I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true.

And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice?

But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.

The Unites States is not in that list. Hence it is more vulnerable to problems associated with allowing hate speech (i.e. incitement of violence by foreign-state actors, etc.).

Companies that operate on the global markets tend to operate with the standards that are acceptable globally. In particular: "On 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours."

So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.

Best practices for maintaining a democracy or best practices for maintaining social order? There's a difference. You might argue that restricting hate speech is actually a step away from democracy towards more government control.

And consider how moderation of hate speech affects these parameters. Evaluating these on an example of presidential debates of 2020 might be a good option. As there is a contrast between the first debate, that included no moderation and a second debate, that included some.

What they could've done is consistently enforced their rules all the way along, to people of all political persuasions.

As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?

If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?

FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?

These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.

As it happens, these actions are not coordinated en masse, are neither promoted nor supported by even the vast majority of people who are supposedly aligned ideologically with is perpetrators, and are not organized in spaces mostly devoted to that purpose.

I'm pretty confused by your last sentence. It seems like a very out of order personal attack with no basis.

Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter? Nah. That's what my last sentence meant.

Again, how am I demonstrating that? I honestly can't see anyway that you have any idea what I think, from my comments in this thread, without just completely making up a projection out of whole cloth.

> Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter?

It does seem to matter, when the question is "should AWS stop hosting Twitter because of the way in which they moderate their content?". AWS can't do that if Twitter is not hosted on AWS... So I fail to see how it doesn't matter.

To answer what I think your original question was, filling in assumptions for my (still unanswered...) questions: if Twitter is hosted on AWS, and if AWS notifies them of content they are hosting with AWS that violates the AWS terms, and Twitter refuses to remove that content, then yes, I believe AWS is within their rights to suspend Twitter's account.

I was actually in Seattle while similar protests occured, and seeing things myself, I can say that the media did mis-portray things greatly. 99% of the protestors were completely peaceful and tens of thousands of people rallied to protest day over day all peacefully. I was surprised the media coverage didn't really cover those much, it chose to focus on like the single instance of a car lit on fire at 3am and those very minor instances, sometimes the media photoshopped images too, where they'd like superimpose a person holding a weapon in front of the photo of the car on fire and things like that. And I mean all media, left-wing, right-wing, small media, big media, like they all did this, which I was very surprised about.

I felt pretty safe for the most part, when people weren't protesting I'd still go and have coffee and order croissant at my favourite places in the area that was "occupied".

Things got scary when "anti-protester" started showing up, and suddenly everyone felt like people would show up with guns so protesters felt they needed guns too, and then there was this weird tension of like why we all have guns?

I was really surprised personally at the intensity of the police response, especially in the beginning, and to me it felt like the police really escalated tensions early on which is what led to protesters starting to bring fireworks and umbrellas to protect themselves from police "croud control". Like if a single person in the croud threw a single bottle that was enough for the police to just start pepper spraying and tear gazing everyone. I always wondered why the police doesn't just go after that person that threw a bottle or broke a window, I'm not sure what justified all this collateral damage from them. There were kids and moms and even handicapped people at a lot of those protests.

Most striking is the way the police organises around protesters, even though the protests are peaceful, they flank the croud, and really position themselves like the police and protesters are about to have a Braveheart style face off. I don't understand why the police doesn't spread themselves through the croud and instead help keep the protest peaceful by deterring the few people who are there to cause raucous. They should focus on the people disrupting the protests, help protect others from them, and arrest those.

I was just really surprised by that, because if there was a parade, the police would do what I'm describing, but for a protest it seems they treat the protesters like a huge threat and that makes the whole thing really tense and makes people feel like the police is actually against them. It didn't help that the protesters were there to protest police brutality and they were welcomed by more police brutality and confrontation.

What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!

Now in Seattle, you had 60000!! Yes I said Sixty Thousand!!! PEOPLE marching an entire day completely peacefully without a single broken window or fire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in... when the population of the whole city is 600000. That means 1 in 10 people participated in this protest, and there were not even minor raucous! That's the most peaceful assembly of such a large number of people I've ever seen in my life.

In Montreal, you have 1k people in the street it doesn't matter why and there's more raucous then that.

And these protests, they didn't just happen once, day over day thousands of people over and over again, and everytime only a handful of incidents, mostly in the late evening or at night. Just do the math, 60k people, if 100 of them broke windows, threw rocks and lit some things on fire that would be 0.16% of the protestors. It be enough for the media to have footage ad-nauseam and publish 100 article about the "riots" and for police to bring out the tear gas. But it also means that 99.84% of the protestors were peaceful. Honestly, if it was for me, I think I'd call these the most peaceful protest I've ever seen, I think they should be given an award for how peaceful these were given the amount of people and the circumstances of how tense the topic was and how they were received by the authorities.

Disclosure: I'm just a bystander here, I didn't participate in the protests myself, I only observed and watched from the sidelines, and I knew people who did and heard from them. So take my info for what it is.

Happens in almost every city I've ever lived in. I've seen far more violence at a Los Angeles Lakers or San Francisco Giants riots after they win a championship than at my local BLM protests.

Should we have to mute ourselves because crazy people might use our words as justification for their madness? Should others censor my opinions because in their opinion, a third party might use my words for justification for their madness?

See: Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492

The usage I’m seeing does not fit the below defined criteria: The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”

"do nothing", just like they did nothing when riots were breaking out in BLM protests.

It's one thing if I say the election was stolen. I should not be censored for saying that it was. My voice alone will not sway anything. The problem is that so much power is concentrated with the president that it ONLY takes his voice to throw an entire country into chaos. That's too much power with one person.

So what am I saying? That I should have freedoms the president should not?

Well, the USA could impeach and remove that person, or they could reduce the power of his office. But so far the people and their elected representatives have opted not to do either of those things.

It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle.

I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction.

Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.

If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.

>Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

It's harder to refute lies in the marketplace of ideas if everyone with a megaphone is obligated to echo them. Perhaps this wouldn't be true if people were perfectly rational, but if people were perfectly rational they wouldn't be believing and spreading lies in the first place.

During: President begins speech at approximately noon. Some protestors already amassed at Capitol. During speech, crowd begins moving away from the speech location, gather at the Capitol building, and breach outer perimeter “bike fence”.

After: The President’s speech ends at approximately 1:10pm. Crowd is still outside the Capitol doors. Congress begins certifying the vote. Protestors clash with police, both sides spraying chemical irritants.

Protesters continue to gather in numbers, surrounding the Capitol building until breaching the exterior doors at approximately 2:10pm.

Other than the planting of pipe bombs at the Capitol/RNC/DNC (which I haven’t seen reporting on the timing), all significant violence took place shortly after the President’s speech ended.

If you think it is good that the recent bans took place then you have no choice but to delegate decision making authority to the industry, because the government is not constitutionally permitted to demand that tech companies make those decisions.

Personally I think we need anti-trust action against a lot of larger tech companies and second that they have now opened the door on further regulation regarding content moderation. I think getting rid of Section 230 entirely would be a mistake but I won't be surprised to see it amended in some form.

From Ars article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/amazon-cuts-off-...

Amazon said: "It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t "feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform." This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts."

not theoretic (not pumping my post but amusing you would comment simultaneously with my noticing this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749923

Craft store noticed their brand logo was on a poster board with messages calling for rape and execution of named individuals (a clearly illegal act). Craft store said in their sale recipt that the reserve the right to stop serving customers that promote illegal conduct.

First, however, the craft store asked the organizer to stop providing their poster boards to people organizing mass rape and execution event planning. "Please moderate, and you can continue to use our service"

The organizer days "go bleep yourself", to the store, followed by "if my members want to organize a mass execution of people, that's their protected speech!”

