This is false equivalency. AWS didn't "arbitrarily" kick them out. If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts, a landlord can ABSOLUTELY evict you immediately in all sorts of states.
https://www.arizonalandlord.net/immediate-eviction-action-in...
https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/missouri-eviction-proce...
AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS.
I think AWS can very easily make the argument that continuing to host Parler when they're allowing calls for violence would do significant harm to their business.
Furthermore it is simply not true that Parler refused to work with Amazon. Parler's policy forbids hate speech and incitement.
What actually happened was, when the mob decided that Parler must go, Amazon gave them little no notice or recourse before shutting them down.
Defenders of Parler keep repeating various versions of this, but it doesn't reflect reality. So either you're being lied to by their founder and taking him at his word and just repeating it without verifying, or you're intentionally misrepresenting what was actually on the site.
Amazon cited 98 examples of hate speech/calls for violence with included images that they had reported over weeks, long before "the mob" you speak of witnessed an attack on the Capitol and decided enough is enough. Odd choice of words too, "the mob" you speak of are freedom loving Americans who support the peaceful transition of power, even when it doesn't go their way.
> Over the past several weeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence. Here are a few examples below from the ones we’ve sent previously: [See images above.]
>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.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
It's evidence that moderation is a hard problem, not that no effort to moderate is made.
Sure, corporations will turn a blind eye to a lot for a little more profit, but this does not extend to supporting a platform full of people trying to violently overthrow the government.
Just think about this for a second: every major provider shut down seditious media shortly after what happened on 1/6. When's the last time Apple, Google, Amazon, Shopify, etc., agreed on anything in the same day?
They are not going to risk the lawsuits and possible market share loss to competitors unless they have an iron clad insurance policy. In my opinion, the only thing that offers that kind of policy is a very clear signal from law enforcement.
Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal. Whatever it was, it was scary enough to move every single cloud provider in the same direction within hours of each other. Despite this kind of coordination being more evidence for monopolistic behavior, they all came to the same conclusion: create space between us and anything related to the 1/6 sedition. Now.
https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec...
> Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal.
Do you have any evidence for this at all?
There are several other alternative explanations for them doing this. There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
Also, you can tell that everything is broken when doing something anti-competitive makes it more likely for you to win an antitrust case against you.
> There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.
> And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
Why is the businesses and politicians aligning a significant thing for you? It should be terrifying.
Also no outside pressure? A small group of employees pushed this for the entire lot. That’s outside pressure.
It says this:
> Judging from the posts announcing that they've been booted, at least some of the banned Parler users seem to have signed up for the service precisely to test the limits of the app's so-called "freedom of speech" policy.
I read this to mean that people showed up to purposely troll hard enough to get banned so they could claim they got banned, and then they were. Your claim was that they don't "regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content."
> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior.
Even if there was outside pressure, you're still speculating that it was from law enforcement rather than the political branches.
How are you even sure this is the first time this has happened? Certainly it's the most high profile, but tech companies have been quietly disappearing "undesirables" for years.
> There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
Not if they get ground into dust by competitors just as they're hitting the exponential growth stage.
The better comparison would be instances of hate speech or calls to violence that were directly reported to Twitter by its hosting provider for the express purpose of requesting that they be taken down. I'd certainly give you even odds that the number of such reports that Twitter both received and ignored during that same time frame was fewer than 98, despite the fact that Twitter is orders of magnitude larger.
No doubt there are instances of similar behavior that go under the radar on Twitter and every other comparable site, but once your hosting provider has contacted you about a specific instance that's probably a sign you should do something about it.
From an Ars Technica article[0]:
"But far from getting cut off suddenly, Parler had months of warning, Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all."
And
"Representatives from AWS spoke with Parler executive leadership on both January 8 and 9 about the platform's "content moderation policies, processes, and tools," Amazon said. In response, Parler allegedly offered steps that would rely on "volunteer" moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze allegedly told AWS that "Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service."
So not so much.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
Amazon told Parler they had to remove some very specific content or they would be sever their service, and Parler refused.
Amazon's letter terminating Parler calls out refusal to moderate content, not their inability to moderate content.
> But AWS does not host Twitter’s feed, so of course it could not have suspended access to Twitter’s content
Quote from a legal document AWS filed.
I think at most this would allow you to accuse AWS of hypocrisy, but the point is moot since Twitter, while an AWS customer, does not host content on AWS as far as I'm aware.
Really though, it has no bearing. You can argue that AWS is inconsistent in its enforcement but it does not change whether they have the right to that enforcement.
