Also, it's worth looking at some of the hacked info that was released - Parler had a serious moderation system, but it was used to make sure people had MAGA viewpoints, not to prevent violence. This is not some free and open platform, it was a controlled one that purposely built an echo chamber of violent rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc., and while they may not do an ideal (or even good) job at it, the fact is they're broad platforms used for a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people and are absolutely not comparable to Parler.
Also, during the riots of 2020, it was extremely common to find calls to violence in twitter that weren't deleted.
They are perfectly within their rights as a private business to make those exceptions. Is it fair? No. Would we much rather they apply things consistently? Yes.
The question is, do we want to enforce who and what they can and cannot allow on their platform via law, or do we want private businesses to control who they are allowed to do business with?
These free-speech advocates still have the ability to create mastodon instances or a listserv or something else where a company doesn't have that leverage over them. They still have options and this crying is overblown.
But I don't feel the same way about AWS, because they are not as critical as an ISP would be. Nothing is stopping Parler from plugging in and managing their own servers. I see AWS as a convenience, and as such I don't think anyone is entitled to it.
As a side note: I would like to take a minute to remind the youngsters that no one owes them a revolution. If you want to go fight against the status quo, you should really have a plan for when the status quo fights back.
Had Parler done this these companies wouldn’t have distanced themselves from them. But also their whole brand is enabling those accounts so had they blocked those accounts they wouldn’t have a community.
I've made this exact argument. It's a blatant double standard that Youtube or Twitter, as you said, aren't held liable for the content their users upload, but Amazon and Google can deplatform whoever they want for whatever they want.
I've read a joke that we're officially in a cyberpunk world now that corporations are "going to war" with each other. I've thought that our society has been heading towards civil war for years, but only in the past year with so many riots and corporate overreach have I started to believe it might actually come sooner than later.
It isn't perfect but they are actively and publicly doing so. Parler publicly seems to take the stance of no to little moderation. I haven't read the hacked info from the site on principle of how it was distributed/hacked but seems that data confirms it based on others notes in the thread
If its the latter, then lets continue to deplatform people. If its the former, then lets ban facebook, twitter et al given their proven history of allowing violence and hate speech and as an essential tool to organize mobs.
The logic here is terrible and you can't argue against that. No matter how many users parler gets, it won't even come close to having the same reach.
Sounds good to me... They're totally culpable for the domestic terrorism that happened at the capitol. Facebook too. Dogshit companies that track our behavior and make money off of outrage.
Compare that to Parler which has built its whole marketing image on "absolute free speech" which technically isn't legal and their platform's contents reflect that.
Parler is blatantly NOT trying to stop illegal material, the other platforms are at least trying to...
If you're trying really hard no to, but still facilitate 1000x the amount of violence (made up statistics), it doesn't matter. The real world results are what matter. At least, its what should matter.
Even at a moderately busy McDonalds there will be errors in your order. You can always go back and tell them to fix it and then you will wait... because they are busy filling new orders. And even after you waited there is a chance that they forgot about your fix, they remade it and it is still wrong, or something else happens.
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. In fact, restaurants and food safety scores are the epitome of "try Olympics." You can have a rat in a kitchen in San Francisco and still not be immediately closed. But if you are making conscious efforts to remedy that, you can stay open and often have a long time to fix it.
Parler likely had a much higher percentage of content advocating for violence, but youtube and twitter probably have hundreds or thousands of times the quantity and reach for the violence advocacy content they host.
Counter argument : twitter letting "Hang Mike Pence" trends.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend...
This is really just a lesson about what happens when you squander your reputation and lose the presumption of good faith.
However, it’s far too late in the day for me to put together coherent thoughts. Perhaps others further west could try. Thanks, and buona notte.
AWS cares because they're a public company with a reputation, and many of their customers and employees are anti-rioter.
In Parler's case, the issue isn't that they are conservative. The issue is that they refuse to take any responsibility for the hate and violence on their platform. John Matze had every opportunity to take responsibility for the content, but he was vocal that he would not do anything about it.