Store says "okay, your not welcome here anymore, see our terms of service"

AWS gave them a chance.. but at the end of the day, those messages calling for illegal acts are stored on AWS servers.. and Parler wanted to promote that kind of content to continue and amplify (it's good for business), but every day AWS is probably getting 50 warrants for information tied to having Parler as a customer. AWS service mark up doesn't cover 20 full time lawyers

Yes, imagine a small town, and there's a guy known for always ranting about the coming insurrection, pedophile conspiracies, how "The Great Awakening" is near... then one day he walks into the town gun store and asks to buy a bunch of AR-15s and a ton of ammo, and the owner of the store says: "Hmm... no."

If he follows that up with "Allahu Akbar," do you expect the gun store to complete the sale, or call the feds? Is that a limit on "freedom of religion"?

Or if you go to buy a ton of fertilizer, and as they're loading it into your truck, you talk about blowing up the white house -- what do you think is gonna happen?

I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately.

> They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services.

This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.

I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.

How so? Are you incapable of using non-digital media to communicate? Are you incapable of creating your own digital platforms for communication or using alternative, less popular means to do so? Are you prevented from going to city hall, council meetings, political rallies, or voting? Your speech as it relates to your rights granted in the constitution remains completely intact. Your rights are unaffected by your access to certain digital platforms.

If you don't believe free speech absolutism should be allowed, say so, but free speech and this level of corporate dominance are not compatible.

I agree, but that's a common position here.

Oh how I wish this were actually true sometimes. Try going to any zoning board meeting.

>If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools

I see the conflict you're bringing up, it's in effect illegal to communicate in person a lot of the time due to the pandemic, so digital tools are very useful for you to be able to communicate, but if you are somehow banned from those you have few options, if any. I think the thing that is incorrect here is actually the government making it illegal to communicate via non-digital tools, even if a lot of times it is in an individual's best interest to stay inside. And once again, no one owes you a platform. You are, in your words, silenced, but I don't think that that is an issue that requires government action.

Let's consider the other extreme with a fictional corporation "MEGA INC", which suppose owns all web hosting, all ISPs. Let's also throw in that they have a monopoly over paper production and publishing. Now, do you think your argument that "this private entity can do whatever it wants" is problematic? I should hope so.

I'm not making the case that it's black/white and that this situation with Big Tech is equivalent to MEGA INC. But, it's not that our free speech rights are binary. My point is simply that we're somewhere along the spectrum spanning "private home" <-> "MEGA INC", and at this point rights are actually being diminished because of the oligopolistic nature of a significant corner where discourse happens.

So, unfortunately, I think it's a nuanced situation that's not easily reduced to a simplistic principle such as what you've stated. We have clear principles to reason about the extremes, but it's hard to make an argument in the hairy middle because both can be made to apply.

The oligopoly only concerns distribution to the widest possible audience, whether it's social media or broadcast media. And even a First Amendment constrained government is allowed to pick and choose which speech it distributes

I think this is a really important point. How I have framed this to others is: "the 6 o'clock news isn't required to give you airtime."

In the past, you could write articles to the newspaper, or contact the news and hope they picked up your story. There was not a right to be heard.

That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about what has transpired in the last week. Freedom of speech (as a principle, not in the US legal sense) has always felt like a core principle of the Internet.

First amendment rights are orthogonal.

I can see the argument that basic Internet access should be similarly regulated, especially as it uses either public frequencies (e.g. 5G) or public land (sidewalks etc) to provide the service.

We have. That's why millions of people have pushed these companies to take a stand against hate. None of these companies are doing this because they want to lose money. If they thought it would be profitable long-term, they would keep doing it. It's the invisible hand of the market that you're really upset with here.

The weird politicization of commerce is baffling to me.

I think the issue isn't really controlled speech with these platforms but more often a loss of control of the narrative. They are ill-preppared to deal with hate speech and often will act as the very propagators of it. (See FB in 2016). The real issue to be found is the massive control they have in light of their blindness to the context of their product and inability to enact real censorship of things that are truly intolerant. Personally looking from the outside in, I think that makes them a long-term risk to themselves rather than just a risk to society. It's worth noting that this will likely lead to a platform that intentionally 'free' to intolerant behavior that will compete and likely compete well as it will be additive to those looking for hate.

Yet we do not treat them like regulated broadcast media, which I guess is unsurprising in that regulation lags behind technology. In the context of Parler, it seems they tried to make the best of a bad situation.

But I don't know that we should cheer this as "the right outcome", even if, in this case, it seems justified (my gut is that this was the right thing to do, in this specific case). It's time to ask broader questions around whether these companies should have that power at all, or if we need government to step in.

I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be).

Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.

Eventually the federal government came in and decided race was a protected class.

Obviously the problem isn't as simple as saying Google or anyone else must allow certain groups to use their platforms. Because that compels speech. Which the government also can't do.

Proper legal experts would have to craft it but I think the limit should be somewhere around access and use of the infrastructure. Domain registrars and hosts cannot discriminate. However If Twitter doesn't want someone on their platform I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to kick them. We just cant allow for those paltform hosts to collude with the infrastructure providers to deplatform others completely.

And I can think of two reasons why from a legal standpoint. 1: most of the internet infrastructure in the US was built with public dollars. Even if its nominally owned by a private ISP, they were paid by the government to build it. Historically the courts have used government funds as a way to enforce legal limits.

2: coordinated deplatforming like what happened with Parlor looks an awful lot like it was an intentional hit to take out a potential competitor to the current online status quo. That should worry everyone really.

For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.

We have strong bill of rights restrictions on governmental power because of the massive amount of power held by the government. So having that power be controlled by small numbers of entirely unaccountable figures with more power than the government in certain areas doesn't seem better at all?

But this isn't about criminalising speech promoting conspiracy theories, radicalisation, and racism. It's about private entities withdrawing the infrastructure of speech, which obviously gets a lot more complicated to reason about and legislate.

I'm mostly okay with Apple and Google removing the app from their stores. I'm slightly less okay with Amazon withdrawing their services. But if Parler ends up reborn on a server running out of someones house or business I would be very much against their utility providers cutting off access.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm with you and don't quite know what to think about this either.

However I do worry that if we're not careful as a society someone posting on HN (or maybe a government approved Facebook group) will eventually say:

>The internet was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it.

Are you supposed to rebuild the entire tech ecosystem that the entire world runs on? Fight through every damn moat along the way? Is this the bar we set here?

Its easy to talk free speech for popular speech. It's how people react to unpopular speech that shows their true colours.

But I also think the rights of the services providers have to considered as well. Should Nintendo be forced to publish porn apps in their Switch online store for example? Should HN be prevented from moderating comments here? Should thedonald.win be prevented from deleting anti-Trump comments? No is my answer to those rhetorical questions.

At the same time I don't think that electricity, water, and internet service providers should be allowed to cut off Westboro Baptist Church either. Likewise for their domain name provider.

I think things like AWS and payment services are more like electric and water suppliers then they are like app stores and web forums. So I suppose that I'm in favour of drawing a line in a reasonable place, it's just not clear to me yet exactly where that line should be.

What would help is what we should have done a long time ago: Apple should either allow users to install different app stores or submit to regulation as a platform.

It doesn't mean private individuals have to humor you. It doesn't even mean they have to listen to you.

The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android.

So the issue is primarily one of anti-trust laws. Monopolies do not get to arbitrarily and selectively enforce their ToS against competitors; that is an illegal abuse of market power.

The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies, a violation of RICO statutes.

I think it is fair to say that Parler, like every social network, could be used to post hateful messages, or messages advocating violence. GP stated that Parler was a “hate site” but I think it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages. It was by no means a site formed or designed specifically to carry hate.

A corollary that I would raise is a similar standard in copyright infringement. Sites which are designed specifically with the intent of committing copyright infringement are now criminally liable — it has recently become a serious felony to make these kinds of sites. However, site that show a significant non-infringement purpose are not illegal, even if some infringement takes place on their platform. You might recall that YouTube was a site that got its start with rampant copyright infringement, and to this day has a significant amount of infringing material on its servers, but it is not criminally liable, or even civilly liable for that content due to the fact that the site has a significant non-infringement purpose. I think that’s a fair analogy with Parler.

