> If you made death threats from your telephone to the point your neighbors threatened to discontinue their phone service because of the unwanted negative attention. The phone service would cut you off.

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).

Would they? Your neighbors might be able to get a court order blocking you from calling them, or get you arrested for sufficiently graphic threats.

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.

Death threats are punishable offenses under the law. _UNDER THE LAW_! Amazon is _not_ the LAW. Amazon is a public company like any other. They should report these actions to the police and they will investigate and take _legal_ action!

> They should report these actions to the police and they will investigate

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.

Would you think that moderators are hiding evidence for murder threats by deleting posts?

Quite often these systems are "immutable" and the post is available to the admins if required. This was found in the Parler hack, for example.

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.

Since it’s electronic, it’s federal. We know the feds have abdicated their duties to investigate and prosecute people on their side. We’ll see it on full display when all preemptive pardons come out next week. Preemptive because the feds didn’t bother to prosecute.

I don't think that's how your situation would play out. The neighbors would complain, and police would get involved. Then you would get prosecuted for making violent threats.

That’s what you think would happen. Lin wood had a call to execute pence up for over a week. Not till apple threatened to remove Parler from the store was it deleted.

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

> Lin wood had a call to execute pence up for over a week. Not till apple threatened to remove Parler from the store was it deleted.

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.

What you are saying is equivalent to "the state is incapable of defending our values so we make ourselves the police". What do you think that implies?

So are you saying the businesses should be forced to server other businesses? That runs counter to capitalism which is a value of our country.

I'm saying that Amazon is neither the police nor a judge.

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.

Are you suggesting police and courts are not executing laws in USA?

In case you missed it, there was an entire summer of demonstrations complaining that the police will not enforce the law against other police.

I wholeheartedly hope the state police and state judges will enforce justice on all of those who committed crimes.

--edit--

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

Impartial justice? That would be great. Preferably without having to have a huge demonstration to get people who killed someone else on video prosecuted.

I'm not sure what do you mean, where I live there are cases of people who had been prosecuted without valid reason and was sentenced to years in jail. Such situations are awful since innocent human being was put through suffering and by the system which should protect innocent people. But this is not rule that governs juridical system, people do make mistakes - you cannot judge whole system by mistake made by random Joe, no system would stand such test. I prefer to be judged by state judge than by angry crowd or self appointed police. Mainly because even state judge and police are accountable for their actions, whereas crowd or self appointed guards may be difficult to find after actions are done.

We’ll find out in the impeachment and what pardons come out this final week.

These boycotts are often spoken of, but I never saw an actual successful example on industrial scale. Does an electricity company lose money because it provides power to Trump's mansion and people run away, not wanting to share the same electrons?

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