Is it really the modern equivalent? People are not getting banned here over what they say in Twitter DMs. They are getting banned over what they publish on their timelines.

You have a right to free speech, not a right to free publication. If you want to publish your opinions you will have to pay for that yourself if you can't find anyone willing to pay the costs for you.

I will defend your right to say what you want, but I won't buy you a printing press.

I think it is perfectly normal that community want to have a certain quality and moderate for this reason. Are we going to complain that HN ban trolls because it impede on their "free-speech" ? Or spammer ?

The case of Amazon is different though. If you have a contract with a company and the company terminate the contract with no valid reason, you should sue. It is their right to break the contract because they don't want to deal with you, but then they have to pay a fine because they were engaged in a contract with you and they broke it.

That would depend on the terms.

If my memory is correct, those kind of catch-all terms where deemed non-applicable in the EU, but it doesn't prevent company from still putting them in the hope that you won't sue them afterward.

Getting banned over harassment in a DM is not the same as getting banned over expressing your opinion in a DM.

Another concern: by your logic, net neutrality should be moot. Let ISPs choose and throttle online service by their whim.

Anyway,"freedom of speech" is actually intended to prevent any dictatorial entity from hiding the other side from the public.

imho, If the 'democrats' are actually 'democratic', they should have solved this with a much more elegant solution - eg. inviting people to a common, shared platform and refuting them there. Current FB/twitter/aws solutions are rather 'easy but dictatorial and may backfire', which is somewhat 'republican' in taste...

(* by backfire: pro-trumps can think: "The other side is trying to snuff us. What are they hiding? Are they more evil than imaginable? We should do something to guard USA from them"

imho, the root of the whole fiasco is actually the press preventing the broadcast of Trump after the election. (the 'snuffing') Better solution would be having open discussions to refute the pro-trump people.

Another thing is that by-standers will note about how 'undemocratic' the whole solution is, and whether they'll also be treated if they end up being the 'other' side of other issues

My argument was that your right to freedom of speech does not compel others to publish your speech.

If you send me an e-mail with your opinion and the instruction to forward it to all my contacts, then I am not violating your freedom of speech by refusing to do so.

And yes, freedom of speech does not protect net neutrality. That's why we need the FCC to set those rules and enforce them.

What some people are arguing for is a sort of "opinion neutrality" for social media companies that forces them to treat all opinions equally without moderation.

You can certainly debate the pros and cons of such a rule, but it's not a consequence of your right to freedom of speech.

By your logic, it's OK for Bill Gates to buy all the press influence to completely silence the politically-other-side.

And my mention of net neutrality is to show how flawed your whole logic process is.

> What some people are arguing for is a sort of "opinion neutrality" for social media companies that forces them to treat all opinions equally without moderation.

hm I actually find this scary. Maybe you're from China, where deviant opinions/minorities must be snuffed down for "harmonious society"?

That is not OK, for the very simple reason you shouldn't be allowed to monopolize the media or any industry for that matter. The way you protect free speech is by not allowing any company to become so large and powerful that it rivals governments and can enact censorship.

> And my mention of net neutrality is to show how flawed your whole logic process is.

I don't see how that points out a flaw? I just explained that net neutrality is not protected under freedom of speech, so I don't see its relevance.

> hm I actually find this scary. Maybe you're from China, where deviant opinions/minorities must be snuffed down for "harmonious society"?

Thank you for keeping the discussion respectful. I don't think opinions should be snuffed out, but I also think you shouldn't be forced by the government to publish lies. I worry that if governments can force companies to publish all opinions including the ones they don't agree with, then they can also force them to publish propaganda.

"We have a clause in your contract that says you shouldnt print 'kill all the x' and you're letting just about anyone print those. We can still rent you servers if you put a content-filtering team into effect"

But Parler didn't.

Otherwise, no contract will be worth the paper it is written on if a mob can just scream on Twitter and get a perfectly legal site taken down on very short notice. I'd be very hesitant to sign a contract with any company that doesn't include extremely high termination fees that would be sufficient to find a new host.

It should have done it a while ago (violent rhetoric didn't just pop up on there last week), but better late than never.

There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless. It's much simpler to just not do business with them than it is to try and develop a pricing model that accounts for those things.

I am sure Amazon hosts a lot of sites that I don't agree with but that doesn't mean I will hold them accountable. It is simply stupid.

If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did (at least if you compare equal shitty places like Twitter), hold Parler accountable and not Amazon for hosting them.

Don't be part of the angry mob. Be smarter.

>If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did

Political reasons?!

They didn't do anything wrong?!