If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform. Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy, and in any case should be done through a court of law, not through the actions of a monopolistic cartel.

Remember Parler was asked by the tech co's to moderate such content, and it refused.

I also don't see how Parler competed with AWS.

For many kinds of criminal content posing an acute public safety hazard, it does, and it's very simple: if you have knowledge of the existence of the material, you must take it down or become yourself criminally liable for it, in addition to anyone who is already criminally liable. (For copyright, there's the DMCA takedown process, which is more generous because people don't tend to get killed as a forseeable consequence of civil copyright violations.)

Of course, if you are a second level host and don't have item-by-item control (such as AWS for a site hosted there by another firm), the only efficient way to acheived that may be to drop the entire account.

I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech was to overturn the conviction of a Anthony Elois, who posted some truly disgusting things online. [1]

I'm not aware of any case where an internet platform was held crminally liable for content posted on their platform, in fact Section 230 provides "wide immunity" for both criminal and civil liability for the content that users post. [2]

For example, from [2];

> A recent case [3] out of the 2nd Circuit illustrates the types of issues courts are facing in our era of social media predominance and terrorist attacks.

> The 2nd Circuit case arose after Hamas posted content on Facebook that both directly and indirectly led to the attack and death of several Israeli nationals, including a 10 year-old girl. The victims subsequently sued Facebook for allowing the posts to exist, and to “match” terrorist sympathizers with terrorist organizations.

> While the content at issue violated Facebook’s terms of service and Community Standards, Facebook did not remove the content prior to the attacks.

[1] - https://gizmodo.com/supreme-court-online-threats-legal-as-lo...

[2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/second_circuit/2019/08/what-legal-...

[3] - https://caselaw.findlaw.com/summary/opinion/us-2nd-circuit/2...

> I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech

This isn't about hate speech, which is protected speech. It's about a subset of content which is itself criminal (that is, for which the source would be criminally liable), where a service provider knows of the content and the facts which make it criminal (whether or not they understand the criminal prohibition itself)

And it's not about civil liability (things some private party can sue you for damages, and where therefore the Section 230 protection is likely to apply) but criminal liability, that is, things where the government can take action leading to criminal fines and/or imprisonment.

Examples of laws creating this kind of knowledge-based obligation are 18 USC Sec 2339A regarding material sorry to terrorists and 18 USC Sec 1466A with regard to obscene visual representation of the sexual abuse of children.

> ...it is necessary that a defendant in some sort associate himself with the venture, that he participate in it as in something that he wishes to bring about, [and] that he seek by his action to make it succeed.”

The example of Sec 1466a is an excellent one. Facebook is the world’s largest platform for sharing exactly those types images, and they have not been charged under 1466a, because they are not liable under it.

What would be pertinent is 18 USC 2258A [2] which requires service providers to report any such content that that are made aware of to the tip line, but by now we are far afield of the topic at hand.

A simple introduction on hosting and platform liability, for example [1].

[1] - https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...

[2] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A

Coordinated? Competitor? Where do you find evidence of coordination? Why do you think parler is a competitor?

> it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages

Not accurate at all. Why do you think people used parler instead of twitter.

> Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy

When the entire platform resists and refuses to moderate, nuking from orbit is a fine remedy. Parler was too stupid to build alternatives into their risk profile. I think they believed their own hype.

Maybe Facebook, but...

How did Parler compete with Apple? What market were they competing in?

How did Parler compete with AWS? Did they share the same sort of clients?

How did Parler compete with Google?

That approach, combined with filter bubbles and AI recommendations driving engagement/addiction, gave us rise of things like Antivax movement, Trump, QAnon and now an attempted coup in the US.

We should probably think hard before we consider it the only possible approach.

At the same time, saying "some speech actually isn't ok" doesn't mean that unaccountable monopolies of corporate overlords that wield more power than some nation states are ok. Both things can be true at the same time.

It’s a lack of confidence and trust in our governments and corporations. The fact that those same governments and corporations own our media makes it even worse.

I think criminalising unpopular speech will make the symptoms of this problem worse rather than better.

Is sharing someone else's private information, publishing outright lies about safety of vaccines, or claiming some ethnicities or nationalities are subhuman and should be murdered right now "unpopular speech"?

I mean, I sure as hell hope it is unpopular!

But it is much more than just "unpopular speech". Framing it like "criminalizing unpopular speech" makes it sound like someone wants to criminalize saying "I think the Twilight series were genuinely good movies." but we're talking about people saying "All those <insert slur> should be killed."

And yet, you are right that in some cases this happens - for example when some US states decided to solve problem of people complaining about animal cruelty by making filming on farms illegal. That's a complete bullshit and it is harmful to the society.

But people who incite violence and Antivaxxers who actively hurt people by spreading diseases? I don't think so.

I use the term unpopular speech as a binary divider of speech between popular speech and unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t require protection by definition so the implication is that free speech laws exist to protect unpopular speech. I wasn’t suggesting that “I like Twilight” is equivalent to “<slurs> should be killed.”

Yes I would describe lies about vaccines, claiming that some groups of humans are subhuman, and doxing as both harmful and as examples of unpopular speech. Also they are unpopular because they are harmful rather than because they are untrue (doxing people is harmful directly because the information is correct).

All those things, despite being harmful, are legal. It seems that you are suggesting that we should consider banning some forms of unpopular speech because it is harmful. By banning it I assume you mean to make it illegal. If you mean something else please let me know!

Not vaccines though, but that might come to pass as well, since vaccine safety misinformation is basically manipulation that runs vulnerable people into biological weapons and that's pretty bad.

And life is ... fine. We go on without having the (pretty much uniquely USian) 100 % unlimited free speech.

Comparing different places is always difficult - Germany is understandably much harsher at limiting Nazis than US is - but saying there's less school shooters and domestic terrorists because of it probably doesn't see the whole truth like mental healthcare, quality of education and access to weapons etc.

So I'm not sure what to make of it.

Just listen to the Parler executives account of what happened. Contrary to all the nonsense being spewed by ideologues, Parler did have a moderation policy that prohibited incitement to violence, and they did enforce it, but it was neither perfect nor instantaneous (since, by deliberate choice, only humans were involved). They also complied to the requests from the three tech titans, but of course that did not matter, their fate was sealed before the first letter was sent.

This is a moment of astonishing hypocrisy and terrible abuse of power. Silicon Valley has proven to half of America that the system is rigged beyond recourse, and for a number of those Americans that might be the straw that breaks the camels back, leading them into radicalization and terrorism. It would be very wise for all of us in tech, in any position of influence, to urge calm and dialogue and to provide space for all speech that is not urging violence. We are not children to throw away our country because of a single deranged fool. We need to show to the country that tech is not an instrument available to only those of a certain ideological bent and that we can talk and sort out our differences without violence or repression.

These moderators were overwhelmingly MAGA/Trump supporters, so I'm sure you can guess what kind of posts they expected to see before they unblocked a new user.

This was all shared/revealed on Twitter, so take it as "evidence" with whatever grain of salt you like, but people didn't just make up these claims about what Parler was..

So while perhaps Parler claimed to be a place for open debate and unrestricted ideas, it is seems that was just a thin cover for their much more focused goal of being a home for all this extremist right-wing talk in America.

https://twitter.com/donk_enby/

She links to a bunch of other articles and sources as well, including lists of moderators etc...

I guess shutting down mosques that promoted terrorism led to more terrorism?

I find it ironic that the ban is what makes people think the techCos are controlling society rather than the fact that all actions of social networks and hosting services impact society. Like the time when FB make some news feeds more negative to track impact and engagement. Or how the radicalization of users on FB can happen due to the Algo.

Ultimately this is a legislative failure, but it also is how a free market should defend itself of dangerous content as well. (keep in mind a Civil war 2 isn't exactly great for the economy).

