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Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tw04 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @06:51PM (#25755790)
>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.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mshanowitz on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:06PM (#25757078)
Your equivalency is false. Parler did not make any change of behavior. Amazon knew very well who they were and what they did when they were making 100s of k a month hosting them.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tw04 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:10PM (#25757541)
>Furthermore it is simply not true that Parler refused to work with Amazon. Parler's policy forbids hate speech and incitement.

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...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:24PM (#25757635)
> Amazon cited 98 examples of hate speech/calls for violence with included images that they had reported over weeks

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nicoffeine on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:16PM (#25758035)
Twitter and Facebook regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content. Parler did not.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:26PM (#25758117)
> Twitter and Facebook regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content. Parler did not.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nicoffeine on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:44PM (#25758256)
Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content. There are plenty of articles saying they didn't censor violent right-wing content, but you'll have to read them to figure that out.

> 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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tekknik on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:44AM (#25761849)
> 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.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:01AM (#25758390)
> Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by MrMan on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:16AM (#25761563)
I have speculated here that these moves were prompted by disclosures from law enforcement
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by spaginal on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:31PM (#25758165)
They aren’t risking market share loss to competitors because they are ganging up together to kill their competitors.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chalst on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:04AM (#25758755)
Parler is not a competitor to any of Amazon, Apple or Google, the three companies involved.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tekknik on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:40AM (#25761825)
Yet they host the competitors and give them a distinct advantage. How am I supposed to get the Parler app now that it’s banned?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chalst on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:12PM (#25766647)
Is this a serious question? The APK is widely available, but it's pointless given the server is down.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tekknik on Thursday January 14, 2021 @08:54AM (#25776244)
Are Android phones the only ones that exist? Is it even the most popular phone in the US? Is this a serious statement?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chalst on Thursday January 14, 2021 @11:02AM (#25777964)
If you want to whine about Apple's App Store policies, join the queue. The surprise, really, is that they took that long.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tekknik on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @11:55PM (#25842706)
I will. In the past I have advocated for them maintaining their own interests. Now I will join the group asking for them to open their phones up. By gov force if necessary because they attempted to control speech.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tfehring on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:45PM (#25757765)
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls of violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by toolz on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:58PM (#25757890)
The lawsuit parler filed states they deleted every piece of content (and more) that AWS brought to their attention. Moderation is hard.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nobody9999 on Thursday January 14, 2021 @08:52AM (#25776217)
>The lawsuit parler filed states they deleted every piece of content (and more) that AWS brought to their attention. Moderation is hard.

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...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:36PM (#25758190)
Try banning users. Try having moderators that aren't volunteers.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by toolz on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:26AM (#25761685)
I mean there's no way parler (up until recent growth explosion) was pulling in more than 1MM - with 30 employees I doubt they could afford to pay moderators. It's not fair to judge a small company by the same standards as established companies w.r.t. hard problems like moderation, but here many people are comparing them more harshly than they compare established businesses like twitter and facebook which routinely are used to incite riots and violence.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by fooey on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:58PM (#25758363)
Amazon doesn't host Facebook or Twitter, but they did host Parler.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by impulser_ on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @07:15AM (#25761078)
Twitter and Facebook both use AWS for hosting parts of their website. Both of them are top 10 clients of AWS, with Facebook being on the AWS's biggest clients.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by JamesBarney on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:39AM (#25764395)
AWS doesn't host the feed.

> 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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by staticassertion on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:37AM (#25759295)
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by engineer_22 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:37PM (#25769554)
I believe the argument is: AWS has the right (under current law), but that exercising this right is not always in the public's best interest.

How do we (the people) ensure good behavior?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by staticassertion on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:42PM (#25771172)
We pretty rarely find good ways to ensure good behavior, at best finding makeshift incentive structures to encourage it.