How do we (the people) ensure good behavior?
It is very likely that those incentive structures are exactly what led to this decision, and are working more or less as intended.
This statement omits the fact that Parler's userbase originated from Twitter's crackdown on hate speech and calls for violence that got a fair share of them banned from the platform.
Is Twitter hosted on AWS? I thought they had their own servers, but I could be wrong
That’s a made up point, though. The AWS contract makes no mention of “reasonable effort” or anything like that.
Yes, it is worthwhile to compare moderation on Parler to that of FB etc, but it has no bearing on whether Amazon had the right to terminate Parler’s contract, which they absolutely did. Within the context of that discussion the comparison to FB and Twitter is just whataboutism. They aren’t Parler and they aren’t hosted by AWS.
As far as I can tell there's zero evidence that moderation didn't happen with anything that was reported.
They were clearly lying when they claimed everything had been deleted... Their content moderation strategy is based entirely on volunteer moderators. You can keep claiming that AWS is just trying to deplatform conservatives but that's just not what happened.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
Inciting mass assassinations, or even directly plan and coordinate them, is not politics.
That's obviously not the case. It's very clearly Parler's problem. I don't see why AWS should accommodate a customer just because the customer's problems are "hard".
The rest of your post is basically irrelevant imo, I'm not going to respond to rhetoric about party.
Why is a backlog of 26,000 tasks acceptable? Why can't they auto-flag things upon report and hide them pending review? This is not a hard technical problem. This is a people and motivation problem.
Try getting 26,000 flagged operations behind when the flag is OFAC or underage porn and see who shuts down your business.
Do you have a citation for that? Be interesting to see how many it actually is.
I suspect people going after Parler have other motivations due to political reasons.
How did they manage to write that with a straight face?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-slams-cap...
Perhaps tech companies simply see the writing on the wall
Then the violence erupted in the Capitol, and Amazon's hand was forced. They had been violating Amazon's terms of service, and they did not do enough to resolve the issue, in a timely enough manner. Therefore they no longer got to use the service.
C'mon! IT playing dumb is so stupid, they knew it, they knew what company they were going to host. Parler's whole point was to host conservative voices, yet the attitude is to pretend it's a surprise, shrug and then have a stupid reason like they didn't act fast enough. It's not a genuine response, it's an obvious attack and an insult to anyone paying attention.
AWS is self serve. Anyone can sign up. So, yes, it is unexpected unless you imagine Bezos is negotiating with Parler's CEO.
You seem to imply they only got 24 hours to resolve the issues on their service. That's not accurate.
It is a cheap excuse to take blame from the actual perpetrators to inconvenient platforms.
I like unfiltered platforms very much and Parler wasn't that attractive, so I appreciate them being the fall guy. But I also have problems with blatant different weights that are used to measure transgressions.
I'm inclined to think the Parler mgt preferred this outcome, where they get to play victim, to actually moderating content and making their users angry.
You imply that all "conservative voices" are raging fuckwits, and while I long resisted that big brush view its becoming harder and harder to do. Especially when self-confessed "conservatives" just assert that yea, that's just the way we talk and act, fuck off if you don't like it. And now the conservative snowflakes scream blue murder when the same rules are applied to them.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
Valley firms built their financial success on being content neutral and even turning a blind eye to blatantly illegal content until they found ways to automate enforcement (or not), but are now forbidding competitors from being the same.
Now if you compare apples with apples, can you recall people using Google to research how to do bad things? Sure. Plenty of people who went to prison after police found they'd been searching for stuff like "how to hide a body" or bomb making instructions.
If they really wanted them to implement some content moderation, it would have been more time, not to mention a clear specification for the feature changes they want, to prevent the solution from getting rejected again.
Ironically, this also feels like a false equivalency to me. I don't believe Parler was putting Amazon/AWS at risk in terms of legal liability (I'm pretty sure in the US you can only sue a hosting provider for material they host if it is copyrighted material and they don't take it down when they receive notices. A Google search didn't turn up anything else.) They also weren't at risk of bringing AWS down.
What really happened, and should be plain to anybody is that something really awful happened last week that shook the country to its core. Parler played a role in that happening, and tech companies didn't want anything to do with them because of that. Both for reputation reasons and I'm sure personal feelings of large swathes of their employees (including leadership.)
I don't actually think they were wrong for what they did. I think private companies should have the right to make such a decision. The problem for me is that these companies were in a position to wipe something out like this in the first place.