What is wild is that the laws for this all exist and are in use. The behavior here is the use of Section 230 as designed. The definition of insurrection and hate speech are all defined. Clearly what has happened is actually late action by social platforms rather than overreach as the US Gov lacks any mode to actually take on this content.

(1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process.

(2) deplatforming could be at the sole discretion of platforms, but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols such that it is sufficiently easy for those who were deplatformed to switch to the opposition or self-platform (for example: ios allowing competing app stores). This would be difficult and technically challenging to enact in many situations (what does it mean in the case of social networks for example?), And if there's no competition we need antitrust ASAP

If all the competition are also deplatforming you, I think at a certain point it becomes fair to say that you were more or less democratically rejected, much like if every bar in town kicks out neo-nazis that's not a failure of free speech but a success of the free market. But that relies on a large, healthy, robust competitive ecosystem which does not exist in a billionaire-dominated tech scene.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

Think gay wedding cakes

> (2) ... but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols

Open standards and protocols like `https` and HTML?

No, because you don't need AWS or Twitter or Cloudflare or any of the name tech companies to run a high-traffic web site successfully.

Nowadays, the public square, the thing that the constitution is supposed to protect, which is the difference between feudalism and democracy, is de-facto (though not de-jure), owned by monopolistic corporations. They are only accountable to their shareholders, and they have nearly complete power over their platforms. The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.

This is an oversight in the current legal framework, and will have to be corrected eventually.

That's quite the exaggeration. You can quite literally still gather in a physical public square. Just because it's more convenient to do so online doesn't mean it's a granted right.

> The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.

And? If a bank decides they don't want you as a customer, you can still perform cash transactions. You aren't entitled to a bank account just because the majority of people do banking.

You can? Last I checked I can't, if I do that I get arrested for breaking social distancing...

> you can still perform cash transactions.

You mean, like in Japan and Sweden, that decided to attempt to go cashless by creating more and more rules on cash so that only debit (or credit) cards are practical?

This is inaccurate at best. The gathering in D.C. last Wednesday had a legal permit for thousands of people to join.

Host on your own infrastructure. Present a mobile-responsive web site. Take Bitcoin.

(we're talking, politely, about free speech extremists - so none of this seems wildly inappropriate, right?)

This is all fair. If your goal is to exist on the fringe of the acceptable and legal, you're going to have to DIY.

For a while now. Sex workers, sex shops have complained about it for years. Nobody cared. I find it ironic that the same group of people advocating against consumer and worker protections now seem to demand them.

Now, suddenly, it's a great big issue because a bunch of neo-Nazis got run out of town? Not a great look, eh.

As a bonus, I'll just add this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

My personal opinion is that this discussion about tech, politics, censorship, etc. is something that needs to happen, and maybe all parties were completely within their rights to act how they did.

There are a lot of people who don't see that as self-evident, and what they are hearing is "if you are pro-Trump, you deserve to be a social pariah." That is a real quick path to radicalization.

Society is based on a set of mutually agreed upon rules. If you convince enough people through your actions that the rules are "Heads I win, Tails you lose", then they'll decide not to play by those rules anymore. And then all hell breaks loose.

Agreed, and it follows from that that "political affiliation" protection cannot include "wants to destroy the government" -- no matter from what quadrant that sentiment flows (anarchist, socialist, fascist, whatever).

Agreeing to democracy -- and probably republicanism -- (note, both lowercase) is a bright line across which you've really decided to step outside of our mutual rules.

The trouble is that many of the same people saying these actions were perfectly acceptable also have a habit of casually stating that all people who voted for Trump are the irredeemable scum of the earth.

Try Homage to Catalonia. You'll find the author likes shooting fascists, not platforming them.

I do agree with you that AWS dropping them isn't evidence of a monopoly. There's plenty of competitors in that space. None of them, however, are going to touch Parler with a 10ft pole at this point.

And I’m saying they “could”. They might decide not to.

Although I don’t think anyone could have foreseen level of censorship we have now, even 5 years ago, so who knows what it will look like in 2025.

And I think if you ask the average HN reader he wouldn’t be opposed to blocking websites for political reasons.

I wonder if this was the same sort of argument used to justify denying minorities homes / home loans? "Well they're free to build their own house!" "Well they're free to cut their own lumber!" "Well they're free to forge their own hammers!" "Well they're free to..."

This situation lies somewhere between “refusing service based on someone’s religion” and “refusing service because I just don’t like them.” Political affiliation is not yet recognized as a religious belief, so they are not a protected class. I don’t know enough about the law to say on what grounds a company stands if they drop/refuse service because they think someone is being a dick.

[1] it’s more nuanced than that of course, but I’m speaking broadly here

The problem is you need to rely on someone.

1) Some parts are still single points of failure, e.g. domains, dns servers

2) There are switching costs (particularly on the infra slide) both in time and money (time was the issue here).

In general, are we sure that no conspiracy ever turned out to be true? How many heresies turned out to be correct and changed the course of our history? And how many people were persecuted in the name of spreading conspiracy? Why are we so afraid of conspiracies?

I think people believe in conspiracies, not because they're mislead on a certain topic, but because they want to believe. So debunking conspiracies is attacking their faith, which is what causes zealotry.

It's more like spreading a religion, which, yeah, you can't really ban it. You just have to let people do their thing.

tl;dr I agree that one shouldn't censor it, but only because it does no good.

I'd argue this is purely selection bias. I think the biggest modern conspiracies are not yet called conspiracies by the public zeitgeist.

Ex. Remember Jeff Epstein? I'm sure there are dozens of powerful people who hope you don't.

Epstein was a Conspiracy. No theory required :)

No one is threatening to kill an elected official over grassy knolls.

Times change.

This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?

"Everyone said Pence sold out!!! Time to enter the capitol. Go patriots. Echo and enter the building dont let them vote. Put pressure. We are riding in!!! Echo big"

66 comments, 301 echoes (i.e. retweets), 375 upvotes (i.e. likes)

There's a torrent of Parler posts that is being analyzed, so there may be better conclusions published soon: https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-pa...

That said, I still don't support taking down a site because there's no moderation. These people won't go away; I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.

It seems as though there is in inverse relationship between ease of use and centralization (obviously). As communication becomes decentralized, the ability to accrue a large audience becomes more difficult. This supports the rise of ideas that can gain widespread support on their merit, as opposed to gaining widespread support via having a mass audience to start with.

To illustrate: on one side, we have a centralized extreme: Twitter (or Reddit, or Facebook). On the other side we have a decentralized extreme: spoken word. Which is easier to radicalize a country with?

If extremists move to decentralized or p2p alternatives to social media, they will shrink in the long run, letting the fringe ideas remain on the fringe.

If all social media went the way of decentralization, we would see far less extremism in general, simply because most people wouldn't go looking for it and it's pretty hard to spread extremist ideas in a one-on-one conversation.

What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about storming the capitol isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for exmaple, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but moderated in Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets.

"On September 17, 2020 we will lay siege to The @WhiteHouse for exactly fifty days.

We need your wisdom and expertise to pull off a radically democratic toneshift in our politics.

Are you ready for #revolution?

This is the #WhiteHouseSiege"

https://twitter.com/adbusters/status/1288193793267625984

The problem isn't just that they had more, though logic would suggest they did; after all, their user base are refugees from other platforms that pushed them out for extremist language, advocating for violence, conspiracy theories, etc.

It's that Parler refused to remove it.

So even if the rate of introduction of this content was the same on Parler (which I don't buy for a second, see argument above), the total concentration and visibility of it is higher because it's not taken down.

I think it's very interesting that you lead off citing good faith in a situation where, in my experience, you're about to demonstrate literal bad faith. It's like you wish to take off the table the interpretation that you are intentionally lying for the sake of argument.