It is very likely that those incentive structures are exactly what led to this decision, and are working more or less as intended.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by rualca on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @05:59PM (#25769170)
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by cestith on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:18AM (#25764051)
It is not meaningless at all. Twitter has no bearing on agreements between AWS and Parler. Just because Parler considers them a competitor doesn't mean they have anything to do with a two-party contract when they aren't a party to it.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by saghm on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:46PM (#25758270)
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter

Is Twitter hosted on AWS? I thought they had their own servers, but I could be wrong

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:57PM (#25758352)
That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable. If Twitter and Facebook can't do it then it's strong evidence that it's not.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by afavour on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:44AM (#25758659)
> That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by cestith on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:22AM (#25764108)
Twitter is not party to two-party contracts between some other two parties. This point is easy to understand and difficult to dispute.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by toolz on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:55PM (#25757861)
in parlers lawsuit they state that they deleted every post AWS brought to their attention on top of other posts they moderate. If you read their policy pre-DC riots you'll see they very clearly have content moderation strategy explicitly talked about in both the ToS and the linked community guidelines. It was simply not their marketing talking about it a lot for obvious reasons.

As far as I can tell there's zero evidence that moderation didn't happen with anything that was reported.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tw04 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:22PM (#25758089)
>During one of the calls, Parler’s CEO reported that Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service.

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...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by toolz on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:25PM (#25758108)
I'm not sure how you're reading that - it's clearly showing they were trying to delete everything but the backlog was outpacing their ability to moderate. As I said, moderation is hard.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by heyoni on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:33PM (#25758172)
And why would you take Parler’s word for it? When your entire marketing is based on a lack of moderation and you have this insane backlog of offending content, but you look to their TOS as a source of truth and intent, you’re being disingenuous and willfully ignorant.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by toolz on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @07:59AM (#25761414)
why would you take anyones word for anything? I'm sympathetic to the underdog that's being targeted so I have my bias, but I have a hard time watching any platform (I've never used parler) get targeted because of politics. I have a hard time believing that anyone truly believes parler was the primary reason DC riots happened just as I have a hard time understanding that people actually think this targeted de platforming will somehow create fewer extremists. In my mind it's rather obvious political targeting creates extremism and there are a number of platforms those extremists can use to communicate.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by rualca on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:05PM (#25769240)
> (...) but I have a hard time watching any platform (...) get targeted because of politics.

Inciting mass assassinations, or even directly plan and coordinate them, is not politics.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by staticassertion on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:38AM (#25759300)
Lots of things are hard. It's not AWS's problem that your job is hard. If you can't do the hard work to run your business, your business doesn't get to run.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by thu2111 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:48AM (#25759697)
If AWS cancel any customer that fails to succeed to an entirely arbitrary standard at problems that are "hard" then yeah, it kinda is AWS' problem. Or more specifically it's now Silicon Valley's problem because when these firms make identical decisions within 24 hours of each other nobody in politics is going to treat them all as unique and special snowflakes. The left have seen that they can apply pressure to get anything that isn't controlled by leftists erased from the internet, so they're going to amp up the volume 10,000% now. And the right have been complaining for years that tech firms have been captured by the censoring left - how will anyone ever convince them otherwise now? Claiming that Parler was full of Nazis? It's a tired strategy, it doesn't work anymore, the left describe anyone who isn't the left as Nazis and fascists. It won't convince anyone.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by staticassertion on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:01AM (#25760536)
> it kinda is AWS' problem

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by cestith on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:25AM (#25764167)
If you're 26,000 pieces of content behind, might 98 of those 26,000 be the ones you've been asked specifically to address by the other party in your contract?

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:38PM (#25758221)
An aside, why are Parler users such thugs?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:26AM (#25758551)
I see you've never used Twitter.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:32AM (#25758590)
I use it all the time. Lots of rude people but nothing like Parler.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by toolz on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @07:52AM (#25761367)
You think parler is a site of thugs because that's all you've seen. Just the same way you don't understand twitter to have tons of thugs because of what you've seen. More people have been killed and linked to #killallmen (which has trended nationally on twitter multiple times) than died at the DC riots. There's plenty of room for subjectivity, but I do think it's objective to say thugs exist on both platforms.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by zimpenfish on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:19PM (#25767436)
> More people have been killed and linked to #killallmen

Do you have a citation for that? Be interesting to see how many it actually is.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by raxxorrax on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:12AM (#25759487)
You can find egregious example of such utterance on any online platform, that includes Amazon reviews.