Parler was knowingly and willingly hosting content that was glorifying and inciting actual physical, deadly violence. Calls to skin politicians and their families are okay with you?!

Nowhere that I know of protected that kind of thing as free expression.

It's not political speech. It left the realm of political speech a long time ago.

Let me rephrase: "Parler paid its bills" is missing several variables in the equation.

Do not read into it any further than that.

> There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless.

What negative publicity do you mean if not political ones from one specific point of view? For me, parler did nothing other than offer an alternative to twitter which is equal shitty.

Amazon didn't have any publicity regarding this matter until they decided, together with a lot of other megacorps to remove everything associated with parler. Now they have had a lot of publicity, which is in my view very negative since now everyone knows that if you want to host anything that support any other viewpoint than those held by american megacorps you can be removed.

I have a hard time understanding how anyone can think this is good publicity.

At no point did I express agreement with any of these things. That is what you seem to be finding in my speech that's not there. I thought explicitly clarifying might help.

Trying to read into more than what's written and using that as a basis to tell me to "be smarter" is unnecessarily rude.

My mistake for opening up a vaguely political thread on HN, I'm out.

It just doesn't make sense, unless you believe Parler is bad in some kind of way and the only way they could've been bad is political.

Not the previous commenter, but Parler absolutely did commit wrongdoing, and that wrongdoing was absolutely not political. Calls for murder and violent insurrection are not political statements!

Do twitter call our for #killallmen when that hashtag is trending?

Your double standards are so very obvious.

AWS works on a consumption model, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the customer also have reservations with AWS for resources covering at least the next few months. Whether AWS can terminate the supply of services depend entirely on the service agreement. IIRC, AWS has a number of options of terminating a user's services in its service agreement, such as abuse of service, which hosting content inciting seditious violence most likely falls under.

This may well be the legal position, but I think people are wondering whether it should be this way.

The first electricity providers were (I think, mostly) likewise completely private & free to sell or not as they pleased. But as they grew, and our dependence on their product grew, the rules changed. They are now regulated differently, and have to sell to all who pay their bills. And nobody thinks it a stain on ConEd's reputation when they are found to have been selling power to porn-studios or gun-makers (i.e. legal activities some find distasteful), nor to weed-growers or mafia-run warehouses (illegal activities, but we don't expect ConEd to hire deeply investigate every connection).

Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses? Or something more like a cable TV service, where they bear some responsibility for what's communicated in the channels being provided?

It is always good to recall history. The origin of antitrust laws lies in the late 19th century, when a lot of railroad companies consolidated into a few mammoths. Back then, there were basically no regulations around the use of railroads, which were built by private capital.

Nevertheless, railroads became an important infrastructure of the nation, and the convergence of power towards just a few hands meant that the situation became untenable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._Uni...

I can see the parallels to the digital giants of today fairly well.

Amazon (the webstore) on the other hand is getting close, and with the core business of the other FAANGs.

This is what I find so disturbing about the Parler fiasco. Every tech person I know has interacted with AWS directly at some point. Everyone any of us knows has interacted with something reliant on AWS. What's the percentage of web services that run on AWS now? It's well over a third IIRC. AWS is essentially indispensable at this point. It might very well be called a technological utility.

Moreover AWS's core market has, historically, been startups. Parler, being a startup, was in their core group of customers, dealing with a service that had effectively become ubiquitous among startups. They were an American company, with a CEO and investors and users and capital.

Being a B2B service, bordering on a technological utility, rather than a B2C online community like Facebook or Twitter, the idea of AWS banning users seems almost a category error. The idea of AWS banning an American startup would have been unthinkable to me before it happened.

EDIT: Moved some phrases around for clarity.

https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bakersfield-bakery-own...

Whereas a grocery store refusing to sell things off the shelf to some group of people would be a very different matter.

(To be clear, I'm not taking any position on the particular cake case linked. There are many & details differ.)

The law currently only protects against certain types of discrimination, but high competition protects against all of them (assuming there isn't collusion).

As I understand those who were involved in any crime are going to be chased and put in front of the judge.

I had to look this up and it took a while to find the answer. There is no clear decision to say whether bakeries can reuse to sell cakes to gay people.

And saying: "Sure. I will make you a cake" and then spoil the wedding by not delivering in the last minute.

I was simply saying that it's not so clear cut as to whether a baker can refuse service to anyone and they please. The Supreme Court ruled that Colorado was biased against the defendant, not that their anti-discrimination law was illegal.

Parler paying to aws was paying for its users free speech.

The question is not about paying costs, but about people trying to use business as a weapon in their ideological war.