I think the parent raises a very legitimate question of what defines a "hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism." I've never had a Twitter account myself, but some of the publicly-available content I've seen there there certainly fits that description. Conversely, I did briefly have a Parler account, and what I saw in my particular bubble did not fit that description at all - It was crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and comedians. I'm not trying to imply that my anecdote is data or that Parler is some bastion of positivity, but the way your premise is stated only requires a single counterexample: some "hate speech" exists on Twitter, and not everything on Parler is.

You say, "the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle." To me that sounds like the old adage that "the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." At least five years ago that was largely seen as a feature rather than a bug. But recently the tide of popular opinion seems to have shifted in general favor of censorship. Undeniably there are some bad ideas out there, but I worry that the "cure" of censorship is a slippery slope that could very quickly become worse than the disease.

Maybe something is lost over text, but I genuinely prefaced my question because I know it's a delicate political topic for people. But your response is just childish. I literally barely know anything about Parler. Also, how is asking for evidence so triggering? That should be the cornerstone of any these types of discussions.

But to answer your question: No, I can't prove to you what I'm thinking. Nobody ever can. So perhaps you should just take my question on face value and stop assuming malicious intent.

Let me fix that:

> that multiple countries and international organizations categorize as hate speech?

A casual reminder that when most think these open air rules are intended to stifle conversation it is generally for very clear legal and moral reasons. If you believe this is used by them to control people then you should also believe that a replacement should view this speech as antithetical to the existence of the free speech social company.

It's one thing to ban talk about the platform you are talking on.

It's not the same thing to ban intolerant behavior.

It all leads back to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

He goes on to explain what situation would call for use of suppression, for example, the use of violence or rejecting reason or logic by the intolerant (Which, obviously both are what happened in January 6th and in this narrative) ;)

The ban isn't on conservative viewpoints, it is on intolerant speech that has no want to make a logical discussion and resorts to violence. Trust me, I'm using it correctly.

Unwillingness to accept(or tolerate) views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own.

When we talk about intolerant behavior we are talking about actions and statements that are intended to demean others by design (and praise the inverse), this is pretty easy to define. Saying that a person's skin color or gender makes them lesser or to be despised is clearly intolerant, the person in context is clearly unable to change this as it is how they are. Whats funny about this is that the US Bill of rights is a statement on intolerance by design. It's meant to both give rights but also set tone.

Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?

You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.

Just because radical things are posted on your website doesn't mean all the discourse on the site is bad and your site should be deplatformed. We already apply that standard to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others.

As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.

A policy that was FAR more relaxed than any of their competitors, which was by design and part of their marketing pitch: come here to say those things you're not allowed to say elsewhere.

Parler's position is: unless the language is strictly illegal according to the letter of the law that's designed limit government censorship of speech, then it's allowed.

By that definition, if I call for someone's death, unless I have the means and the opportunity and mention a specific time, then it doesn't count and the post stays up.

Clearly Amazon, Google, and Apple have policies that are more strict than US law. And that makes sense: US law is shaped by the constitution, which is meant to restrict the government's ability to limit speech. And we should absolutely want the rules regarding government censorship to be as narrow as possible.

But private services are free to operate by different rules.

For example, if I walk into a McDonalds and start swearing at all the customers, I'll get kicked out even if I'm not breaking the letter of the law.

So, did they have a moderation policy? Yes, technically. But did that policy allow extremist and violent language to persist on their site at a level above and beyond what's seen on any competing platform outside of, say, 8chan? Absolutely.

> As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.

And Facebook would pull that content down if they found it.

Parler won't.

That's what got them pulled from AWS, and the Google and Apple app stores.

But that's just it, isn't it? Parler tried to make a new service that plays by a new set of rules. And they were crushed, because it turns out that you actually can't have your own rules unless you are already at the scale of Apple, AWS, etc.

That's not an infringement on my rights, that's the free market at work

Before this, the power was somewhat theoretical and used in tiny marginal cases. Now, it's proven that they can effectively exercise the power in a major way, and that's news.

Honestly, it's really not. We've seen groups like ISIS kicked off social media, for example, and no one blinked an eye. Heck, Milo Yiannopoulos was deplatformed way back in 2016.

The thing that's news is that a significant percentage of a major US political party is now associated with a form of right wing extremism and wrapped up in a major conspiracy theory movement whose adherents are willing to commit violence in an attempt to subvert an election.

That's not at all true. If I recall the same thing happened to 8chan/8kun. Yet somehow they live on. If Parler has a market, they'll find a way.

That said, it sucks but, well, that's capitalism for ya.

What else would you suggest? Regulating these various companies such that the government gets to decide who can use their services?

Because if so, a) that would require new laws, b) it'd probably fall afoul of the first amendment, and c) it doesn't seem to align well with free market conservative ideology, and so should be opposed by the very users of Parler that are being affected by this.

Facebook ultimately started removing Holocaust denial content because it violated their harassment policy, not because it was illegal.

I think it's a non-sequitur.

But man, wow. I joined Parler several months ago and that's literally all my default feed was -- various flavors of right wing rage. Not all was violent or racist. Some were verified celebrities and right wing politicians; those tended to be rather mild.

But typing various slurs or words like "shoot" or "hang" into the search box returned some eye-watering results.

The difference between it and Twitter was not subtle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... is a concrete example of speech that would be banned from Twitter and Facebook. I think it's telling that there are 25k up votes.

What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about e.g. storming the Capitol being banned on Twitter but not Parler isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for example, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but censored on Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets. That's the kind of evidence I would like to see.

If I start a new social media service, what are the objective measures I can use to ensure I'm moderating well and quickly enough? How should we allow this to interact with scale?

If a new startup goes from 10 to 10,000 users overnight, and 0.5% of users post offensive comments that first day, how long does that startup have to remove them all before they are designated as "bad"?

Also, how should we view overmoderation within this context? I think most people would find it injust and orwellian to ban a black sociology professor for posting an academic analysis of the use of the n-word through history, but I fear society is going to overcorrect.

I really dodged a bullet. Thank God for our tech overlords and their new Ministry of Truth. I can now sleep easy knowing that they are busy scouring the rest of the internet and it's marketplace of ideas for more doubleplusbadthink from which to shield me.

Whether it will be applied even-handedly remains to be seen, but there is a law to deal with this, and I suspect it's a factor in why businesses of all kinds are running screaming from anything connected to the attacks (including other businesses that fail to themselves cut off any activity with a nexus to the attack, the attackers, and the apparent planning for future attacks): 18 USC Sec 2339A, which makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide any goods or services except medicine and religious materials connected to any of an enumerated list of federal criminal offenses collectively designated “terrorism”, punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years unless death occurs as a result of the crime, in which case the imprisonment becomes for any term of years or life.

Individuals are not held responsible for the threats and illegal speech they make. Look at all the threats made against people on social media. The fact that there is almost no accountability means it keeps happening.

The only repercussions most of the time is that the platform kicks you off. Part of it is, its their platform and from a business perspective having you around if you are too toxic isn't wise.

It seems like a society problem. Non enforcement and a lot of people with nothing to loose.

Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. While there may be a market for the speech Parler promotes and amplifies that market is not sufficiently large (in the opinion of these companies) to offset possible bad public relations or the loss of other customers.

I don't think there's any place for legislation that forces private companies to take a loss in this manner. It's clearly anti-free market and definitely anti-free speech, forcing Amazon to associate with speech they feel might harm the companies financial outlook.

Also, is it necessary? There are many BitTorrent tracker sites that are treated as illegal in the US and are still available. If Parler was really dedicated to keeping their website running they could surely do so. Maybe they won't have applications in the Apple App Store but that's not a right, is it? You have to have product that Apple feels helps the overall goal of their App Store, which is to make money for Apple.

Technically, there is no barrier that restricts a corporation from granting free space, so it isn't "free" to do so, moreso that it was not addressed because at the time of the framing of the constitution, the bigger dissenters of free speech were government, and religion, backed by government (or being the government.)