If I were running a cloud provider company, I wouldn't want anything to do with this behavior either. Who cares whether the users lean right or left - hate and violence are unacceptable.
The US tends to bias towards letting market pressures take care of this sort of thing, and then stepping in if there are enough high-profile cases of failure.
There are also a bunch of edge cases that I think most people would be ok with. There are conservative-only dating sites. I wouldn't be allowed on the platform, but that doesn't really bother me. If there was a republican-only grocery store, that gets sketchy. And if there was a democrat-only government program, that would clearly be illegal.
It depends on the context.
Political affiliation is a protected class for employment in some states[0].
Political affiliation is a protected class for accommodations such as grocery stores in DC[1] and Madison, Wisconsin[2].
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits
[2] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
That surprises me. "Political opinion" is not a protected class [1] in most jurisdictions in the US, and I assume that the same holds for whatever the local equivalent is to protected class. Especially considering that a lot of European countries also have laws that prohibit Holocaust denial--which are unconstitutional in the US per the 1st Amendment.
[1] Protected class, in US discrimination law jargon, is an attribute that you cannot legally use to discriminate against. The usual protected classes are sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity, although there is some variation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (e.g., military service is protected in my state).
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
Now obviously it's a blurry line, but again, the neo-Nazis storming the capital and their ilk are just way over the line. Just because it's blurry doesn't mean we have to pretend it doesn't exist out of some sense of fairness.
> We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
I will hard disagree with this every day of the week. To me this is a clear example of how ideology has taken the place of religion in today's society. It's no longer enough for you to be civil and respect the laws, but even having the wrong thoughts is considered criminal, just like lust and envy are considered sinful in religion.
We're heading in a dark direction if we're re-adopting the same principles and perspectives that were behind McCarthyism, let alone used to burn witches and conduct the Inquisition.
Less sarcastically, do you agree that the amplification of thought and rhetoric possible using social media isn't something that was considered 500 years ago? i.e. having wrong thoughts isn't dangerous, but having 75 million followers and pushing your wrong thoughts on them is dangerous. It isn't thoughts any longer - it's an action.
And this would be an issue if we were actually talking about government action, but we are talking about private individuals deciding who they will associate with. When the government gets involved then you have reason for concern, but if this is private parties engaging in commerce you have absolutely no leg to stand on.
(cue the desperate, too-cute-by-half arguments "but are they REALLY inciting violence?")
It's a bad faith argument, yet it's everywhere. I'd think HN would be better than that, yet here we are, having the same fight every time free speech is the topic.
Also note that the parent mentioned "government action" whereas the GP is referring to a business taking action. The distinction is incredibly important, yet so many free-speech purists respond to corporate action as if it was a government action.
Well then it's a good thing being kicked out of a bar isn't "prosecution".
Speech is a kind of action, isn't it?
Can a business in the US refuse you service if you're gay / black ?
Same argument applies.
1) You could be wrong. Numerous examples exist throughout history regarding the wrong opinion turning out to the be the truth.
2) Knowing wrong opinions makes you have greater understanding of the correct ones.
3) Roughly the expression argument you mention.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Onl...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
'On January 8, 2021, AWS brought concerns to Parler about user content that encouraged violence. Parler addressed them, and then AWS said it was “okay” with Parler.'
'The next day, January 9, 2021, AWS brought more “bad” content to Parler and Parler took down all of that content by the evening'
https://www.scribd.com/document/490405156/Parler-sues-Amazon
"AWS knew its allegations contained in the letter it leaked to the press that Parler was not able to find and remove content that encouraged violence was false—because over the last few days Parler had removed everything AWS had brought to its attention and more. Yet AWS sought to defame Parler nonetheless."
If you are going to run a site full of user content, you really need to read the rules you are agreeing to regarding what content services you depend on such as web hosting allows, and put in place mechanisms to keep your users from posting that kind of content and to find and remove it when it does get through.