This isn't what the web was supposed to be. First it was the switch by most people to using a phone that is locked down as their primary computing device.
Now even websites are subject to unregulated private company control. After all - even if you set up your server somewhere, what's to stop CloudFlare or Google or anybody else who run these huge DNS services from simply blocking the domain? (assuming you can even keep one registered) Etc...
I often hear the argument "Private company, they can do what they want" but at what point does a private company become so powerful that we really do need the government to step in? I've also heard people say that this isn't a slippery slope because it's all terrorist/white supremacist websites so far, but I think to this article I read a while ago about how Apple had decided to ban apps that had anything to do with vaping. This was when some people were dying due to bad black market cartridges.
Vaping isn't illegal. It isn't hateful. It also isn't inherently harmful. People used those apps for legitimate reasons. Some of them used iPhone sensors through APIs that aren't available for websites/web apps. And Apple just decided "Nope, you don't get to exist anymore".
I was not a Parler user and I do not support the attack on the Capitol. I also don't vape. But both of these things do bother me. And they should bother everybody.
I notice it in other areas too like verbiage such as "business logic" or "product owners"
But then they decided to be hosted by AWS willingly, and it's not like they haven't been warned about issues with it. "They made their bed…"
This also reminds me of the situation with youtube-dl's very valuable information stored in GitHub's issues.
Other systems like MinIO and Ceph have S3 interfaces for object storage, so the code could be kept. Operationally you'd need to retrieve it from Amazon S3 and re-store it. RDS is an export, transfer, and import away from being loaded into a normal database server, but that can take quite a bit of time.
Getting geo-sensitive DNS and implicit testing of backends out of Route 53 isn't so simple. Getting stuff out of Lambda and onto a commodity platform isn't quick and easy. If you have data in Glacier there's a substantial lead time to recover your first byte.
FWIW the Parler CEO claimed 12 hours, an obvious falsehood, and that’s now being used against him in his lawsuit against AWS.
Risk management is part of the job. Businesses that don't do it properly will often fail. Sometimes this is an unfortunate thing, sometimes it's a happy accident.
You seriously don't think with the amount of publicity Parler was getting, that AWS' reputation was going to be hurt? When my Dad is talking about Parler and AWS it has become a PR nightmare...
>I often hear the argument "Private company, they can do what they want" but at what point does a private company become so powerful that we really do need the government to step in?
If the private company is "so powerful the government needs to step in" then it should be through breaking up a monopoly. But it turns out AWS doesn't have anything approaching a monopoly in hosting, so it would be absurd for the government to step in. There are literally THOUSANDS of other hosting providers out there.
What you're seeing is that nobody agrees with the hate speech Parler is selling, and nobody wants to host it. That is the free market at work.
>Vaping isn't illegal. It isn't hateful. It also isn't inherently harmful. People used those apps for legitimate reasons. Some of them used iPhone sensors through APIs that aren't available for websites/web apps. And Apple just decided "Nope, you don't get to exist anymore".
So don't buy an iPhone? Buy any number of android phones that don't require Apple or Google's app store. If you want the government to dictate who companies do business with, you aren't for capitalism or free market, that's all there is to it. Parler isn't a protected class, vaping isn't a protected class, nobody should be forced to do business with them if they don't want to.
I definitely agree that the government does need to break up some large tech companies. But I don't agree that that should be the only form of regulation. I think the government should regulate technology companies in several ways. Here are some no brainers:
ISPs - Net neutrality required. No data caps allowed. Device manufacturers - Right to repair. Can't lock down the device the way that gaming consoles and mobile phones (and TVs, etc...) often do. Cloud providers - Greater privacy protections like they have in Europe.
>There are literally THOUSANDS of other hosting providers out there.
You're glossing over the other infrastructure examples I named. We're talking about a cumulative effect here. It makes me uncomfortable that key parts of the internet's infrastructure are controlled by private companies with little to no regulation on what they can do. And I feel like it's getting worse every year.
>So don't buy an iPhone? Buy any number of android phones
Not everybody gets to choose what phone they have. Maybe they got their phone handed down to them or donated to them and can't afford to buy a new one. For a lot of people, their phone might be their only computer. Also, vaping was just one example. Apple routinely blocks apps and only backpedals if the app creator has enough clout. They tried to do it with the open source blogging platform WordPress a few months ago.
If there were regulation in place that Apple could maintain their own app store, but couldn't block or make it difficult for regular users to install other apps then nobody to choose. Same thing with like a gaming console - buy a gaming console and you could install Linux and use it as a general purpose machine without having to break some encryption scheme.