I suspect people going after Parler have other motivations due to political reasons.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ashtonkem on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:38PM (#25757722)
> Parler's policy forbids hate speech and incitement.

How did they manage to write that with a straight face?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by wrtingonWall on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:06PM (#25757513)
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nobody9999 on Thursday January 14, 2021 @08:45AM (#25776160)
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chris_wot on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:30PM (#25757235)
That's not correct. Amazon advised them that they were encouraging violence, and had already reached out to them about this issue. They had responded that they would use volunteers to moderate their content, but Amazon (IMO quite reasonably!) saw that they had not moved fast enough, and were skeptical that it would work anyway.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by proc0 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:42PM (#25757343)
So it was basically, "hey can you please change this... OOPS too slow LOL. Nope, not our fault, you didn't do shit, canceled!"

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by pertymcpert on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:01PM (#25757483)
Isn't it the exact opposite? They were given lots of time to fix this and didn't. Something very bad happened which was partly caused by their inaction.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by proc0 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:53AM (#25758712)
It seems the timing was more of a cover for what they already had planned, or at least not every chance was given. Small features in large apps take months, and big features easily take a year. It didn't seem in good faith IMHO, granted this isn't just AWS at the moment.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by pertymcpert on Friday January 15, 2021 @03:03AM (#25788197)
Ok, but that's not an excuse right? If your platform is too immature to be effectively stopping/mitigating child porn from being published, you don't get the chance to say "yeah but it'll take a while to write the code". They always had the option to shut down while they fix the problem.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:46PM (#25758273)
The profits from Parler are a rounding error on Amazon's balance sheet.

AWS is self serve. Anyone can sign up. So, yes, it is unexpected unless you imagine Bezos is negotiating with Parler's CEO.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chris_wot on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:48PM (#25757383)
Actually, it appears they had given them plenty of time to implement proper moderation practices to prevent incitement of violence. Their response was inadequate. They were removed from Amazon.

You seem to imply they only got 24 hours to resolve the issues on their service. That's not accurate.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by raxxorrax on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:19AM (#25759523)
Incitement of violence isn't measurable. The US had autonomous zones and communication was allegedly through Twitter.

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.

[dead]
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by pavlov on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:03PM (#25757942)
From Amazon’s POV, the same sequence of events may look like this: people were kicked off from Twitter; they sign up for Parler; the amount of insurrection planning on the platform skyrockets; FBI starts calling Amazon; leadership decides they’ll rather take a lawsuit than risk being involved.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chalst on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:07AM (#25759115)
If Parler was serious, the owners would have hand-moderated the specific complaints Amazon made. Their response is like a streaming service that responds to a DMCA takedown by saying they plan on making it possible to comply sooner or later rather than immediately yanking the content.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ageofwant on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:56AM (#25758720)
Parlor did not get thrown out of the bar because of their "conservative voices", they got thrown out because they threatened the other drinkers with knifes, shat on the floor and pissed on the tables while shouting 'Fuck Yea America !'

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by proc0 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:28PM (#25766063)
Well if they are not all like that... then why censor a whole network? I guess Parler must not be a private company... all other platforms censor their own way not according to American Law, yet other smaller platforms can't do it their way? Sure, they decided to use AWS, that was dumb in hindsight, but still the scale of it and timing is scary. In other words, you can't be a private business and use AWS, they will own you.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tw04 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:25PM (#25758114)
They had 7 weeks to clean up their act. I'm not sure that qualifies as "oops too slow".

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by thu2111 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:50AM (#25759708)
For contrast, YouTube was knowingly and illegally hosting pirated content for years before Google bought them and developed ContentID, and relied entirely on volunteer moderation (user flags) to detect it. Facebook has up until very recently relied entirely on user flags for moderation. Google web search is theoretically entirely unmoderated. And so on.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chris_wot on Thursday January 14, 2021 @10:19PM (#25786593)
I don't recall Google search organizing any marches on the Capitol.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by thu2111 on Saturday January 16, 2021 @07:09AM (#25801745)
You don't recall Parler doing that either, because they didn't.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by proc0 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:02AM (#25758749)
This does not read like they wanted to cooperate. 7 weeks is a nothing for a large feature. Apple gave them 24 hours which is a joke, if not an insult. Features are complex in large apps that are social networks (which in fact are dozens of apps under the hood, on the backend and frontend).