Indeed, it's my position that such laws would in fact be infringing on the free speech of those private companies. In addition they might cost those companies money, making these hypothetical laws also anti-free market.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

That's pretty much been newspapers in the UK for as long as I can remember!

It’s just the last 20 years or so of everybody having a megaphone that is outside the norm.

With social media, your feed is perfectly catered to you as an individual, by using as much data on you as they can get their hands on, and a nearly endless supply of content from the "megaphones" of other users. Even if you have many of the same friends as someone, and politically align with them, you probably would find scrolling through their feed to be less interesting than scrolling through your own.

One can always list all the players in an industry and call that set "a monopoly and should be broken up". Or we can just take this for what it is, which is that some entity is so toxic that none of these companies (which compete with each other otherwise) want to touch it.

    Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are 
    monopolies and should be broken up.

For a monopoly, you need anticompetitive practices. Is Facebook unfairly preventing the success of other social networks? A good example of a monopoly was 90's era Microsoft, which prevented its OEMs from shipping competing operating systems.

Terminology aside, I completely agree with you that we need far, far more choice in the marketplace.

Granted these are just lawsuits at the moment and not final verdicts but still it's not hard to see how they don't play a fair game.

By that point, what would having your own tech stack do? How do you even collect revenue when banks and payment providers cancel on you? This is the power of freedom of association at work, the power behind cancellation.

Even for people who don't agree with his libertarian politics, there's no arguing that he is anything short of an uncommonly decent man. He's certainly the closest I've ever seen anyone come to being the mythical "honest politician." So of course they're attacking him...

I have a hunch that any "extremely racist" comments may have been more to the effect that although slavery was very bad indeed, there might have been better ways to dismantle it than by half the country fighting the other half [0], which is a sentiment worth considering in the context of current events.

[0] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-...

    This will push towards a balkanization of the 
    Internet at the platform level as people will 
    want to self-determine the terms of service 
    for the basis of their communication. 

My feeling is that most people would not like to belong to a space where open racism and other abhorrent views are tolerated and encouraged.

Those that do can have their fringe spaces, but they shouldn't expect mainstream companies to help them do so.

I never thought I would say this, but I have become a fan of Europe's approach to regulation. They've pushed for GDPR which at least gets us the ability to obtain and delete our data, they've acknowledged the right to repair, and as self-serving as it may be, they understand the ramifications of a unilateral takedown of the communications of a head of state – particularly the precedent it sets. They will likely continue their fight until they've setup their own alternatives to SV-based infrastructure.

Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.

Not your right to be provided an audience

The right to a platform has never been guaranteed. The only difference is that with social media, your message is broadcast first and moderated after.

FB's "platform" feature is largely listener-driven. You can still use FB and not listen to persons X, Y and Z. It's all posted by users, and users decide what to follow or read (except paid content). Not like TV Stations and Newspapers. That's what Social Media companies have been telling us for a while!

But if we want apply usual standards of platform rights and responsibilities to FB, we should then require it to also be responsible for what's posted there.

You can't have it both ways.

  "Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."

This book may have been pivotal to British utilitarianists, but it didn't have much, if any, impact on the U.S.

Before then, "free speech" as a concept did not exist. (The closest was the freedom of religious practice, which is not the same thing.)

Now that is a heavy claim to be making. Do you have anything to back it up?

Before the U.S., nobody even thought free speech was possible. England was the closest, but their version of free speech was still subject to government censorship.

It was the writings of the Founding Fathers, and the Bill of Rights in particular, that established the doctrine that is today known as "freedom of speech."

"The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law."

I think this analogy needs a lot of work.

Specifically, how does banning people for their actions work well as an analogy for banning someone for who they are (and you must take that for granted, because that's the legal frameworks opinions on the matter)?

That's also an even worse example because the supreme court found in favor of the cake shop.

Citation needed. Neither I nor my friends or acquaintances used it for any of these things. Hell, I've hired people off of Parler.

> ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does.... Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such.

[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-...

And what did start-ups do before AWS et al? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS?

I understand it's more 'agile' to just spin up instances as needed, but are we in a place that the Old Way can no longer work? (At least theoretically.)

Doesn't Stack Overflow (still?) run on their own hardware?

* https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

As for hateful rhetoric on Parler, that same hateful rhetoric exists on Twitter as well, don't fool yourself, it is only the fact that it is the left threatening the right that anyone allows it. Remember when Kathy Griffin held the bloody head of the President, or the current rise up and kill cops tweets you find everywhere on Twitter. Or the white people should all be dead tweets? Whether you agree to it or not does not therefore make hate speech. There is no clear cut defined line for hate speech to begin with. Anything can be declared hate speech, hell what I am saying now could be considered hate speech because I actually defend Parler and the people on its right to speech. At least then we can show examples of see this guy right here? He is a moron and believes in really dumb stuff. All they are doing by silencing these people is forcing them deeper underground where even more nefarious ideas and figures lie becoming more radicalized and more violent. But I guess that is what establishment wants, a perpetual idea to scare people with so that they give up even more freedom of thought.

That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm.

Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades.

The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company.

In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?

As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.

I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.

I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.

Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).

The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.

All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever.

I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case.

Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.

The financial bifurcation in the US and to a lesser extent in many other parts of the developed world is quite big, and I don't know how big it has to get before a competent demagogue gets traction in the US. The extremes in both the GOP and the DNC have just been handed a dangerous working template with Trump's history lesson. They just learned that extremism works, and it scales from local to national politics. It was not always so; one of the salient features of American politics in the past was just how consistently difficult it was to move the center any appreciable distance politically, the infamous "lumpentariat".

I believe this is because the US valuation landscape is fundamentally broken. This goes way beyond the economic or financial system. How we account for value over time is structured in very perverse incentive structures leading to the power law popping up in an all-over fashion when in the past it didn't use to dominate the landscape so much (it had localized instantiations but these were more local maxima than a general law more widely applicable). It's generating a "desperation deciles" that the means and averages of metrics sweep under statistical rugs.

I think these deciles are mattering now due to the law of large numbers. With "only" a 100M population base, such deciles are manageable, whether through coercion (unfavorable), assistance (nominal approach), or generationally long-term rehabilitative policy like public education (ideal). But I suspect there is something about near-billion- and billion-scale population governance our governing systems are not scaling to meet.

Also, a consistent theme I see in these kinds of discussions is similar to your "...if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy...". In my humble and limited experience, the ones in the developed world are short-term focused on survival, putting food on the table and a roof over their heads, then with what limited discretionary time and cognitive energy left over, trying to find some happiness in a pretty bleak outlook as globalism systemically blocks their avenues of escape.

There are some limited avenues left, but the arithmetic doesn't support lifting enough of the desperation deciles out of poverty or functional poverty to matter through transitioning them to plumbers, welders, fitters, rig work, etc. While there are currently screaming needs for many of those skills, it isn't in the tens of millions scale we're needing (law of large numbers).

Poor people don't riot if their poverty is perceptibly, contiguously improving over time. Rich people don't incite malign ideologies if there aren't poor people who will act as foot soldiers absorbing the brunt of adverse consequences of swearing fealty to such beliefs. When there is a chicken in every pot, people will riot over sports teams, but not politics. Actual getting-policies-and-legislation-established-and-practiced politics is dead-ass boring to the vast majority, so getting this many people to even pay attention to just the cartoonish depictions of politics we see in the US now is a major signal. I currently don't think it is a good signal. And I suspect it is a more complex signal than "get the wrongthink upper middle class suburbanites to shut up". But I'm just a layperson throwing some brush strokes out there and wanting to hear thoughts from folks like you. I hope I'm wrong-wrong-wrong since I'm operating from very limited data. I don't know what the hell the on-the-money forecasters are making of all this, but in a world this big, I gotta believe there is someone or some entity out there that has had access to sufficient data and has been consistently right for a couple decades plus, and some very wealthy people are paying very dearly for their ongoing analysis.

There were about 10 million people on Parler before it was taken down. If you really think its comporable to an ISIS recruitment site, we got a much, much bigger problem here.

