I abhor both Parler and Facebook. In the context of these threads, I don't think either has done anything illegal, which is what passes for "ethics" in our economy. Of course IANAL.
I don't think Apple, Google and Amazon did anything illegal to Parler. And until these kinds of companies are legally and explicitly made into utilities, I don't think we can expect them to do anything except whatever they want.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-protests-facebo...
In this interview (audio, but there's a transcript) Matze details some of it, and basically explains that violent-but-popular content is going to be left up because of "free speech": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.
And if that's the baseline, Facebook and Twitter have far more objectionable content yet-to-be-removed.
Look around you. Right here on HN, we discuss politics. We're doing it right now. Yet... no violence. And the reason is moderation. The moderators remove violent commenters and the community shuns them. Clearly HN/dang have been able to "prevent violent rhetoric". It works.
And Facebook and Twitter are doing OK right now. Both were very late to the game, but are engaged in a heroic effort right now to clean up their communities. In fact it was something of a left-Twitter running gag over the past week to giggle at conservatives complaining about their follower count suddenly dropping.
But Parler did no such thing. So outside forces had to apply the moderation.
I don’t trust FB enough to want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this would still be true if I did.
There is already a zero-tolerance approach to numerous extremist groups, regardless of whether they are active on American soil or not. Why should this be treated any differently?
Being as how Twitter isn't shutdown for the same offense, I'm also curious as to why Parler was "treated differently"?
Political pressure, period.
Parler's raison d'etre is that it makes no such efforts. From the AWS team's motion to dismiss:
"There is no legal basis in AWS’s customer agreements or otherwise to compel AWS to host content of this nature. AWS notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement, requested removal, and reviewed Parler’s plan to address the problem, only to determine that Parler was both unwilling and unable to do so. AWS suspended Parler’s account as a last resort to prevent further access to such content, including plans for violence to disrupt the impending Presidential transition."
From: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Washington_Western_Distric...
Obviously this is a rhetorical question. But the answer is an elephant-in-the room kind of thing so I think it needs to be said:
The reason is that the overlap between "extremism" and our (now) minority political party is so large as to have muddled the distinction. Per one poll, 45% of Trump voters approve of the sacking of the capitol. It's really not possible to distinguish people who merely post angry political speech and the ones who stray into extremist rhetoric about revolution and violence. The same people are doing all of it.
So right now, "moderating communities with extreme content" simply looks a lot like "censoring republicans". But... I don't see how that gets better by outlawing the moderation. Republicans need to fix their rhetoric first.
That may be a distinction without a difference. What company failed to even attempt to moderate?
That's cool, I'm down for making all social media apps illegal. Today.
We've given guns to chimpanzees. Perhaps the human race needs to mature a little before we're shoving our entire lives into everyone else's face. Turns out that despite having more things in common than not, we still don't like each other very much.
10 years ago, most of the American left and center were shouting at banks about being the 99%. In the wake of that, these apps have been used to divide and conquer us. They've turned us against each other. Our best hope is to shun these tools en masse.
Edit: For a multitude of reasons - money, money, and money - I don't expect any vendors would discontinue service with Facebook. The question is more of a thought exercise.
Depends on their contracts and that’s all it depends on.
That's not true. Laws supercede contracts. You cannot write a contract that creates new law between parties.
But there are still laws that require you to _remove_ certain content (child porn comes to mind, but also material that infringes copyrights, etc) once you are aware of it.
Concretely, given this sequence of events:
1. You have a web site that allows people to post pictures. You moderate them some.
2. Someone who is not you or one of your employees/contractors posts child porn.
3. Before your moderators notice it, someone else sees it and reports it to the FBI.
4. You remove the child porn (based on normal moderation getting to it, or you getting notified by the person from item 3 or by the FBI).
my understanding is that Section 230 means that there is no legal liability on your part, as long as step 4 actually happens once you become aware of the content.
They've got (poorly paid and treated) human mods for user interactions, but apparently ad mods aren't a thing with them.
So I'm largely in the same camp; if they're enabling armed insurrection by white supremacists (or extremists in the middle east, etc), Facebook should be boycotted by their partners.
That's what happened with Parler. Facebook's more likely to weather the storm. Parler evidently wasn't able to.
Some open problems:
* Nazi propaganda * Content that's dangerous to the development of children (violence, eating disorders, ...) * Sexual harassment * Libel and slander
So yes, take that together with Facebooks data transfers across the Atlantic and there is a real chance of Facebook shutting down in Europe.
Facebook owns all their own infrastructure and gets the final say on how their infrastructure is used. Private companies can run themselves as they please.
If you violate the terms of your rental agreement, your landlord gets to kick you out. If you can't afford to own your own infrastructure, you answer to those who do.
Welcome to Capitalism.
Also in my country landlords can't kick renters out if they disagree politically. I think that's a good thing. Maybe similar regulation should apply to infrastructure providers.
Surely in your can get kicked out of your rental if you violate the lease. Especially if your landlord sits down with you and discusses the issues and you still can't commit to not violating your lease.
I can get evicted from my rental if I don't have renter's insurance. Let's suppose my landlord sat down with me and said: '[name], you are in violation of your lease agreement without renter's insurance.'
If my response is 'well, I'll find someone to volunteer to look for renter's insurance for me', I would expect to be evicted. And I'm not even facilitating or enabling people to openly advocate and plan for violent overthrow of a democracy on my property.
It's a little strange, then, how Amazon took Parler's money until a day after others deplatformed Parler right after the election. Amazon's decision doesn't seem as arms-length and independent as you believe.
Quoting AWS's literal rationale:
> Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. [...] This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but you plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts.
Whether AWS was able to make that decision because of the political calculus had changed (e.g. there was demonstrable evidence of real-life violence stemming from plans made on Parler; others had taken action against Parler; AWS's employees were publicly calling for Parler to be removed from AWS) -- that's a different question.
The timing can be political but the decision apolitical.
This is ignoring that Parler's continued prior existence was likely in part due to the politics (i.e. American conservative allegations that Big Tech's pervasively censors right-wing and Republican voices).
Edit: wow, that blew up. For the record, I don't think Facebook should be shut down, and I don't think Parler should have either. I'm rather anti-social media, so I've never used either. We should have better reasons for doing things, and stick to them. Section 230 exists for a reason.