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by chalst on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:14AM (#25759155)
Apple didn't give a reasonable timeframe to respond, but that is typical for them. The 7 weeks Amazon gave absolutely is reasonable: if this was a priority for Parler they could have put some effective measure in place.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by dimmke on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:36PM (#25757285)
>If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ouid on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:55PM (#25757860)
Vaping is, I think, fairly harmful. But it is absolutely clear that the government should step in and say no to these companies who are in the business of deciding which other companies are allowed to exist.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by dimmke on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:01PM (#25757915)
This isn't just about "other companies" though - that's what is so crazy to me about this. We've reached a point where the idea of creating and providing software is almost exclusively thought of through the lens of capitalism. That's so dystopian.

I notice it in other areas too like verbiage such as "business logic" or "product owners"

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ashtonkem on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:39PM (#25757730)
AWS doesn’t have the power to wipe people out that don’t tie their stack to them. Parler could’ve avoided this, it’s not AWS fault that Parler could t move.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nomel on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:44PM (#25758253)
I’m curious how many AWS houses could move to private hosting in that short of a timeframe.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by BlueTemplar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:06AM (#25760578)
It looks like none could, because AWS requires some very AWS-specific code ?

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by cestith on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:37AM (#25764358)
How AWS-specific your code needs to be depends on which AWS services you're using and how you use them. An EC2 instance is just a Linux system, as is a Lightsail system.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ashtonkem on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:21AM (#25758856)
Depends how much prep they did beforehand. Lots of businesses have contingency plans for negative situations including needing to leave AWS, and they're far less likely to get booted. I’m not sure why they didn’t just start with Epik; they already host Gab and won’t give a crap about what Parler does.

FWIW the Parler CEO claimed 12 hours, an obvious falsehood, and that’s now being used against him in his lawsuit against AWS.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by staticassertion on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:31AM (#25758585)
Most probably couldn't. But most will likely never have to think of that. Parler's inherent value proposition increased this risk and they were foolish not to consider and plan for that.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by raxxorrax on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:22AM (#25759537)
Is there evidence that these people were incited on Parler instead of Twitter or Facebook?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by gscott on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:16PM (#25758037)
Parler set themselves up for this by not going with their own servers but wimping out and using a cloud provider. Get a high speed line and host it yourself straight up. Save money too.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:53PM (#25758327)
I'm guessing Rebekah Mercer didn't give them enough money to build their own datacenter.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by thu2111 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:51AM (#25759717)
Then the left would have gone after whichever hosting provider they did use. And it obviously doesn't help with smartphone apps getting banned.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tw04 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:49PM (#25757394)
>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.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by dimmke on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:57PM (#25757880)
>If the private company is "so powerful the government needs to step in" then it should be through breaking up a monopoly.

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?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by triceratops on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:28PM (#25758134)
> ISPs - Net neutrality required.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by dimmke on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:04AM (#25758412)
>Yes, that's actually how the law works.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by triceratops on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:18AM (#25758495)
Let me clarify. I support net neutrality. Including DDOS protection in that is to ensure that you can't be taken offline even if every hosting provider in the world hates your guts and you have to self-host (as might be the case for a lot of the people and organizations being banned these days). And I'm not an expert on DDOS mitigation, so it might be that you don't have to require even them to serve everyone.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by dimmke on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:20AM (#25758853)
First of all, this is a great reply and yes it does clarify your viewpoint. I really value that it's possible to have discussions like this on the internet.

>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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nobody9999 on Thursday January 14, 2021 @09:13AM (#25776436)
>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.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ashtonkem on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:40PM (#25757735)
As I keep saying: you probably have fewer options for takeout than you do for hosting.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by BlueTemplar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:09AM (#25760603)
I mostly agree for AWS, but are you seriously claiming that Apple/Google smartphone duopoly isn't an issue ?