Putting aside questions around whether or not a media filter has always existed in some form...

You're using social media hosted on EC2 instances that can be terminated vs instead of your local newspaper and other similar, less directly filtered options. That's the trade off. I don't really see anything unusual about it - a newspaper could fire a writer (or even hire writers that reflect a certain tone), and nobody batted an eye.

AND we want to ban the whole platform X,

THEN it would be logical to ban also all the layers down the technological stack: AWS, Google Play Store, Telecoms that transported the traffic etc.

Indeed, X platform has approximately the same responsibility as other platform layers and hence they all should be punished.

Another idea is to punish them proportionally to their ability to check the content published on the platform so that telecoms probably will not be punished at all because they are not able to read encrypted traffic.

If the next layer refuses to ban the previous layer, then yes: keep going after the next layer in the stack.

The overwhelming vast majority of the people on Parler were simply normal people tired of what they perceived as a double standard in Twitter's treatment of conservatives as opposed to liberals, and wished to support a competitor.

Parler was co-founded by an unelected billionaire as a "grassroots" way for the Mercers to push their ideology and their version of "acceptable speech". I don't really have any qualms with their power play getting shut down, and I don't think other businesses should be forced to support it.

* In general, tech companies should be less powerful and monopolistic.

* In this specific case, the tech companies used the power they have in a way that is overall beneficial to society.

Trump incited a violent insurrection on the US Capitol. If Senators and Representatives had not successfully escaped through tunnels before the rioters got to them, some of them would be dead. The fact that Trump is still in office after that shows that the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch to check Trump's executive power.

In the absence of that, we need some entity powerful enough to push back against rising fascism and authoritarianism. I don't like that that power apparently has to be a handful of tech giant companies, but I'll take that (temporarily at least) over the US becoming a right-wing dictatorship.

> the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch

I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.

Have you seen Twitter, Reddit? It's filled with hate, conspiracy, radicalization and racism.

It's astounding how quickly people fall back to their dfault political leanings and stop being objective.

If they can do this to Parler citing politically motivated excuse to shut them down, what stops your company from getting booted off the internet because some of your users posted "lets blow stuff up"?

This sets a dangerous precedent going forward and it affects all of us regardless of your political spectrum. I get that AWS is an independent commercial entity that has its own terms but do you realize the problem of trusting billionaires and their monopoly to always do the right thing?

Tomorrow, the currents might change, and it could be you too.

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist....

Does it change the flavor if I rewrite the phrase as

    First they came for the murderers and I did not speak out ...

?

We have laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, sexuality, etc. A grocery store can't refuse to serve people by race. Maybe we should expand these protected classes and make sure they apply to Internet businesses as well. I don't think we will (or should) expand them in such a way that Parler would be included, though.

While there are significant improvements that could be made to our laws, the most significant failure here is one of enforcement. When Republican senators chose not to hear witnesses during the impeachment trial they took a significant step towards making Donald Trump a despot and legitimizing the alt-right. The recent strife is a direct consequence.

You can argue that the violent events of last week would have simply taken place early last year, but at least it might not have threatened peaceful transfer of power after the elections.

Elected billionaires (and millionaires/thousandaires) don't do much better.

I'm not surprised at the end result, but the effort to retain free speech was a valiant one. Forcing extremist views underground doesn't silence them, it emboldens them and makes it harder to know what they're up to. Not a good idea.

This is just false. They censored all kinds of things: antifa, parody accounts, obscene usernames, porn, etc.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...

Parler was moderated, and it was explicitly moderated for coherence with a right-wing/reactionary viewpoint. It was not a neutral, unfiltered platform.

censorship is NOT the underlying problem here

No, wait, hear me out.

No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.)

Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls.

Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.)

The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point.

Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats).

But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent.

One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed.

But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable.

There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares.

And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.

With the average opsec of chat sites, would you bet on "effectively"? Ironically Parler itself just had a leak.

Even if a company currently has good opsec, it can be acquired and go downhill (or turn evil).

In the current climate, this comment could (and would) be construed as implicit support of Parler, with all the consequences. The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves.

But suppose you set up a specific semi-public organization to act as the identity provider. (Like IANA? Maybe that's not a good example. :-)) Following something like a provably secure communications flow[1], the chat site gets a unique number representing the user. That's all they know about the user.

Alternatively, and with the approval of the user, the site gets the user's name or whatever the user wishes their online reputation to be associated with and can display that, for their comments to be taken seriously.

Ok, so let's take the example of Parler. Parler doesn't moderate its content, and actively resists attempts outside attempts to do so. However, anything illegal is still associated with individuals and the court system can force Parler to complete the link (that's the "effectively anonymous" approach, here), resulting in that user facing legal consequences. (This is opposed to the current system, where Parler could be technically designed to be unable to complete that link (Yeah, Parler are idiots.) and any kind of moderation relies on Parler's goodwill.)

AWS can continue to host Parler under the cover of a statement like "The POPO are keeping them in check." Or, AWS can kick them off based on measurable facts like "they got more than 10 or 15 subpoenas a day for three months".

As for your last paragraph...

Personally, I think Parler was a sewer filled with the morally and intellectually challenged who lack any sense of responsibility as citizens of the United States of America. (My understanding is that its users were limited to the US, btw.) I understand and agree with its vendor's decisions not to do business with them any more, in the same way I understand and agree with their decisions not to do business with ISIS recruitment sites.

The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves. The rich right loves "consequences", except for themselves. The poor love "consequences", except for themselves. Libertarians love "consequences", except for themselves. You love "consequences", except for yourself. I love "consequences", except for myself.[2] Everyone loves "consequences", except for themselves. Because humans suck.

[1] Yeah, I'm a formal logic guy.

[2] Except I don't really, schadenfreude aside. I seem find in myself a streak of moralism and an excessive sensitivity to fairness. It sucks. Even my schadenfreude doesn't extend to the Darwin awards.

Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different.

On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

We support a market place of ideas because, it was argued that bad ideas would eventually be trumped by better ideas - only by examining bad ideas would we be able to move past them.

Part of that remains true today, but it does not account for the realities of mass communication.

The model ends up painting a passive, solitary image of ideas.

But ideas are neither passive, nor without context. Signal without context is noise.

Nor are brains neutral processors of information, they are vulnerable to psyops, malformed arguments, pressure, ignorance and emotion.

I have read propaganda, I have seen arguments which sound legitimate, but underlying it is xenophobia and hatred.

I know for a fact, that Popper was right and you cannot tolerate the intolerant.

They do not come to discuss or exchange ideas. They come to use your platform as an opportunity to gain followers.

And they use the gaps in our norms to create space for themselves.

Counter speech is not a panacea, it require conditions to work. If those conditions are not satisfied, the strategy fails.

The norms behind modern speech need to account for these trade offs.

The status quo comes with the trade off that partisanship will increase, more people will be radicalized.

This is the trade off, and people have to decide if they are willing to enjoy this trade off.

That's just "I'm for free speech unless I disagree with the speech", right?

Who decides what's too intolerant?

We all love our Popper quotes but it's a very hard line to draw. Nearly any opinion can be explained at being somehow intolerant if you try hard enough.

It's no shock that DailyKos shouldn't have to host pro-Trump content. Nor should /theDonald have to host pro-Bernie content. We all agree that people can choose who to associate with, and that free association is important.

But AWS (and Facebook and others) didn't say "we're sites that present only one kind of content" the way /theDonald and DailyKos did. They presented themselves as universal tools for people to express themselves, build their own sites, install apps, etc.

So it comes as a shock when AWS says "we actually only want to support sites that present views that Jeff Bezos thinks are reasonable." And when Apple says "you can only download apps on your phone that we think do a good enough job moderating." And when Facebook bans people for posting wrong opinions.

