I understand this on a visceral level, but I wish more people would look beyond that to the implications for communication on the web. This action by Amazon happens to correspond with what I think is right and just on first iteration, but what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
Honestly, none. It's their business and they can handle it however they want.
What you can do (and this is exactly what Kolmisoppi was suggesting) is build your platform to work without relying on other people's business.
I'm happy that companies like Amazon don't want to get associated with people who organized a failed coup. That should be the bare minimum. But there is no law which forces you to be hosted on Amazon if you want to be on the Internet. You can self-host. You can buy/rent servers in another country, where what you are doing doesn't have direct consequences which might lead people to want to get away from you. Use the blockchain, use torrent, develop your own P2P protocol. Those people just got locked out from the easy way, something they should have expected to happen (and plan for) since day one.
You can't although you can, of course, mitigate.
But are you OK with just a PWA on mobile w/o the Apple or Google stores?
And your platform is ultimately dependent on a network connection, probably CDN, domain registrar, DNS, etc. Those are a pretty high bar to get kicked off but you're not immune.
(And, yes, there are things like Tor and jumping around providers if you have a fairly lightweight web site--like most torrents--but that doesn't help you if yo have a site with many TB of data catering to unsophisticated users.)
POTUS has the biggest bully pulpit in the world. whitehouse.gov, daily press briefing, C-SPAN, etc.
No third party should serve as alternate bully pulpit, allowing a democratically elected leader to speak directly to their audience, bypassing the fourth estate.
I'm not saying Twitter was right to shut down POTUS. I'm saying never should have hosted POTUS in the first place. Further, no leader should be allowed to speak as a private individual.
If Twitter wants to feature POTUS, then let Twitter attend the daily presser along with all the other reporters and journalists.
Everyone is responsible for allowing this undemocratic violation of norms. Social medias are just the one that profited most.
This makes people talk about how they think it should work, not just how it works right now, which I think is exactly what is needed.
Personally I found Amazons response to Parler convincing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/gov.u...
The question is, why should a company in Amazons situation be unable to turn off that service? As in, your question assumes that Amazon turned off Parler out of nowhere for no reason other then "we dont like them". It assumes they did not had documented reasons, documented attempts to convince Parler to comply to TOS etc.
Otherwise said, contract.
The principle of Amazon not wanting to piss off all of their customers and several government organisations. If you're this tentative about something you explicitly agree is just, then clearly you (and millions of others) are going to react pretty harshly to Amazon unilaterally deciding, e.g., that all mentions of Belgium should get scrubbed from the platform.
I mean, it is the rudest word in the universe.
> I understand this on a visceral level, but I wish more people would look beyond that to the implications for communication on the web. This action by Amazon happens to correspond with what I think is right and just on first iteration, but what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
It's kind of predictable but still disappointing that this was the part of my comment people chose to discuss with a 43-comment thread. It was the least novel and interesting idea in it.
But to your point, there's a lot more "looking beyond" than just that. There also needs to be a lot more looking beyond rather limited fundamentalist views of free speech, which tend to abrogate other fundamental rights and be so short-sighted that they actually bring discredit to the values they try to protect.
Like, amazon isn’t actually the basic infrastructure of the internet. You can build web sites and apps without involving them. So why would a law force them to do business with you?
The political alignment of many Parler users isn't a secret and if they decide to measure skulls again, I might be in trouble. Still, I don't see them as a relevant threat at all. It is even more ridiculous as the terrorism scare.
However, the actions of SV social media sites and hosts like Amazon censoring unpopular opinions and content outweigh that danger from neo-nazis by magnitudes. These groups have absolutely no political power in the 21st century. They have more influence than a decade ago, but that is mainly due to their ability to reinforce their prosecution narrative and martyrdom.
On the internet there are calls to violence in any political group, even vegans and cat lovers. We ignore that because they aren't relevant. But if you seriously crack down on cat lovers, you might need to expect real violence.
Either there are rules and principles that are valid for everyone or there are none.