If even Epic Games / Fortnite had to cave in…

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by bilbo0s on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:11PM (#25756017)
I don't think OP is asking for protections that renters would not have from landlords. For instance, we all know that illegal activity gets you kicked out immediately. You can't be running a brothel or crack house on the one hand, and demand 90 days notice on the other. At least not in my state you can't. No court judgement is required either, the cops show up and arrest you, you're gone. (In fact, in my state, if a landlord does not boot you in a swift enough fashion, the municipality can confiscate his/her property.)

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by cm2187 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:35PM (#25756248)
That’s for a criminal activity. Not for doing something your landlord merely finds distasteful.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by bilbo0s on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:44PM (#25756343)
Right.

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.)

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mrzimmerman on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:39PM (#25757317)
I feel like if you read some of the dump recently released then you might suggest it’s worse than merely “distasteful”. Seeing a person say they want to round up people registered to a particular political party so that they can skin and murder their families in front of them is obviously pretty awful!

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by Natsu on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:00AM (#25758373)
The dump is "hacked data" that if I remember from two weeks ago, is supposed to be grounds for booting it off of every platform, yet archive.org is hosting it now and everyone is promoting it instead of banning links to it.

Why have the standards suddenly changed?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by fragmede on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:49PM (#25756941)
Assaulting and killing a police officer is a crime in most, if not all jurisdictions, though I'm not sure if that lets your landlord evict you if it happened in the next town or county or state over.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by humanrebar on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:46PM (#25757371)
Sure, but Parler was more like someone subletting than someone actually committing a crime.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by refurb on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:54PM (#25758332)
Sure, a landlord can evict you for damaging the property the rented you. But was AWS “damaged”?

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).

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by causalmodels on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:59AM (#25759071)
Parler agreed to abide by Amazon’s moderation policy and it agreed that it was responsible for the content of its end users.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by account42 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:42AM (#25759658)
I don't know where you live, but here your landlord could absolutely not throw you out on the street the next day if you throw a party, no matter what the contract says.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nrb on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:42AM (#25758647)
Depending on where you live, they absolutely can terminate lease and evict for convictions on a huge laundry list of crimes: violent crimes, crimes that were conducted out of the domicile (especially drug convictions) anything that causes irreparable harm to people or property, etc. even in places with very strong tenant-friendly laws.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by thu2111 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:52AM (#25759720)
Parler hasn't been found guilty of anything in a court of law and given the free speech protections in the constitution, probably won't be, so this sub-thread is irrelevant.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by BlueTemplar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:45AM (#25760871)
Yours is false equivalency too.

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 ?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nobody9999 on Thursday January 14, 2021 @09:17AM (#25776475)
>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...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by himinlomax on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:44PM (#25756348)
> If you are destroying the property

Greenwald specifically claims that this is a lie.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by strangattractor on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:59PM (#25757025)
Legally they have the right to refuse service but ethically they owe the public. However "Free Speech" does not entitle people to Freely Lie. As we have seen the wrong words from the right person can cause the loss of life. The police officer did not deserve to die to further the political ambitions of a few morally/ethically bankrupt individuals. Parler can recreate itself on another platform if they wish. Gab is still up. It is just as disgusting. The Constitution only guarantees that Congress shall pass no laws prohibiting free speech. The last time I checked Amazon or Twitter cannot pass legislation.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by humanrebar on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:35PM (#25757277)
It was people with guns and lead pipes, not lies, that hurt and killed people.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by strangattractor on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:48AM (#25759011)
Thought experiment: Let us say that Anthony Fauci, well respected Dr., had a brain tumor and suddenly started telling people during a live TV interview to do something stupid and dangerous like drink bleach or expose their lungs to intense UV. Stuff so dangerous and stupid that only an idiot would think of it..

Should the broadcaster cut him off? I say YES!

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by humanrebar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:31AM (#25759590)
If he's sick, you do not broadcast his mental illness out of decency and respect. That's not the interesting thought experiment. The interesting one is broadcasting true believers in their right minds.

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!).