It's clear that maintaining an operating system/platform is an expensive endeavor - and maybe it just isn't feasible for more than those two operating systems to exist. That's where regulation comes in. There need to be ground rules especially when the barrier to competition is so high.
>Parler isn't a protected class, vaping isn't a protected class, nobody should be forced to do business with them if they don't want to.
So companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they're not discriminatory/racist about it?
Gee...I wonder why we don't have that.
> So companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they're not discriminatory/racist about it?
Yes, that's actually how the law works. This isn't exactly news to anyone.
I am really trying to understand your perspective on this, because it's so obviously not true. Companies are regulated by the government and limited with what they can do in a lot of different ways.
Net neutrality is a form of regulation that I am advocating for - and it sounds like you're in support of it too which would seem to contradict this.
I was looking at some of your other comments on this subject and saw you posted this one day ago:
>Maybe Cloudflare et al should also be required by law to serve everyone regardless of content.
You're advocating for regulation of tech companies here too.
I was pointing out the irony that net neutrality was repealed under this same administration.
I am yet to be convinced that "neutrality" or a requirement to provide service regardless of content should be enforced by any government regulation above the network layer.
Companies IRL have the right to discriminate against their customers based on their speech. If I walk into your bar and start insulting other patrons it's totally legal for you to kick me out. And in fact if you fail to do that, your other patrons might leave and never come back.
I don't see why that shouldn't extend online. Except at the network layer. Because if you don't have that, you can't have any speech online. Which is also unjust.
I think this is self-consistent. Feel free to tell me if there are any holes in it.
>I am yet to be convinced that "neutrality" or a requirement to provide service regardless of content should be enforced by any government regulation above the network layer.
I agree with you. I wouldn't be in favor of a government regulation at the level of social media that would prevent specific services like Facebook or Twitter from banning things. But the bigger problem for me is that we've all just decided that it's okay for really fundamental things about the web to be controlled by private companies.
The web was designed to be an open system and it's slowly being more closed in. There's still areas of openness, but they get smaller every year. And every time there's a new layer of restriction added there's always someone to point out that you still can do x y and z, it's just 10-20% harder than it used to be.
When apps for phones came out it was "Well, you can always just make a web app. They have no control over that." but consumers are less likely to use a web app and you don't have the same access to the device.
Now it's "Just move to a different hosting company!" which is disingenuous for several reasons. First, any company they move to is going to get pressured to drop them in the same way. Secondly, even if they did find a new hosting company that was okay with them, the pressure would just get applied to a different point (like Cloudflare.) You can roll your own hosting system but it's prohibitively expensive for most people especially if the site has a lot of traffic, DDoS and regular hacking attempts. The fact that web hosting beyond the basics is complex and hard is the reason that cloud services exist and are so popular these days to begin with.
So yeah, I think we're basically on the same page. I don't see this getting better. But I still think it's worth pointing out.
I agree with the tone of your post, but it's not the web that's open (every website is created/owned/controlled by someone), it's the Internet as a whole that needs to be open.
>When apps for phones came out it was "Well, you can always just make a web app. They have no control over that." but consumers are less likely to use a web app and you don't have the same access to the device.
I understand your frustration, but while we have freedom of speech and freedom of association, etc.
And while you certainly have a right to start your own business, you don't have the right to force others to make it easy for you.
Again, I understand your frustration, but what you're arguing for just doesn't make sense.
Why should other companies be forced to change their business practices to make your life/business easier?
That's a rhetorical question of course, but you don't have to treat it as one if you don't want to.
If even Epic Games / Fortnite had to cave in…
So that's fine. The rules should be approximately the same as the rental protection laws in the state hosting the data center. If you're running a service that is objectionable, but no cops or feds are knocking on the landlord's door, then there should be notice given that your provider wants to boot you. Again, if the owner has a fed asking him questions about you and your service, that owner should be free to act much faster. No one questions that.
I would assume there is not a fed at your landlord's door because you skinny dip in your pool. There is probably something illegal they suspect of happening at that point.
In this particular instance though, with the Capitol falling, it doesn't help. Because I have to imagine that when the Capitol fell, there were a lot of feds knocking on Amazon's door. But, yes, as long as you're not doing anything that feds are at the door flashing badges about, you should be golden. If you are doing something feds are asking your landlord about, worrying about your landlord is a poor use of your time. You have bigger problems. (In fact, it's probable that your landlord also has bigger problems at that point. Feds generally don't make courtesy calls.)
