State.
Citation please.
Alright, AWS may not own 80% of the market, but let's be fair; it's fucking massive. On top of that Cloudflair has taken down websites before. DigitalOcean and DreamHost have removed people's hosting with less than 24 hours notice[0]. NameCheap and GoDaddy have both revoked peoples domains with less than 24 hours notice[1].
Initial searches seem to show AWS owns 50% of the market by themselves. You add in DO, Azure and GCE and that number quickly climbs[2].
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
[1]: https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/896935462622957573
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/08/02/amazon-...
Edit: Also the lawsuit itself also claims AWS has 1/3 of the hosting market.
That said, antitrust battles against Big Tech will dominate the next four years of economic policy, and rightfully so. GAFA is too big, too powerful, too manipulative, and needs to be brought to heel by every legal means necessary. The US government should also move to immediately outlaw targeted algorithmic advertising, which would make a huge impact on Big Tech's sectarian violence cashcow. (And yes, that's what this absolutely is. Sectarian violence is not just a term for non-Western countries.)