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by strangattractor on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @05:24PM (#25768796)
Lot of good that does innocent children fed bleach by their parents. If you don't think stuff like that happens you are naive. https://www.pharmacypracticenews.com/Covid-19/Article/03-20/...
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nobody9999 on Thursday January 14, 2021 @09:23AM (#25776562)
>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.

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

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by rorykoehler on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:00AM (#25758374)
Incitement is violence.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by humanrebar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:23AM (#25759545)
Incitement is akin to assault, yes. In that both invoke violence to overpower others. A threat of violence isn't an expression of an idea as such.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tptacek on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:00PM (#25757035)
Hasn't he been refuted repeatedly and decisively?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by guywhocodes on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:41PM (#25757331)
I would love to see a link because I have seen none
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tptacek on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:43PM (#25757756)
Check out the Gizmodo article; all of Parler has been dumped, because Parler had no authz on links, and huge amounts of GPS metadata got dumped. They have Parler users practically down to the room in the Capitol (modulo the floor). The jig is up for this Greenwald argument.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by haimez on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:48PM (#25756381)
Well, we should all definitely take his opinion on the matter, because he’s Gregg. Do YOU have an opinion?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by Reedx on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:10PM (#25755998)
The whole thing is such a terrible, short-sighted justification. The logic being used is setting a precedent to ban or backdoor any encrypted non-moderated form of communication. e.g., Signal and Telegram.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by bananabreakfast on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:18PM (#25756083)
That's an absurd jump to take. The subject is about a platform that is specifically moderated. This has nothing to do with non-moderated communication
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by bpodgursky on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:27PM (#25756191)
So... Parler is worse because there is _minimal_ moderation, but _no_ moderation is totally fine? That doesn't really seem consistent with any set of guiding principles.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by scoopertrooper on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:40PM (#25756298)
I don’t use either service, but the critical difference in my mind is that telegram is point-to-point or point-to-small-number-of-points medium whereas Parler aspired to be a means of mass-communication.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by bpodgursky on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:55PM (#25756464)
I think you have it exactly backwards. The actual violent intruders last week absolutely coordinated plans around bombs / guns / etc via DMs and small private groups.

The mass gathering was propagated via Twitter-style broadcasts sure, but not the actual violent plots. Those will effortlessly move onto Signal.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by catawbasam on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:39PM (#25756859)
There were open calls for revolution on Twitter. I reported them to Twitter, friends, and the capitol police the weekend before.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by scoopertrooper on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:09PM (#25756606)
Many were almost certainly radicalised through social and alt-right mass media though. You can’t blame the opening at the end of the pipeline for the water coming out.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by oceanplexian on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:41PM (#25756878)
Saying something like “Refresh the tree of liberty” or “hang the traitors” etc. still doesn’t rise to the level of illegal speech or an imminent call to violence which is the standard under the law. In fact, if you were to claim language like that crosses the line we would have to pull books off library shelves because the same language has been used repeatedly by politicians in American History. I’ve also seen similar language used in reference to Trunp like “He will get what’s coming to him if he comes to our city” etc.

It’s distasteful but it’s legal and part of our political culture.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by crandycodes on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:20PM (#25757167)
Distasteful speech is legal and so is kicking distasteful speech off your private platform. The primary limitation on what businesses can and can't do with who uses their platforms are that they need to avoid affecting protected classes.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by MockObject on Thursday January 14, 2021 @10:19AM (#25777313)
In the context of discrimination law, there is a commonly-held misunderstanding that "protected class" refers to a group of people, but actually, it refers to a classification.

A particular race is not a protected class. Race is a protected class.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by BlueTemplar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:16AM (#25760658)
> walking away from storming the Capitol after killing multiple people

Why do you assume that these people won't be (eventually) charged ?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by scoopertrooper on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:15PM (#25757125)
The tree of liberty remark was not a quotation. They were quite explicit in their violent intentions.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by rbanffy on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:18PM (#25756686)
Also keep in mind Parler and Gab were explicitly designed for the far right that claimed wasn't being treated fairly by Facebook and Twitter (which we now know is not factually correct).
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:59PM (#25758368)
The founder of Gab was kicked out of YC, right?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by rbanffy on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:32AM (#25762378)
I wouldn't be surprised if he got kicked out of a lot of places.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mensetmanusman on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:25PM (#25757199)
None of the radicals used parler.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by UncleMeat on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:41PM (#25757334)
Greenwald appears to have conjured this claim out of thin air.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:38PM (#25757725)
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348620818016841729

> 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.)

