Nonsense.
Parler was created because Twitter and Facebook were moderating content. If Twitter and Facebook hadn't been moderating hate speech, Parler would not exist. Posting voices and content which is banned on Twitter and Facebook is the single unique "Feature" of Parler.
Over the months, Amazon has been in contact with Parler's management about moderating violent content and speech.
Facebook and Twitter have hosted content which incites violence and hate speech, but it's far less common and they make (often grudging and half assed) efforts to remove it. On Parler, it's accepted, arguably encouraged.
https://deadline.com/2021/01/amazon-court-filing-parler-for-...
If Amazon can find it and has identified it, why won't Parler remove it?
> If Twitter and Facebook hadn't been moderating hate speech, Parler would not exist.
I don't think it's fair to claim Parler was created because Twitter and Facebook moderate hate speech. For example, the Hunter Biden story was actively suppressed on both Twitter and Facebook, essentially confirming long-held beliefs that social media platforms curate based on political ideology.
But they actually moderate their content, and while there have been a few knee jerk reactions, they've mostly erred on the side of leaving things up rather than the reverse.
Parler has knowingly left threats of rape, murder, and torture on their site indefinitely. The contrast is stark here.
I don’t think anyone can in good faith deny that if Don Trump Jr had allegedly done one-tenth of what Hunter Biden is accused of, the media would have it on 24/7 rotation.
Meanwhile, the Trump and children have been a Masterclass of nepotism and corruption. Let me know when one of Biden's children become an Aide to the President or put in charge of pandemic response, middle east peace, federal government reform, or the dozen other things Javanka was put in charge of despite being absolutely ignorant and unqualified in those topics.
What likely happened is that Amazon/Google/Apple did not want the risk of being accused as enablers if Trump managed to get on Parler and they decided to pre-preemptively cut Parler loose. Since in this day an age no one gets fired for canceling conservatives it was a winning move no matter what.
My issues with Parler are pretty much in line with what Amazon lays out in their court filing against Parler.
> "This case is about Parler's demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web Services ('AWS') content that threatens the public safety," Amazon wrote, "such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens."
https://deadline.com/2021/01/amazon-court-filing-parler-for-...
Maybe you think "inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination..." is an Ok sort of thing for public discourse. That kind of speech is banned here on HN, and as I suggested, nearly every other public discussion group.
I disagree. There were open calls for murder on the platform where Parler was notified by Apple, by Google, by Amazon - and nothing happened. Which is the key thing here.
Twitter and Facebook are extremely fast with the ban-hammer, in contrast.
Twitter and Facebook have recently grudgingly picked up the ban hammer and use it, often too late or ineffectively. But yes, they will eventually act which is the big difference.
What do they take payment for?
But in a situation like this, a company that's likely to be deplatformed, is likely to be deplatformed everywhere. I've seen a screenshot recently of Parler's hardware requirements (when searching new vendors) and it's somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 cores with more than 400Gbps (sustained) of internal and 100Gbps of external bandwidth (from memory).
The big cloud providers are the only place you can move to when you have those types of requirements (and are still actively growing).
The problem sounds like it would have been database sync between locations, which is a major issue in multi-cloud. Most replicated databases are pretty chatty.
You're right though about deplatforming, and the problem is if you are providing a safe haven for a bunch of Nazis like Parler is you are going to be constantly DDOSed. That means you need a lot of DDOS protection, and high end DDOS protection is a significantly smaller market with fewer players than just raw rack-em-and-stack-em hosting.
On the smaller but still “millions of virtual machines” end of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs and can give you instances in minutes.
Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their “Dedicated Server” offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72 hours to deliver to customers.
Or one of a thousand places to rent a rack and “DIY” with hardware from a vendor like Dell, HP, Supermicro, Lenovo, ZT, ...
Plenty of examples exist of sites which have spent years or even decades online despite being unpopular or illegal, e.g. The Pirate Bay.
On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration, more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed on a weekend).
TLDR: what a bunch of lightweight crybabies...
Parler was easily nuked because its tech was amateur hour not because US cloud providers rule the internet.
Peering ISPs would frequently drop routes + messages from whole data centers that would blatantly ignore spam complaints, which would force their hand to kick the offending customers off their platforms that caused harm to their other non-offending customers.
Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able to set their own rules and if it’s public, then the public sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to be a mix of the two.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cos...
at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.
The NYT did not apologize for printing Tom Cotton's op-ed because it was outside of a broad Overton Window, but because it's a captured institution. A lot of tech firms face similar issues, whereby trying to hobble the speech channels of political enemies (even those with very broad support) is not only seen as acceptable but morally necessary.
Don't forget...just because everyone thinks something is good, doesn't mean that everyone isn't wrong. Hitler was Time magazine's man of the year...less than a year before he started WW2.
It's not that hard to do.