If nobody wanted to listen then there would be `one to nobody`. But it seems many wanted to listen, even if another many wanted him to shut up..

yes, lets look at it from a legal stand point.

Utilities like the phone company are granted special privileges under the law, in exchange for society granting them those special privileges they must service all persons in their service area provided they pay the bill (and in some cases even if they do not)

Now lets look at social media and other platform, we as a society have granted them special provisions under the law, the most well known today is Section 230 but there are others. I do not believe it is unreasonable then to demand these platform be require to allow all persons to speak provided their speech is legal speech.

This is standard would be massively more open than the current moderation standards of the platforms today

Now each one of the platforms are free to fore go those special legal provisions, and be treated as publishers, like say a NYTimes, or a DailyWire publication. Under those rules then they have full and complete editorial control over everything on their site but they also assume more legal liability.

What the platforms today want is a little bit of A, and a little bit of B, I think that is not what we as a society should allow

They need to choose, are they platforms or publishers

Not only is TechDirt take factually incorrect on the history of Section 230, I am talking about REFORMS to Section 230 to make it CLEAR what the section should mean, which IMO should be legal speech, not simply allow the platforms to set their own moderation standards

The Ninth Circuit has as stated the intent of Section 230 was "Congress wanted to encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet, and to promote the development of e-commerce"

The clear purpose of section 230 is promote not impede free speech. TechDirt on the whole has taken very pro-censorship stances provided it is "mah private companies" doing the censorship

This is not inline with the actual facts of law, nor it is inline with how we as a society should be progressing

I know it may come as a shock but people can have differing opinions from TechDirt....

I can't find that Ninth Circuit rulling you're referring to. The closest I can find is Barnes v. Yahoo! where the court ruled a company can't be compelled under the CDA to ban someone. In that ruling the Ninth circuit said that congress wanted to “promote the free exchange of information and ideas over the Internet and to encourage voluntary monitoring for offensive or obscene material.”.

I can't find a ruling that says the intention of section 230 was to enforce unfettered free speech. Rather as I understand it section 230 is there to protect companies who want to publish a myriad of opinions by clarifying that it is the user who is liable for what they say, not the company that runs the website

Batzel v. Smith [1][2]

>>Rather as I understand it section 230 is there to protect companies who want to publish a myriad of opinions by clarifying that it is the user who is liable for what they say, not the company that runs the website

The 2 congressmen that created the law are on record talking about how they did not want speech on the internet to be stifled because of legal liabilities if they moderated some content, the primary justification/rhetoric at the time like most laws designed to allow censorship/moderation was "think of the children, children might see some boobs or franks and be scared for life"

"The broad language of Section 230’s protection reflects the intent to protect the industry and its users’ ability to communicate freely." [1]

It was not conceived at the time of the Sections passage the internet companies would start to bann their "users" or "customers" from the service for political speech, such a thing was really unheard of during that time in American History, it just was not done.

Times have changed, the law needs to be updated to reflect the original intent of the law which was and is to expand not limit speech

[1]https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2019/08/correcting-the...

[2]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163765021797671...

Section 230 is not limiting speech, these companies would've had the right to delete people's posts and ban users with or without section 230.

The intent was to encourage free speech by telling companies: "Don't worry, you won't be held liable for posts from your users, but you do have a responsibility to moderate". Which you can argue they weren't liable for in the first place, because they only provided the platform not the speech.

You can definitely argue for an expansion of section 230 into a new "opinion neutrality" law, but it is not the true intent of section 230 that you make it out to be.

Afaict section 230 isn't a special provision granted by society, it is a legal clarification of existing rights of speech & assembly that has the effect of limiting certain types of frivolous lawsuits. Clarifications seem materially different than government granting a corporation a local monopoly. The latter should definitely have strings attached, but the former?

Now you could argue that the basis for the decision to grant utilities local monopolies is rooted in similar natural monopoly circumstances (economies of scale and resource limitations) as that of mainstream social networks (physical infra & space in former, network effects in latter), and I'd probably agree, but that would be an entirely different focus than section 230 reform.

You're also advocating for a very black & white solution (platform v publisher, based on a choice about moderation), but there's a lot of specifics lacking such that its hard to determine if that's even a good idea. My immediate reaction is: online communities are extremely varied in both operation and medium (design, algorithms, what 'speech' even is, etc), and anyone who has had the experience of building and operating communities would see 'all legal speech should be published' as frankly a laughable premise. It raises far more questions than it answers, and likely just kicks the hard work of how products are designed over to lawyers who will definitely get it wrong.