However, I am going to worry more that it existed in the first place than it being destroyed.
By all means "deplatform" Facebook, please, but why would you condone that and condemn deplatforming Parler? makes no sense.
If anything, we should be more bothered that people consider something like AWS or any of the other major clouds, core infrastructure akin to backhaul or electricity. (Google Play and the App Store have always had very clear TOS rules that limit certain types of content so I don’t even see them as being part of the discussion.)
I fundamentally agree that something like Parler, as abhorrent as much of its content was, has the right to exist somewhere on the internet, but I just as fundamentally disagree that Amazon should be forced to provide them with services or that we should equate having a right to exist with “having the right to exist on X’s brand of compute.”
What a store can’t do (at least in the US), is say, “we won’t let you shop here because your skin color is this, or you’re from this part of town, or you practice this religion, or are this sexual orientation.” Now, if a person who matches one of those descriptions and chooses to violate rules and screams at people in the middle of the store, they can be denied service for that reason, just not on the basis of their race or religion, etc.
Parler violated AWS’s terms of service. I’m not going to be obtuse pretend that the type of political ideology that Parler actively seeks out/evangelizes/caters to, doesn’t make them a target, of course it does. That doesn’t negate the fact that the TOS was violated and there was no real plan of action from excising content that violated Amazon’s TOS from the platform. (Although I want to be clear, getting a bunch of conservative celebrities and Fox News hosts on your platform as a way to try to buy respectability doesn’t mean that the rhetoric extolled by Parler CEO and championed by the service is mainstream or even mainstream conservative. Parler was/is a place that was not about free speech but about pro-Trump speech; dissenters were banned from the service, which is Parler’s right, but it was hardly a “free speech” platform.)
Again, I’m not arguing Parler doesn’t have the right to exist. But I am arguing that AWS shouldn’t be obligated to host it. I’m also arguing that as big as AWS and the other clouds are, they are not yet at the point of being true pieces of immovable infrastructure. And honestly, I hope they never are. Even those of us who don’t shed any tears for Parler, probably agree that we don’t want to live in a world where the only options for hosting a website or app belong to a FAANG.
If it were an issue of an ISP or a backhaul provider denying access to the service, I would be the very first person criticizing and standing up to the action. But that’s not what happened here. Someone came into a store without shoes, without a shirt, without a mask, screaming in the face of the employees and other customers. They aren’t allowed to shop at that store anymore. But a store that might be a little further away is still an option.
We do have a big tech problem. Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple should be broken up. Twitter should be required to improve moderation and bot removal. Public/Private enterprises should be established to provide alternates to Twitter/Parler.
You've seen this play out in sports hundreds of times. Politics isn't any different. It's even got WWE-esque storylines.
Freedom of speech is, colloquially, about being able to discuss things. That's something I'd like to support, and to see more of,
but I'm going to draw a stark categorization between discussion and incitement. Both use words, sure. Are both speech that should be free?
Edit: To be clear, not a rhetorical question: actual question, one I don't have an answer to.
If so, when can I start hosting raves in your front room?
It's not about illegal content. It's about politics and ethics. (And private companies can choose to do or not do business with whomever they want - except a few protected things. But there's a gay wedding cake somewhere too in this. Free association and free speech. Ethically it's hard to coerce anyone to say or not say something, and to host or not host some content.)
Furthermore, there's the power imbalance aspect. Twitter banning SciHub is probably Twitter abusing its power, Twitter banning Trump is less likely an abuse. (Though there very well could be and are exceptions.)
Parlour used AWS property to allow its members to help organize sedition. AWS has the right to nope out.
All the problems with large private entities like Twitter and Facebook hosting speech on their own terms pale in to comparison with letting governments dictate how they host speech.
Parlour can find or create another hosting device and get back up quickly. If they want to use mainstream services, they should moderate out something other than liberals.
Truth is it was good PR to obliterate Parler for everyone involved and they weren't a big enough player to be able to fight back.