Some say people get influenced by far-right propaganda. Far-right groups think in the same way in that they believe everyone not on their side is an "NPC".
I think Dorsey and Zuckerberg handled it relatively well in the grand scheme of things. Their latest ban attempts were over the top though. I know that some people might need help instead of a Twitter account, but that is beside the point. They set the precedent for countries to suppress their opposition and for state propaganda. I think Uganda is one of the latest examples.
The reasons are not "they were too much right wing for us". They had multiple reasons, but it is not that long to read.
> On the internet there are calls to violence in any political group, even vegans and cat lovers. We ignore that because they aren't relevant. But if you seriously crack down on cat lovers, you might need to expect real violence.
And vegans and cat lowers do seriously take them down in their forums when those cross the line. And when they discuss cats and food on reddit and reddit deletes accounts of those who threaten violence, the vegans and cat lowers are happily continue to discuss cats and food.
This is bad analogy.
That's the difference between merely saying something, and saying something with the likelihood of actually carrying it out.
Parler would still be around if there not been an mob attack on the capitol connected to it (and no legitimate fears of further mob attacks on inauguration day, etc.) If vegans actually started and organized butchering of meat eaters, I'm pretty sure the forums where they planned such things would get shut down quickly.
I don't have a solution, but Amazon + Apple + Google coordinating to shut down a platform for communication - even a platform that contains expression that I strongly disagree with, I might add - is a problem that requires a solution
This is what I wish more people understood now rather than later, but at some point everyone will understand that it's a problem
Hint: it's the identical problem to deplatforming BLM or Antifa or Occupy or the Proud Boys or pick anyone you agree with that annoys powerful people. "Having the better politics" will not protect you. "Oh they're just fascists" will not protect your peoples.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/05/twitter-d...
Apple on the other hand is a lot more murky due to their lockdown of app installs. I don't believe they should be made to host things they don't agree with but people should not be prevented form installing whatever software they want on their own hardware.
For the record I am a staunch free speech advocate but fully believe that no-one (no-company either) owes you (the royal you) a place to use your free speech on their property.
Did they actually coordinate [1] or just come to similar conclusions based on similar facts, in the context of the same cultural zeitgeist?
[1] e.g. Bezos, Cook, and Pichai (or subordinates) on a conference call, deciding what to do
I do believe some level of internet serving access is a public utility. But i doubt that level is cloud hosting.
I will dig a little deeper to support archive.org[1] this year. I'd love to run a mirror.
Parler had people discussing murdering Congresspeople and didn't do anything about it. No matter which faction of "what level of free speech is acceptable" one subscribes, this is never acceptable and it is no wonder that Parler got booted off.
I want you to understand what I'm about to say. Understand it in your bones: it is unacceptable to me and to you and it is reprehensible; and beliefs that you hold dear will someday, by someone, be seen as unacceptable and reprehensible. To protect the speech of the reprehensible is to protect your own speech. That's what I would like you to understand.
David Goldberger didn't defend the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie because he is a Nazi, but to defend his (and all of our) rights.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
The people who planned actual murders and crimes must be caught and punished. But if "planning and executing crimes" is the standard by which platforms should be shut down, then Facebook also should be shut down.
Planning an executing crimes is the standard by which those doing so should be shut down. Ideally, by the actor as close as possible and able to do so with minimal collateral damage.
But a second-order platform that determines a first-order platform is systematically incapable or unwilling to do that does not act improperly in cutting service to the first order platform .
That's fine by me tbh
Note, the reason why it is illegal goes back to preventing protesters from hanging up their banners / messages. An act to legally silence opponents.
Actually, even in the US there are exceptions - namedly when speech is likely to incite crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
But if you wrote that on a site hosted on AWS, there is nothing in principle from Amazon taking the platform down. Politician Y calls his buddy Jeff Bezos, and fwoomp! Gone. This should be concerning.