I also hate this conflation of conservative views and people calling for murder. I have a lot of very conservative family who liked Parler but didn’t like being lumped in with all the Qanon galaxy-brains.
Why have the standards suddenly changed?
And landlords cannot evict you for being charged with a crime and cannot evict you generally if you are convicted of a crime (some exceptions no doubt).
My landlord has a ‘no parties’ clause in my lease because my apartment is in a factory and someone could be easily hurt if one of the machines turned on. I agreed to this contract. If I break it my landlord is within their right to terminate my lease.
The correct analogy is that a landlord cannot throw you out on a whim because they don't like your friends or your friends get in trouble. And that is true.
It isn't Parler that committed (or arguably, even facilitated, see Section 230) illegal acts, it's (likely, allegedly, some of) Parler's own 'tenants'.
But most importantly, as made explicit in your links, it looks like the landlord can NOT evict the tenant himself, and still has to go both through the justice and the police system ?
Also it seems like that when "illegal activity" is mentioned, it has to be declared illegal by some court, or at least have been processed by the law enforcement ?
Also I note that this only holds in some of the states. (So arguably the laws that allow that might be 'bad'.)
Finally, while it's not as bad for AWS, for App / Play Store it's like only having two landlords in the whole Western World, and get evicted from both (one of which still allows you to set up your tent in his garbage dump).
> AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS.
This is not what Greenwald claims. Do you have any opposing evidence ?
ArsTechnica[0] has some detail from Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit and quotes from Amazon that contradict this. I suppose YMMV.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
Greenwald specifically claims that this is a lie.
Free speech is prevented by the use of force. We held an election. The results where not what some people liked. They tried to cancel the people's voice. That is the real speech suppression here.
The principle of free speech is the idea that open discussion and debate is sufficient to resolve conflicts of ideas. Using force to end discussion is not free expression.
Of course there are limitations when fraud, slander, threats, and the like. But those should be considered in trials by peers or judges as decided in a fair court with due process. Again, words, ideas, and fair institutions are the rule, not decisions by the involved parties who happen to have enough power to get their way.
At least that's the principle.
Should the broadcaster cut him off? I say YES!
In those cases, you make the best argument possible to refute that drinking bleach us harmful... which honestly isn't that hard to make. The hard part is building up a reputation as being someone respectable and respectful enough to deserve attention. I think that silencing of sincerely held beliefs undermines efforts to actually persuade, inform, and make progress (and peace!).
Absolutely. However, not all speech is protected speech. At least not in the US.
Speech can also be part of a conspiracy. And conspiracy to commit criminal acts is a felony.
Which is, as I understand it, what the issue is in this case. Apparently (if you take Amazon's word for it, and once the dump from Parler is available, we can see for ourselves if that's true), folks on Parler were planning acts of violence and insurrection on Parler.
Again, that's my understanding. And if that is the case, it's not just folks exercising free speech. It's folks planning violence and insurrection against the US government. Those are absolutely crimes and not protected speech in the US.
N.B.: IANAL
In my mind, one holds a different level of accountability when sharing private thoughts with friends as opposed to when wielding an insurrectionist bullhorn.
No doubt radical groups are sustained by access to private encrypted messaging, but they cannot grow into the sort of movement that fuelled the attempted coup that took place on 6January without wielding the reigns of mass propaganda.
I am all for freedom of speech, but liberty is not a death pact. We can’t sit idle while this group, that very nearly interrupted the peaceful transfer of power, openly recruits and plans their next attack.
The mass gathering was propagated via Twitter-style broadcasts sure, but not the actual violent plots. Those will effortlessly move onto Signal.
Furthermore, I was checking in on right wing sites like theDonald.win in the lead up to 6 jan. The loudest voices all argued that the Democratic Party had systemically rigged the election, constitutional remedies had failed them, so the only response available was to fertilise the tree of liberty.
I didn’t sneak into a private telegram group or discord server. This is what these people were saying openly on popular websites that anybody could wander into without so much as making an account.
The same was true of charlottesville, sure parts were undoubtedly organised secretly, but facists like Baked Alaska were live streaming the whole thing - complete with antisemitic commentary.
This nonsense has to end.
It’s distasteful but it’s legal and part of our political culture.
If you think we need to protect MAGA supporters as a class, I just flat out disagree that there's any cause for it. That group of folks are largely already brimming with privilege that protects them (see walking away from storming the Capitol after killing multiple people).