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by lagr01 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:26PM (#25758122)
This evidence puts into question the quality of such review

https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:40PM (#25758240)
What evidence? The article just says they downloaded all the posts. Am I missing the one where they reference the events at the capitol?

The main exodus to Parler happened after Trump was banned from Twitter, i.e. after the events in question.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by lagr01 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:39AM (#25758629)
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...

"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."

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:34PM (#25766896)
People uploaded GPS tagged video of the event to Parler? Of course they did. The videos were shared everywhere. They were on television and YouTube.

Wasn't the claim that the attack had been planned largely using Facebook and not Parler, rather than something that happened after?

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by lagr01 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:27PM (#25770561)
Greenwald literally says in the twit you referenced that zero active Parler users were arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by AnthonyMouse on Thursday January 14, 2021 @02:09AM (#25773137)
> Greenwald literally says in the twit you referenced that zero active Parler users were arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion.

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.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by nswest23 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:50AM (#25762629)
that's kind of his thing...it's why he's on substack where he doesn't have to worry about an editor.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mycall on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:36PM (#25757284)
How do you know this? Have you looked at the 78TB of data available already?
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by lagr01 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:22PM (#25758087)
Seems like someone did for Jan 6 (and archived it all, with users' location data included).

https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by lagr01 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:40AM (#25758639)
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca... "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."
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ketamine__ on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:57PM (#25758354)
I viewed Parler before it went under. Not true. Plenty of people making threats.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by scoopertrooper on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:46AM (#25759683)
How could anyone possibly know that? We haven't even identified them all.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mensetmanusman on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:11PM (#25769304)
Exactly :) Just pointing out the disagreement on who needs the burden of proof.

Apple said they banned them because they weren’t moderating enough, “nothing to do with what happened in DC”-esque

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by BigToach on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:44PM (#25756345)
Yes, private messaging and public broadcasting deserve different treatment.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ska on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:54PM (#25756452)
It only seems inconsistent because you are comparing apples and oranges, signal and telegram are in a different category entirely to parler and twitter.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mr_toad on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:45PM (#25757767)
Signal and Telegram are private communications. Signal doesn’t even know what the contents of these communications are.

Twitter and Parler are mostly public forums.

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ffggvv on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:31PM (#25756795)
either way we need a law so this can be adjudicated and argued, and a legal process. not just the whims of the biggest corporation and oligarch in the world.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by greedo on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:33PM (#25756810)
We do have laws. Parler has taken AWS to court. We'll see how good the contract AWS had with Parler is.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ffggvv on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:57PM (#25757007)
that’s not how eviction works though which was the context. just like you need to show proof before evicting someone and give them time
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mr_toad on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:42PM (#25757745)
AWS is a place of business not a home. You can be immediately kicked out of a place of business for bad behaviour.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by BlueTemplar on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:13AM (#25760636)
The OP makes the opposite case. We are discussing under that assumption.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by tartoran on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:04PM (#25757061)
shard972: innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply in emergencies, e.g. insurgencies, coups, terrorist attacks, ...

But Im sure that if Parler is proven innocent they’ll have recourse

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by mycall on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:34PM (#25757270)
Parler should have deployed a multi-cloud strategy, even using OpenStack perhaps. They should have better prepared.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by kelnos on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:57PM (#25757453)
That's the thing that's pretty dumb here. Regardless of what anyone thinks about what happened, the Parler owners should have expected something like this to happen and planned for it.
Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by ffggvv on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @11:27PM (#25758130)
given that google also banned them from the app store, i’m guessing they would be banned from the cloud. not sure about azure though...

but almost every large company blacklisted them in concert

Re:How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler by kelnos on Thursday January 21, 2021 @04:01AM (#25856932)
Sure, but they don't need a "cloud". Just a hosting provider that would sell them enough dedicated servers to run the service. Like how everyone hosted a website before 10 years ago or so.