It is hard to separate the fact that they are distancing themselves from a fascist, white-supremacist platform that was instrumental in a near-overthrow of the US government. And even if you think that's okay, this wasn't insurrection in response to oppression, it was an insurrection to overthrow an uncontested democratic result. I guess Parler is so radioactive that Amazon would rather be sued than continue to business with them. Further, there are reports Amazon gave them weeks of warnings and were ignored. AWS has rules.

I don't think the Jan 6 insurrection was OK, or even close.

My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary.

It's like fitting everyone with a shock collar and saying it will only be used against insurrectionists. The government will be a lot less worried about resistance, and the definition of "insurrectionist" is likely to move over time.

It just doesn't seem like a good direction to me.

If it helps, I agree with you here. This whole situation has made me a bit uneasy. While I generally agree with the decision made by these private companies in this specific instance, it does feel like there was a domino effect where one platform banned people for inciting violence, and then the rest followed suit when there was media traction on the story. The fact that a few people have this much unchecked power is a bit scary.

Yes, these are private companies. Yes, they don't have to spend time, money or infrastructure on anyone they don't want on the platform, I understand all of this.

What I merely want to comment on is the ubiquity of these websites. Facebook, Google, Twitter and even TikTok are increasingly becoming primary means that people around the world communicate. If I'm a racist prat that spams that we should "kill all those muslamics, innit", sure I should be warned or removed from these platforms, however that significantly diminish my means of contacting other people.

I have friends that I can only really contact through Facebook. I'm trying to add them on multiple services so that I stay away from a single-point-of-failure, however some of my relatives are old and/or technologically inept, and they never check their email or SMS. While I could call them, if I were to get banned from Facebook that could reduce my ability to communicate with these people down quickly and easily to near zero.

I understand that there are actions for your consequences, I just fear that with these services becoming so commonplace (see WeChat in China, for example), being locked out of these walled gardens could have severe, real world impacts to those that the platform doesn't like.

I don't know, just food for thought.

I'm surprised that no-one's dived deeper into WHY these private companies don't want these people on the platform.

From the perspective of Amazon, Google, Apple, and many others, the overthrowing of the US Government negatively impacts their long-term goals in many areas, such as profit and employee retention. If the US Government were overthrown and Trump became dictator, Amazon would have to move a ton of customer data to other countries because America would be the new China.

It's crazy that it took a coup attempt to open their eyes to this risk. The fact that they didn't take action sooner suggests that a lot of C-level folks throughout the tech world have been pretty complacent in regards to government stability.

That's a really fair point, and it's a really hard problem.

In this case, you had people trying to overthrow a democratic vote. So they are literally the enemies of a free society. But the same laws and infrastructure to prevent this can be misused.

That's the hard stop. You can't have a governmental system that is fault tolerant to malicious misrule. You need to apply laws or laws lose power, and you need to trust those carrying out governing to obey some norms.

Trust isn't about blind, 100% trust. You can trust democracy to work without fitting yourself with a shock collar controlled by the pooular vote. You can trust government officials without assigning them blanket power of attorney.

I am just saying that there are limits to trust. And when someone you 99.9% trust tries to convince you to give them 100% trust, you should pause.

> My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary.

Don’t think this is even vaguely true. We know that one of the primary tools of activists (or insurrectionists / terrorists depending on your point of view) in other countries are WhatsApp groups, and other encrypted chat platforms.

If one is organising a serious insurrection, then I believe one does not normally broadcast their plans to the enemy. That’s kinda strikes me as op-sec 101.

Only in a free and open society could you possibly hope to organise an insurrection in public, on broadcast platforms, without direct and immediate consequences brought down by the state. We must be so pampered to believe that the right to organise in public is a requirement insurrection.

We can theorize and rationalize all day. But I just get a feeling this is something we will look back on as a red flag that warned us of a bad outcome.

>My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary.

Insurrections were organized well before AWS and the like existed, and they will still be organized well after AWS and the like are gone.

Limiting platforms that make it easier to radicalize large numbers of people is still a good thing.

They had 50+ concrete examples of calls for violence on parler that were reported to AWS.

> AWS has rules.

Also, "we're trying to have a f'ing society here"

"near-overthrow"

A few hundred people stalled the counting of electoral votes for literally a few HOURS. Hardly a "near-overthrow" of anything other than Trump himself.

That's only because house and senate members were successfully evacuated - if they weren't, what exactly did you think the rioters were going to do? What do you think they had zip ties for? What was the gallows erected outside for?

> near-overthrow of the US government

That's giving WAY too much credit. The US Government is not a room or a building. A coup is considered successful if it holds power for 7 days; these jokers didn't hold power for 7 seconds.

> insurrection to overthrow an uncontested democratic result.

This is overstating from a certain point of view. It was contested in court (and soundly affirmed). Bear with me for a moment - if what Trump was saying about the election were true, we would want this kind of reaction. I think we can all agree that rigged elections are an affront to democracy. It's just that this election wasn't rigged, as affirmed by courts many times, so the mob wasn't acting righteously. This train of thought has some nuance so I'm not going to be surprised when some folks misinterpret it.

There are two things to think about:

1) how have we let misinformation get so bad that it ultimately forms insurrection? We've got Snopes, disclaimers on social media, etc - is deplatforming the only thing left to counter fake news that calls people to violent action?

2) what are the implications of giving social media & hosting platforms the power to arbitrate what's fake news and what's not? This is incredible power and without checks & balances it is probably too much for individual private companies to hold the keys.

> if what Trump was saying about the election were true, we would want this kind of reaction.

This is an counterfactual to consider. Indeed, we should defend the integrity of the democratic system at almost any cost. However, facts matter.