If you think that the government should force private entities to not enforce consequences to speech they disagree with, I believe the government would struggle to prove that that doesn't itself impact the free speech rights of the private entities and it face immediate law suits to overturn such a law. The 1st amendment protects us from the government, not us from each other.
A particular race is not a protected class. Race is a protected class.
Why do you assume that these people won't be (eventually) charged ?
> For those asking the basis for that last claim: I spent the weekend reporting on the removal of Parler from the internet, including reviewing lots of documents and interviewing people associated with the companies involved, including Parler.
> The article will be up shortly.
(The article is the one this discussion is attached to.)
https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...
The main exodus to Parler happened after Trump was banned from Twitter, i.e. after the events in question.
"The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
Wasn't the claim that the attack had been planned largely using Facebook and not Parler, rather than something that happened after?
Evidence says: "GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
Evidence proved Greenwald's statement wrong.
I'm still not seeing the inconsistency, unless you have some evidence that the people who uploaded the videos were the same people who were arrested.
https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...
Apple said they banned them because they weren’t moderating enough, “nothing to do with what happened in DC”-esque
Twitter and Parler are mostly public forums.
But Im sure that if Parler is proven innocent they’ll have recourse
but almost every large company blacklisted them in concert
And the protection for residential tenants isn't due to the difficulty of finding new accommodation, but the consequences of not finding new accommodation - homelessness. It's substantially harder for commercial tenants to find new space than for residential tenants, but they do not enjoy such protection as residential tenants, because the consequences - going out of business - are substantially less dire.
Given that anyone losing access to AWS faces consequences more along the lines of a commercial tenant being evicted, rather than a residential tenant being evicted, this analogy does not work.
Arguably web hosting is more important to Parler but that makes their lack of prior communication with their vendors like Amazon that much more inexplicable. There are (or were, last I checked) plenty of hosting providers that cater to controversial websites. They charge a premium for not doing this kind of thing. Seems like they tried to pinch pennies in the wrong place.
It happens to everyone in business at some point.
I can't say I agree or that I find this analogy valid. Tenant eviction protection is, in part, to protect human life acknowledging the necessity of shelter. The same just doesn't apply to cloud computing.
My lesson here is that the Internet is essential infrastructure, and once companies reach a certain size (Google, Facebook, AWS), they should be regulated similarly to public utilities.
An electric company shouldn't be able to cut off electricity to a crack house or brothel unless law enforcement first asks for it. Law enforcement should have due process appropriate to the situation; a terrorist attack should be cut off right now. A company making pirated copies of Windows should have their day in court. Your propaganda-believing gun-toting drunk crazy uncle should probably keep their electricity (which isn't to say he shouldn't be handled somehow, but perhaps committed to a medical facility).
I don't feel good or bad about them being taken off-line, since I don't actually know what they hosted. I do feel bad about that decision being made by corporations behind closed doors.
It's more than just an analogy when the parent comment claimed that if you support one, you should support the other. I'm not disagreeing that the scenarios aren't analogous. I'm disagreeing that the same logic that makes one of those things essential to a functioning society should be tried to be wedged in as an argument for the other.
No one is entitled to income from their source of choosing. Government provides welfare, not whoever you want to do business with.
Parler is not some rube. They are a company with access to legal counsel. They agreed to moderate their end users in accordance with Amazon’s content policy and chose not to. They made extremely stupid decisions they do not deserve to be coddled for.
The government, at some point, decided to regulate utilities. It certainly didn't create them or their monopolies. Most have a natural monopoly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly).
It was a good idea, at the time, and it's just helpful to update our list of what constitutes a utility.
Yeah! The employees of organized criminal gangs need to feed their families too!
They're honest, hardworking people. Why should they be penalized because the repressive system in which they live persecutes them for extortion, robbery, murder, sex trafficking and the like.
Arresting them and putting them in jail is just cruel and unfair!
Isn't this the point?
It isn't a responsibility of the electricity company or the landlord to investigate or apply punishments in criminal matters. Arresting them and putting them in jail is something the lawful authorities do, and there is a due process for it.
I don't think 'organized criminal gangs' is an apt description of Parler given that.
Even though it's only a few hours ago, I'm not really sure exactly what point I was trying to make.
Which is kind of sad. I think I need some sleep.
If I can remember what the hell I was blathering on about after I wake up, I'll post again.
Thanks for calling me out.
Even this might be a slippery slope – in the URSS at some point it was common to put political dissidents in mad houses.