My hunch is we're barking up the wrong tree with 230, and the underlying issue is too much power concentrated in too few entities. They have too much control over too many people's experiences, and when they use that power people confuse it with censorship. If we focused on the issue of natural monopolies arising from network effects, we might come to very different solutions, like decentralization with standard protocols for social graph interoperability.

I tend to agree there, my focus on 230 is simply because that seems to be only avenue open for reform at the moment, it is not the best tool to solve the problem, but it is a tool

Ultimately I think the root of the problem comes down to 2 flaws in the foundation of the legal system

1. Data ownership: We have incorrectly applied ownership rights to the companies that collect the data, instead of allowing people to own the data about themselves. This has had wide ramifications on how social media companies have been formed and monetized, as well as in criminal law

2. Failing in contract law to properly designate the current slate of "Terms of Service" and "Acceptable Use" agreements as Unconscionable Contracts, these contracts are soo one-sided that if put in to use for anything other then "Information services" they would be tossed out of court and be unenforceable. Companies should be required to have better, enforceable agreements with their users, that provide CLEAR and OBJECTIVE statement on what the service can be used for, that the process for ending the relationship is, and what the recourse is for the customer (i.e appeal, data portability, etc). Today they have none of that, and are so steeped in self serving legal verbiage with absolutely zero considerations for the user, this type of contract / agreement should not be allowed in a fair and just legal system.

Or imagine not being able to use the banking system because banks don't like you're dealing with legal weed ?

Or getting cut from payment processors as a sex worker ?

Unthinkable, right.

I think it was only last week that we had somebody banned from github for simply logging in from Iran.

Yeah, no. Any time before the internet, getting any sort of publicity was a thousand times harder with lots of very real gatekeepers.

Include anyone but white/male/hetero/christian/upper-middle-class-or-better people in your consideration, and the idea that freedom of speech went anywhere but up, almost vertically, in the last decade or two is laughable.

Maybe freedom of speech went up, vertically, meaning more people can publish than ever before, but it got extremely narrow at the same time. If you publish the wrong thought your life or business can be literally destroyed within a day. (or as long as it takes to fly to Africa)

And let's be clear: nobody gets "literally destroyed", nor even figuratively, for publishing "one wrong thought". Parler had been peddling in low-effort violence-porn for the lowlifes that make up their userbase for what.. two years? That's hundreds of thousands of terrible... "thoughts". And nothing happened, until something happened, which happened to be peoples' deaths and a crisis of democracy.

For comparison: reddit got into hot water at some point, and managed to clean up their act. The porn websites are in a similar process. It's all just actions-have-consequences, really. And the public's ire is actually the more nuanced, soft approach to do it, compared to the blunt tool of criminal law.

Jewish and female authors were absolutely commonplace before the invention of the Internet.

(Switching to "counts" makes it more obvious)

It's interesting how tech people will endlessly argue about some minor details regarding privacy in some mediocre-usage phone app but huge precedents like these are swallowed without criticism because of political stances.

Now, if the consequence is to strike a point against the enemy party, it seems both formations unconsciously agree to sacrifice some piece of democracy or freedom. In the end everybody lose and society decays.

It's much less easy to think about ways to negate them as a political force without hurting everyone else in the process, and it seems a lot of people don't even care about weighing costs and benefits.

Unfortunately, when the modern political sphere is highly influenced by idiots on Twitter who are permanently stuck on first-level thinking, this is what you get.

This isn't why they're being dropped though is it? I was under the impression they were being denied service because further terrorist attacks were being openly planned on their platform with no attempts at moderation happening.

Take payment companies for example. If Visa and Mastercard decline to do business with you (as they did with Pornhub) you're basically stuffed. Lots of individual sex workers have also had this experience. You can't make money if the payment companies won't work with you.

Also if you look back at the history of censorship you'll find loads of examples where people were effectively de-platformed. One I was reading about recently. In 1970's UK a reggae artist called Judge Dredd held the record for most songs banned by the BBC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dread).

In those days, that's effectively de-platforming that artist and there for the great crime of ... double entendre.

If you want to call a congress person an asshole, tell me that America isn't the greatest country in the world, say that the President is a treasonous tool then yes I will absolutely defend your right to say that, and more.

The minute it turns to violence, insurrection and death I will make sure the authorities know exactly where to find you. And if these actions violate a Terms of Service that you agreed to, you reap what you sow.

You being the generalized you.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Parler knew exactly what they were doing and who they were courting. As the saying goes, "well, well, well. if it isn't the consequences of my own actions".

Sure. They can go say it to their mates down the pub. Private companies also generally have the right to choose who they do business with.

Not really.

Like many others I was born without Internet and never before in history so many people said so many things, multiple times a day, from anywhere they are, to a potentially global audience, paying nothing

Never before in history has each individual had the ability to broadcast their thoughts so widely so easily.