Trump's statements about the election were not, in fact, true. They are lies. The votes have been counted, recounted and certified. The courts have been consulted. The media has investigated. Election observers from both campaigns watched the whole thing.

Some of the insurrectionists may have thought they were defending democracy, but that doesn't change the fact that they were actually attacking the very democracy they claimed to defend.

> how have we let misinformation get so bad that it ultimately forms insurrection?

Catastrophically bad leadership. While the individual insurrectionists must fact justice, the leaders who intentionally deluded and incited them must also be held accountable. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance, a lawful democracy cannot tolerate democratically-elected leaders who use their authority to attack the core mechanisms of democracy.

It happens all the time in the banking arena. Banks are frequently used to deny market access to businesses that are undesirable to the federal government but are otherwise legal businesses.

This is actually a great analogy. Its all about reducing risk for the overall business.

I hadn't thought about it this way. I assume marijuana dispensaries/businesses are one of the examples you're referencing?

Porn type content also tends to have trouble with many services like payment processors. A simple example is paypal doesn't support most porn related content. I also recall a video game company that makes weirder porn (stuff like hypnosis hentai) saying hypnosis is a trigger for some payment processors so they've had to avoid that terminology.

And why sketchier businesses, such as casinos, had to turn to organized crime for loans and funding.

> private companies getting together and voluntarily enforcing the supremecy of the state

Your choice of words implies some sort of conspiracy here. The response has been widespread and quite frankly should be unsurprising. No coordination is necessary. Any sane CEO running a profit driven organization will not tolerate a group of people whose words of violence against the state cross beyond hyperbole and words and into actual action. If more actions take place and are more successful and these companies decided to stick their heads in the sand then the existence of these companies would be under threat.

This is about basic survival.

> This is a weird case of private companies getting together and voluntarily enforcing the supremecy of the state.

It's maybe weirder than that, because of the involvement of the president. Even if you believe the president was entirely uninvolved and unaware, the purpose of the insurrection was to keep a leader in power, not remove one. The actions of tech companies are both a challenge to the supremacy of the (current administration of the) state and a way of enforcing the supremacy of the state.

The insurrectionists were attacking Congress, so that makes things more complicated.

There was the case of PornHub/MindGeek and MC/Visa. PH was hosting a ton of videos which showed exposed minors (likely most of it was "revenge porn") and other unsavory content. It wasn't until Visa/MC decided to halt processing of all PH transactions that PH decided to haphazardly delete ALL non-partnered content on the platform.

This all happened in less than a week of Visa announcing it.

I think the outcome was "good" but the damage had already been done as these videos are likely residing on servers that are not owned or controlled by PH. Additionally, there's probably a shit ton of non-partnered content that was innocuous.

timeline:

* nyt publishes scathing article about PH and other sites on 2020-12-04 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...)

* MC and Visa announce to cut ties with PH on 2020-12-11 (https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/mastercard-and-visa...)

* On 2020-12-14 (~3 days later), PH then purges all unverified content (https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all...)

In just a matter of 10 days, a billion dollar corporation deleted a significant amount of their content without even having to step into a court room.

To be honest, it's kind of scary. What if you are just on the wrong side of a person at XYZ company? Maybe a cloud executive wants Y company to succeed because he or she has significant capital investment in it, and X competing company is about to roll out their product to the masses. Executive then writes up a scathing internal report by X company to ban them from using their products, or even worse "leaks" false information about X company to get them tied up in a public opinion battle.

It's amusing that people are simultaneously complaining that tech companies are censoring the president of the US and "enforcing the supremacy of the state" at the same time.

True "deep state" conspiracy material. After four years of running the country, they are still underdogs.

It's too out in the open to call it a conspiracy. Amazon,Google, Amazon and Apple (twitter, facebook) are putting out press releases that say this is what they are doing.

They are enforcing the supremacy of the state for the next government. If he was going back as president these companies would not be making these press releases.

The president is not the government; he's one part of it. The insurrectionists were attacking the rest of it.

Very wrong, in my opinion. But I'm not sure that I want to completely remove the possibility of anyone organizing to do so in the future.

To be clear, I think insurrection is nearly always bad, but keeping some faint possibility around is not bad.

You can have any opinion you want so long as it is mine.

A good example to this is the founding of the US itself.

“The only thing that keeps leaders in check is the knowledge the population can rise up against them. By eliminating the Bowman’s Wolves ability to string you up by your own intestines, you’ve removed them from a very important part of the political process.”

— Sam Starfall, Freefall, http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1600/fv01595.htm

Its called voting. That's how you change who's in power, you vote. We have democracy so you don't have to have an insurrection to change power.

But what if you want to change who's in power but you don't have a majority?

That's the fundamental problem facing Trump voters. How do they replace this slapdash democracy with one where they can determine who's votes actually count.

Under our current system, they can only throw out a bunch of roadblocks to make it difficult. The new "Trumpocracy" would likely make voter discrimination a little more structured.

Do you have any evidence that they are "getting together" or is that just speculation?

Fun fact: I spoke with two of my good buddies one up high Amazon another at Twitter. The fellow from twitter told me they will never suspend Trump because despite what he says, Twitter makes few million dollars daily (!!) off of his feed. The reason you see him being booted out is because my buddy from Amazon told me they may be ready to drop Twitter as a client altogether (mostly because of Trump) and the way their contract is designed is that Twitter would still be up for tens of millions of (now unfulfilled) hosting contract fees. And that something they won’t digest. So really the decision to boot Trump had nothing to do with freedom of speech - its AWS who thretened to withdraw, and Twitter folks did some simple math and realized the loss from AWS contract would cost more than gains from RealDonaldTrump feed.

This is speculation by an employee who clearly doesn't have power to make the associated business decisions.

That math, combined with the drop in stock price, does not add up.