But it's not a problem as long as there is due process… which wasn't the case for Parler !
Commercial leases usually have limited contractual clauses to allow eviction of paying tenants within the, usually 10 year, term.
Of course because AWS/GCS/MCS are sort of an oligopoly, they don't have long duration terms.
Regardless of what end of this debate you're on, I wouldn't be surprised if more customers didn't start asking for lease terms.
If I were really any right-leaning media organization I'd really hesitate going to a cloud provider without some sort of durable contract. Think about - is Fox News at risk if it's on AWS? What about The Wall Street Journal? Even Bloomberg has pretty right-leaning opinion pieces often... should they be worried about their content triggering a backlash since there's no contract?
...or maybe we'll just see a resurgence self-hosted platforms?
It's an analogy unto it's own, and it needs new guidelines. We're seeing them made as we progress.
Nope.
1. Kicking a company off of a cloud platform is not putting someone on the street without notice. Companies are not people, clouds are not beds.
2. It's the company's responsibility to manage risk, including the risk of getting kicked off of a platform. Most companies manage this risk by minimizing it - it's extremely easy, and well trodden territory. Things most companies will do is moderate content, it's pretty much dead simple. If your company won't do those things you'll have to mitigate risk in some other way.
3. You might argue "well companies aren't people, clouds aren't beds, but workers will lose their jobs". This is true, if the company has been poorly managed. But we already have nets for those situations. There's bankruptcy, unemployment, various tax benefits, notice to apply for a new job, etc.
I actually don't feel particularly compelled at all by your analogy.
Also, in some situations here the landlord may lose the grounds to proceed if they won't press the issue as soon as they become aware of it. This is exactly to avoid situations where the one side arbitrarily decides throw the book on whatever the other's activities they can pin down on them.
(Whether the comparison is adequate depends ofc if AWS has consistently made complaints to Parler about the objectionable content. Their message included a part where they pointed out they had requested moderation action earlier, so I suppose they have.)
I can see the issues relevant to cloud hosting are different enough so that analogies are not 1-1 anyway. In general, it is a good principle that content that encourages violence and other illegalities is removed from the public. It would be still also a good idea to have procedures where the hosted party could protest if they are engaging in illegal acts or other breach of contract claimed by other party and the enforcement is applied equally.
Landlord is entirely justified in immediately changing the locks and contacting law enforcement after.
We as a society have said that is not ok for phone companies to do. Why are we making exceptions for what is now services that are holding a large portion, if not the majority, of online sites and services at this time?
Also, what evidence has been presented of illegal activity on this app and proof they were not following Section 230 law and refusing to remove it? How were they handling things differently from Twitter (or any social media site for that matter), who also has these problems with their service, and why is Twitter still able to be up? No, I don't mean AWS claims they weren't doing it. I want to know actual evidence. If the post exists, their should be screenshots of them still up now, no?
At this point, cloud services have gotten so large that they probably need to be regulated at this point as a public utility is.
To say AWS is the same as a rental/tenant relationship is laughable. If it was, there would be millions of different cloud services one could go to and this would be a non-issue. But, it clearly isn't close to the same.
Also, if illegal activity is being done (and this stuff was handled like a public utility, as frankly that is the size of these cloud services at this point), then that needs to be handled in a court of law.
Maybe because they were shocked and horrified (as I and many other people were) at the assault on the US government?
Just a crazy thought.
Due process isn't some concept that is only applicable to government actions. IANAL, but I feel like contract law includes lots of elements of due process.
Buying a cheeseburger is also a type of contract. Can you imagine McDonald's having to reserve a court date to kick someone out of their restaurant for disturbing the other customers?
Tells us you don't understand the purpose of regulation.
The entire premise that regulation is bad is a disinformation campaign against rational thought. Do you understand how regulation comes into existence? Regulation is the result of someone, some corporation, some city, some legal entity abusing the public's trust to the degree a law is enacted to oversee future such situations because the general public has proved it cannot self regulate this aspect of the public's trust.
You're statement that "it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad" is sheer lunacy. Are you listening to yourself? If I listened to your logic, I'd expect airplanes to be falling from the sky, computers are not possible, and the moon landed must be fake - because they is no way, the misunderstandings, the calculation problem, the unintended consequences... humbug.
Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?
For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account.
In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days.
I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
Under Damaging a Computer, 1030(a)(5)
> The provision may also be used to prosecute the perpetrators of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which occur, for example, when an attacker overwhelms a server’s ability to process legitimate requests by overloading the server with a flood of illegitimate traffic.
