> this is never acceptable

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.

> But if “planning and executing crimes” is the standard by which platforms 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 .

> But if "planning and executing crimes" is the standard by which platforms should be shut down, then Facebook also should be shut down.

That's fine by me tbh

Not all crimes are created equal. It is illegal to use clotheslines to dry clothes in New York City. A protest to remove the law may involve using clotheslines. Would you deplatform for that?

Note, the reason why it is illegal goes back to preventing protesters from hanging up their banners / messages. An act to legally silence opponents.

> To protect the speech of the reprehensible is to protect your own speech. That's what I would like you to understand.

Actually, even in the US there are exceptions - namedly when speech is likely to incite crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

Indeed! We weren't talking about the 1st Amendment, but let's go where you lead: speech likely to incite imminent lawless action is illegal. Courts decide if that applies. Someday you might say "Politician Y should be hung by his thumbs". Politician Y and friends try to convince a judge that you thereby incite imminent lawless action. Of course, you were just feeling passionate, and no one reasonable would believe that you meant it. Thankfully, due to strong 1A protections, the case would not proceed.

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.

Is that what we've learned here?

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."

> But if you wrote that on a site hosted on AWS, there is nothing in principle from Amazon taking the platform down.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> That's not a strong argument at all.

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.

> Some people are arguing that the should be, that they should be treated as the equivalent of a modern town square

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.

"Parler had people discussing murdering Congresspeople "

By that criterion we should immediately close down Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, ...

You missed one key difference, moderation, Parler straight up refused to remove these kinds of posts.

Parler just got ejected from the internet. Is it totally unthinkable that they would have adjusted their behaviour and moderated whatever Amazon had told them to if given, say, 2 weeks notice? They probably would have, then transitioned off AWS in an orderly fashion.

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.

Parler knew the terms when they signed the contract and didn't bother to adhere to them. They had months of notice. AWS did wait until Parler became completely toxic to enforce the terms, but they had lots of cause available.

Reddit has banned a lot of toxic communities over the years to avoid negative repercussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

Same for Facebook and Twitter.

Parler, however, did nothing even as people went and publicly called out criminal acts happening on the platform.