It seems more likely that we've learned that if I said that quote -- and then I personally tried to hang the politician by his thumbs and got caught because I'm a cartoonish moron. Then, when charged with attempting to hang the politician, I said "I was just joking" even though I had some hanging equipment and I was in a giant mob full of other people all chanting to hang the politician and many of us had guns and anyway I also broke into a locked building to do the hanging -- and then it came out that large swaths of the content on the same site was people making those kinds of threats, and then it came out that the site operators didn't care to remove the threats because they had a moral opposition to moderation, and then it came out that AWS had contacted the site owners many times to implore them to remove other illegal content, and then the site operators, rather than removing the content, gave press interviews where they boasted how they were invincible and didn't care if AWS took them down... then it's probable that AWS would take the content down. And this doesn't concern me at all. Lock me up, in this hypothetical, and lock up the people who enabled me.
I ran a legacy website that once got spammed. My host contacted me because one of the spam things was an ad for a website hosting stolen credit card numbers. They gave me 24 hours to take down the content. This isn't because they're censoring math and they're using their monopoly power to prevent numbers from being posted, it's because stolen credit card numbers, provided for the purposes of credit card fraud, are illegal and they didn't want to do business with me if I wasn't willing to remove the content.
And I also don't see a further problem with using the posture of the site operators + the site itself to make a judgment call about whether the content in question is an aberration or intentional. If someone posted a magnet link of pirated content in Hacker News, I wouldn't presume per se that Hacker News was a piracy website because I can facially see that the site is general purpose, and also because I can see that the site has a general moderation policy that signals it is willing to comply with legal requests. But that doesn't mean that ThePirateBay can credibly argue in court "We had no idea our site was used for piracy, and if you ban us, you have to ban Google, because they crawled us."
The 1st Amendment (and its European equivalents) usually only bind the government, not private entities.
There is nothing per se preventing you (or Parler) to build their own datacenter or use another hoster - there is no "human right" to be able to use AWS. However, what still remains is that every company has the right to refuse service to an entity that is suspected of criminal activity - and the onus is on Parler to prove they will not serve as a planning platform for criminals.
Why should it be concerning at all? There are a few thousand other hosting providers they can go to.
The slightly stronger argument seems to be that the people making these death threats on Parler should not have been banned from Twitter/FB in the first place. FB/Twitter have far less competition and most of their value is in the network effects they've established.
The tech giants should absolutely be broken up/more heavily regulated, but I think there are much better examples of why than Parler.
That's not a strong argument at all. Spouting death threats gets you arrested if you do it in public (and someone records it or calls the cops), so it should also lead to a time-limited or permanent ban from social networks.
Social networks are not a free-for-all zone.
I don't think it's a strong argument either, I just think it's slightly stronger than the one people are trying to use for why AWS should be forced to host Parler.
> Spouting death threats gets you arrested if you do it in public (and someone records it or calls the cops), so it should also lead to a time-limited or permanent ban from social networks.
The argument from people coming out against the moderation of these threats seems to be that FB/Twitter etc. should only remove this content after receiving some sort of court order/government mandate to do so, that they shouldn't "play cop" as it were. Personally this seems like a pretty stupid take.
> Social networks are not a free-for-all zone.
Some people are arguing that the should be, that they should be treated as the equivalent of a modern town square. I don't necessarily agree with this take, but I can see why people might think that way.
A modern town square isn't a free-for-all zone either. Try to go and shout "fuck <n-word>" or raise the arm to the Nazi salute in an area where people of color live and you'll be lucky to escape with a minor beating.
Town squares are a form of societal self-preservation too - unruly elements get dealt with, either by the people themselves or by the police.
By that criterion we should immediately close down Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, ...
I mean, AWS basically took their business under false pretences. AWS wasn't trying to provide them a service, it was trying to kill their company.
Same for Facebook and Twitter.
Parler, however, did nothing even as people went and publicly called out criminal acts happening on the platform.
I'm really glad she did that. I'm fine with all this stuff getting taken down, but it really needs to be archived somewhere for historical purposes, to help understand this moment.
Given the kind of media and political impact Trump's tweets from @theRealDonaldTrump have been, I really hope they're archived at NARA along with the @POTUS tweets. They're legit historical primary source documents.