The stuff parler allegedly turned a blind eye to goes way beyond objectionable viewpoints and well into violating contracts.
I don't think google should be able to simply lock people out of their accounts and data without any notice for them to take their data out. I was hit by this personally when google docs locked on of the documents I was working on for school at a time I critically needed it. Their given reason was simply "tos violations" despite nothing in the document being a violation and they unlocked the document 2 days later.
Very? Well, they are very different. And it's in those ways that they differ where the reasons for the tenant protections exist..
Like with rentals, they can deny me service at the start, but once they take me on to the platform, short of a gross abuse of the service, I should be entitled to a warning before the service is terminated.
Edit: utterly ridiculous. Imagine applying the same standards to other physical businesses. Image a bar not being able to evict an unruly patron without 90 days notice or a court order.
This is frankly completely unworkable. And I think once the EU gets off their high horse they’ll find they have to accept that too.
It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever.
Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am.
Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't
Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook.
Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line.
Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform.
You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have? Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!
They have just breached that contract and bowed to the mob. For those reasons they're now being sued.
I ask because contracts typically, despite their duration, contain a variety of exit clauses. In this case, Amazon could argue they were exercising a "compliance with laws" clause (if it was in the agreement) such as,
"<Licensee> will not use, or allow its products to be used, in violation of any laws or regulations."
It becomes a legal argument as to whether Parler's members that advocated violence against the government caused Parler to violate the clause, and whether that amounts to a material breach that triggers contract termination.
That is very different than a blanket statement that Amazon "breached that contract and bowed to the mob." In fact, Amazon can sue Parler for breaching the agreement and exposing Amazon to significant liability for (at the most extreme) aiding and abetting terrorism.
Note that I'm not arguing either way, simply stating what lawyers are likely discussing behind the scenes.
that is something that has to be proven in court, before playing any such cards
If that is the case and you defend it, then this is a very unique situation, where law is not enforced by state institution, but by Google, Apple and Amazon. The question is what law? As clearly it is not US law.
If there is breach to the law, then there should be article Nr of breached law, otherwise all of these arguments are nonsensical. Nowhere in the world - even in Saudi Arabia it is possible to be judged and sentenced by unwritten law - by nongovernmental entities. Otherwise it is unlawful lynching by mob and there are countries that allow those, but US kinda positioned themselves as a country that guarantees The Law. Now that guarantee does not work.
Nothing needs to be "proven in court, before playing any such cards." It needs to be asserted. Once asserted, there may be a cure period (the licensee might have 30 days to remedy the problem, otherwise the contract terminates).
The party may disagree, and could negotiate different remedies or timelines - again, no court is required here. However, if they can't come to terms, then they can pursue this in contract court.
Be aware that I'm not defending, or justifying, or taking a position on any of this. It's just how it is. If you don't like it, then work on reforming tort and contract law as opposed to stating on Hacker News that the basis of most worldwide commerce is "nonsensical."
None of this is criminal law. It's contract law and it will be dealt with per the laws, procedures, precedents, customs, and traditions of civil jurisprudence.
Meanwhile Facebook Messenger remains the #1 way Child porn is distributed online
Please, separate legal arguments from emotional arguments. I'm strictly speaking legally.
Regarding Facebook, the choice to enforce, or not to enforce, a contract term is exclusively the right of the parties to the contract. Amazon may have unfairly chosen to enforce contract terms against Parler and not enforce those same terms against Facebook (for example; though I don't believe Messenger is hosted on AWS).
That's completely irrelevant; so far as I know, no law says all parties to all contracts must be treated equitably.
You will have a compelling argument when and if law enforcement chooses to crack down on child porn on Parler but not on Messenger. In this case though, you're comparing apples to baseballs: their similarities are vastly outweighed by their differences.
I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations.
Even if the landlord insists on a contract abrogating this, it's unenforceable. Policy restricts this because 1) landlords generally have very high negotiation power, and 2) tenants rarely read the fine print. It seems to me that both conditions are approximately true for the major cloud providers.
If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. AWS/GCP/Gmail/iCloud could ban you as a customer, but only with 90 days notice. Otherwise, immediate eviction could only occur if it involved legally codified egregious behavior, and would require a court judgement.
I think this would eliminate nightmare scenarios where somebody suddenly finds themselves locked out of their Google Drive and Gmail for some algorithmic mishap. But it would put very little operating burden on the cloud providers.