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.