Twitter/Facebook/AWS/etc can all refuse to do business with you. You can still throw an old computer in your basement and plug it into the internet and make your thoughts accessible to the entire world.

Domain name registrar or TLD banned you too?

Great, pick another registrar. Pick another TLD. Pick another country with different laws. You can do it all from the country you currently inhabit and the comfort of your office chair. You can make your site accessible via IP address or virtually unblockable via Tor.

Even if you're violating the laws and norms of the country you inhabit, you can host this in a way that's virtually untraceable back to you with little effort.

How exactly did one accomplish that in 1930? 1830? 1730? 1630?

What ability did a peasant in 830AD have to broadcast their thoughts across the entire world that we lack today?

I think your first statement is hyperbole. There are countless times when the few controlled the dissemination of information to the masses. What about when only monks and scribes knew how to write? What about when the printing press had just been invented? What about in the early 20th century before television even existed?

If anything, people have been able to throw their opinions around more today than ever before in human history.

I don't think that was really the newspapers on their own, they were being fed that by US intelligence services. Since there was basically zero ability to check the facts on the ground, they were left relaying lies - that had bipartisan popularity.

> I, for one, am tired of being fed fake news by those in power.

So am I. But the antidote to fake news from those in power is not even more fake news from random cultists and foreign intelligence services.

No company should be forced to lose money. That’s what we are asking Amazon to do. They were going to lose customers if they kept hosting Parler.

Not really, you would have police visiting you, probably followed by court action since death threats are punishable offenses. And yet, the phone company does not have right to cut your line off, unless judge ruled to do so (well, they could terminate your contract without the reason but then you would be able to go to court over this and phone company would end up covering all of the damages you claim).

But I thought phone companies had obligations of universal service (in most places), so that they are not free to cut people off based on rumors & internal committees.

They don't. The volume of death threats on the internet is far too high for that. Death threats are a routine part of internet discourse - except where deleted by moderators.

The question is kind of moot because the police don't ask for evidence and don't pursue these cases. Can you dig up a case where the police made this argument?

Edit: oh the hilarity, here's the same discussion 22 years previously on the "decentralised" system USENET: https://www.wired.com/1998/03/canceling-the-evidence-on-usen...

I believe AOL lived to cancel again.

Policing is out, we talking about the same people who failed to activate the national guard allowing the siege of our capital.

I don't think it should have been deleted at all. Let concerned citizens sue Lin wood (whoever that is) and present his threat as evidence. Why should we expect people's words to be deleted from a public platform?

If nobody sued him, or went to the police, maybe it wasn't a real threat. Or maybe it wasn't illegal. Who are we to judge? Let the "neighbors" take it to the police and to the courts.

I really wish today's social platforms functioned like Slashdot. Their philosophy was to never delete anything posted by users, unless compelled by a court of law. That's the right thing to do.

As a public company, their terms of service are as questionable as EULAs that no-one reads. I don't think (know) if they were ever tested in court. But it's about time they do.

--edit--

especially when crimes were committed by some incopetent judge/policeman.

Even the BDS movement, probably the largest-scale boycott promoting organization in the world, pulled no one big into red numbers AFAIK.

I'm afraid it isn't going to swing that way. We're closer to allowing utility companies to cut people off arbitrarily than we are to forcing internet companies to keep serving users who hurt their business.

You have those already, facebook operates according to US laws. If not, it will be prosecuted. Of course, maybe government mandated ones will be better? Like public television in my country, where it is just a propaganda machine for currently ruling party? You think it will not be "moderated" by ruling party in US when operated as a public government owned utility?

  > Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over

  >  Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over 
  > something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable. And yet here we are 
  > with the modern equivalent.

what they shut off is their television show / public feed of people calling for violence. it's completely justified.

Yes, and as part of that _regulated_ monopoly, they were required to provide "universal" service: it didn't matter how remote the customer was or how inconvenient it would be to provide them with service, telephone service had to be provided to anyone who was willing to pay the (regulated) monthly fee.

Right, this is more akin to Fox/CNN/MSNBC deciding they're not going to allow you a platform.

Also, email is still available, don't pretend these services are all there is, it just isn't so.

Right, there will likely be a licensing regime that comes out of this which does tie user-generated content platforms to the state, reducing their ability to make arbitrary decisions.

Actually, yes, in most parts of the world the telephone company was under no obligation to provide service to anyone who wanted it and there were laws about what you could say or do over the telephone.

Maybe the next clause in this highschool-level aphorism should be "although I will not compel anybody to help you say it".