The government can't and probably shouldn't force AWS to host content that Bezos doesn't agree with. It would be Amazon's right to host only content that is pro-Trump, or equally Amazon's right to only host content that is anti-Trump. But when Amazon presents something as a neutral utility but secretly enforces different rules, we can and should criticize them.

That's true even if all the content being removed today is garbage. I haven't seen any "worthwhile" content that's been affected by the recent moves, and I have never heard of any valuable speech on Parler. But I am still concerned that Apple gets to decide what apps I can install on my phone because they don't like the content. For every Apple (managed in California by socially liberal periople) there's a Walmart (managed in Arkansas by social conservatives) that will take the same powers and use them in a different way. Walmart is legally free to remove pro-BLM books from their online bookshelves, but we can and should criticize them if they do.

Honestly feels like just companies are trying to maximize their profits and "don't be evil" became just an old memory.

People are pretending like the platforms that deplatformed the group inciting violence are the only platforms on the internet that they could have used, they're not - they're not monopolies in regards to that. They are however the most convenient platforms to use because of various reasons, however we're not talking about having a right to convenience - we're talking about having the right to free speech, which everyone still does in America and on the internet.

Some advice: if you're going to have a mob boss and wannabe tyrant like Trump and rally your followers on a platform, I'd recommend using, depending on, technology layers of owners who are aligned with you and okay with inciting of violence; Trump goes on Fox News to say whatever the fuck he wants to millions of people while saying he's being prevented from free speech - come on now people, let's come back to reality and stop getting sucked into the gaslighting.

There's no natural monopoly that you can't find an alternative to if you're willing to spend enough effort.

Billionaires like the Mercer family, who fund Parler?

You're on a site run as part of the outreach for a VC firm where the owners are best buds with Peter Theil, Facebook board member, early Trump backer, a billionaire who literally hunted for a chance to sue a news organization out of existence because he didn't like a story they wrote about him; a site where a large number of the companies they fund and people who comment are intimately involved with AdTech and/or social media.

And you're only now noticing that billionaires have an unreasonable sway on discourse?

You didn't notice that not only does Rupert Murdoch own print press, book publishing, an TV all over the English-speaking world? You didn't notice the Mercer family also setting up Cambridge Analytica and being principal backers of Brexit?

Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.

(I'm going to leave aside the unfounded assertion that Parler was a "hate site." If it is, then every popular website is a "hate site," from Facebook and Google all the way down. Scores of prominent people who aren't hateful but for bizarre Left-wing constructions of the word "hate" use Parler to communicate with millions of people who are themselves not hateful conspiracy theorists.)

I always feel there's an unjustified logical jump on the part of authoritarian sentiments such as this. The argument seems to be, "X hosts hateful content that it refuses to remove. If we remove X, then we will have reduced hate."

This doesn't make much sense. Has anyone's mind actually changed because of Parler? It makes even less sense for conspiracy theories, where censorship makes conspiracy theorists feel like they're on the right track.

I remember looking up some moon landing hoaxer content on YouTube probably five to eight years ago. There was a lot of it on YouTube, but then YouTube also recommended some debunking videos (a few of which had been made specifically in response to the conspiracy theory videos themselves). The debunking videos were just frankly more persuasive. (The only issue with my little experiment was that the "Algorithm" recommended me conspiracy nonsense for a few weeks after.) There were no passive-aggressive, condescending propaganda boxes, no appeals to the authority of the media or legal system, no "fact checks." Just arguments for and against.

This is not to say that people can't do bad things with speech. We have stories like a random lynch mob forming in India over a viral series of videos shared via WhatsApp.[1] There are other stories like this. All are appalling. And technology has removed frictions that existed before to keep these things from happening.

But let's not forget that the world in which speech is restricted is much, much scarier. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was perpetrated by the most powerful members of Rwandan society, who used their monstrous power to slaughter Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus who spoke against the killings.

In the South under Jim Crow, speech was also violently suppressed with the aid of the states, who turned a blind eye to terrorist groups like the Klan going after black southerners or even white "race traitors" with lynching.

"Censorship, but only for the bad stuff" seems to be an unworkable system. People get riled up, and the consequences can be horrific, but they seem worse in a regime with heavy censorship that doesn't allow a safety valve for the bad ideas.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Doesn't libertarianism posit a weak central government, shedding all responsibilities (that can be shed) to the free market, where competition ensures the best outcomes, choices for all, etc?

If that's true, the current situation of wealthy corporations controlling various social media platforms is... the desired outcome?

The fact that competition is better in areas such as motor vehicles, due to physical standards like roads that work for everyone, lack of network effects, and so on, is beside the point. It isn't the government's fault that Orkut and MySpace didn't compete well against Facebook, or that Parler entered a service contract with another corporation that decided their TOS was violated.

This will all be sorted out in the courts, interpreting contracts which are the ultimate source of truth in the libertarian world view. Fear nothing, justice will prevail. If Parler was not in violation of the contract, they will be compensated. If they were, too bad, they failed to adhere to the contract they agreed to. They deserve to fail and the NEXT competitor to take up the mantle will have incrementally better information and chances to succeed.

OP's statement of "this is what we get" strongly implies that the current state of things is somehow the result of libertarian policies.

There is nothing libertarian about our government. That's why I bring up the extremely high spending and unjust laws we have. Blaming libertarianism for anything happening in the world requires some serious mental gymnastics.

China also has large corporations, should we blame libertarianism for all the human rights offences happening there?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If libertarianism and individualism are "a cancer" and "literal poison" then then they are the most benign and beneficial ones I've ever heard of. Of course any ideology has a spectrum of interpretations and people involved, but the core ideas of "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" (and maybe also "leave me alone") seem pretty good to me.

Nobody would bat an eye if you were banned from HN or reddit for hate speech. Why should a platform be any different? If my customer started using my services to spread Nazism, I'd ban them too. Let's say I was a baker - would it be reasonable that I be compelled to draw swastikas on cakes? Obviously, that's absurd! It is equally absurd to demand that other businesses provide platforms for behavior they don't condone.

Freedom of speech is freedom from oppression by government. Parler isn't being oppressed, they just aren't being given a platform to oppress others by private citizens and corporations. Well, not anymore, although lots of corps made some money from them while they could.

This justification doesn't work if elsewhere is shut down too.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see GOP resurgence in 2022, along with another very real attack on section 230.

Twitter et al booting persons from their services is the neighbour slamming their door in your face, or the baker refusing to do business with you.

The town square is tcp/ip, not the services on top of it.

Twitter is more like a mall owned by a large corporation and while there is some trouble there, they will kick people off the property that are too offensive. If you try to start an insurrection at a mall, you will be kicked out and banned.

It is in Twitters and mall owners best interest to start insurrections on their properties because there will be ramifications for allowing that to happen, that is not good for business.

Comments that are unacceptable on Parler: Pretending to be a cow owned by Devin Nunes

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is...

IMO it's reasonable to consider it a hate site or a site which embraces racist behavior.

And in any case, it seems pretty straightforward to forbid platforms from banning PEOPLE, it should only be possible to ban utterances. At the very least, Trump should have a legal right to be unbanned as long as he doesn’t post things that Twitter doesn’t allow.

What evidence do you base this on? Do you have evidence quantifying how Parler users are more hateful than Twitter or Facebook?

And so is Facebook. And Twitter. And YouTube.

And so what? If you don’t like that stuff, you are free to not use services that you don’t like.

Yes? I mean, look where you're posting. HN is very heavily moderated. Check out dang's post history for all the work he has to do. HN has very clear ideas on what speech is "acceptable" and what is not, and they are significantly more complicated than the "don't incite political violence" standard being enforced against Parler.

I mean, really. Parler failed to clear even the simplest, most straightforward, most consensus- and norm-driven ideals of how public discourse is supposed to work. And they didn't really get "moderated" any harder than any of us would have.

Yet we still have to rally behind them as the standard-bearer for megacorp censorship? Really? Can't we wait for at least a tiny bit of evidence that they're misusing their power first?