To believe that Parler would have been viable on AWS to begin with, they had to actively avoid reading the AWS terms of service. And, I mean, I'm sure they didn't, just like they apparently didn't authorize anonymous HTTP requests for their users assets. The whole effort seems clownish and performative.
In that light, I think I object to the notion of a "digital death sentence". They chose an incompatible provider for the services that they needed, and suffered the consequences. Gab, a service that is objectively far worse than Parler, appears to be doing just fine; in fact, they went through something similar to this after the Tree of Life shooting was planned on their service, and Parler had to have not paid any attention whatsoever to what happened to their most important competitor to have believed they had a chance on AWS.
Amazon can enforce their contracts selectively. The contract isn't a statute; it's an agreement between two parties. Amazon could presumably strike up a side agreement with a customer that overrode the "master" contract. I'm not a lawyer, but stuff like that happens in consulting somewhat regularly, where you have an MSA governing all your projects, and specific contracts for weird projects.
Not necessarily because I enjoy having this speech hosted, but because isolating and pushing out so called "deplorables" is escalating the current American political conflicts to serious violence.
As I said in my other comment, when the disenfranchised can't speak, they get violent. If you disagree with these people, say that to them. Cutting them off from the mainstream public squares like Twitter and Facebook just creates a new generation of radicals.
Silicon Valley used to stand for freedom of speech for a reason.
Can you provide references that back up this claim?
Bear in mind that the deplatforming began after January 6th of this year, so any escalating violence which may have occurred on or before that point is not evidence of your claim. And after the events of the 6th I imagine it’d be difficult to compose a compelling argument that not deplatforming prevents violence.
In any case, the only news on the topic that I’ve seen has been that election misinformation on Facebook/Twitter has dropped by 70% since the deplatforming happened on those platforms[1]. That isn’t directly about violence, but presumably will result in less alt-right radicalisation, since their ability to reach new people is reduced. Though obviously it’s much too early to have a good understanding of the long-term impact of actions like this.
Which is why I’m so curious about how you’re making statements like this as if they’re plain facts. I’m super interested to see any references you can provide!
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinfo...
One of the conclusions of a recent purge by Reddit was that it just pushed the banned users into even more radical spaces online[2].
Of course we all know about The Streisand effect, and one article suggests that censorship just draws more attention to the banned content[3]. If we assume that ideas are somehow "contagious" or "infectious"[4] then we're just exposing people to them even more.
> In any case, the only news on the topic that I’ve seen has been that election misinformation on Facebook/Twitter has dropped by 70% since the deplatforming happened on those platforms.
But the deplatforming didn't make those people go away, it pushed them to platforms like Gab and Parler, right-wing echo chambers. This is like an extreme version of a filter bubble. Remember, millions of people supported what happened at the capitol[5], and there is zero hope of de-radicalising people if the left and right aren't talking. If anything, both sides will get more extreme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming#Twitter (see references)
[1]https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...
[2]http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
[3] https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://th...
[4]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00546-3
[5]https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/
You should re-read it. It offers that as a possibility, with terms like "may" and "could have". It does not conclude it did happen; it notes that some users migrated, but that's not at all surprising.
The hardcore folks are likely to always wind up somewhere, but driving them off Reddit likely makes it more difficult to recruit less initially strident users. As the study indicates, "the ban worked for Reddit".
It has the effect of preventing violent content from using adjacent nonviolent content (i.e. baby and pet pictures, nonviolent political advocacy) on the mainstream platforms as a kind of "human shield".
Of course, this is a disappointment for anyone who finds the normalization of violence-provoking content desirable.
The problem is that there already exist plenty of forums on the internet for non mainstream but non violent speech. The only speech seeking a home is the violent speech.
That doesn't seem to be working in a post-truth world. Not sure what the solution is, but this isn't nearly enough.
When the white nationalists did not have a platform, was the escalation higher or lower than it is now? Granting them platforms seems like the issue that started the escalation to me.
What I've seen is basically some screenshots of some bad posts, which doesn't tell me anything about what was really going on in a very large and complex system.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
Filing: Amazon warned Parler for months about “more than 100” violent threats
[...] Amazon provided "more than 100 additional representative pieces of content" advocating violence on Parler over the following seven weeks, the company said. Another document in the filing (PDF, also with content warning for racial slurs and threats of violence) lays out dozens of examples of posts Amazon reported to Parler, beginning in mid-December. Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama.
Exhibit D (contains racial slurs, etc):
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
https://uncoverdc.com/2021/01/21/doe-v-twitter-twitter-fails...
Come back to me when AWS drops Twitter's new contract. Then we'll talk about whether or not Twitter has any moderation. We'll discuss whether Twitter is designed specifically to facilitate child trafficking. And every other formulation of this narrative.
The issue is not that someone somwhere posted something bad and Parler merely failed to notice. The issue Amazon claims is that Parler had not done even bare minimum - taking down few dozens of posts that Amazon told them about.
I saw a violent insurrection against the US government unfold on live TV, incited by Trump himself, with the goal of overthrowing the results of a fair election, armed sedition justified by disproven lies, which was planned and promoted and published in real time on Parler.
I also saw a map of the GPS data from Parler users who posted live videos and photos of themselves storming the US Capitol and murdering a police officer and attempting to murder Vice President Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
So yeah, there's a lot more evidence than screen snapshots that you're conspicuously ignoring.
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
I have no doubt that some Parler users went into the White House. I haven't seen any evidence that Parler had no moderation. I haven't seen any evidence that Parler was any different than Facebook or Twitter with regard to users planning illegal/violent acts, making violent comments, etc.
From a practical standpoint, your opinion (and mine for that matter, which I haven't expressed for this reason) is irrelevant.
As such, it seems to me that all we can really say is that the judge's refusal to grant the TRO (given the tests[0] applied in deciding such things) while not dismissing the case outright, isn't a positive development for Parler.
Further, the judge's ruling appears to have questioned the legal basis for Parler's claims. That doesn't bode well for them either.
All that said, claiming that one side or the other is factually correct without having all the evidence seems both biased and premature.
I'll wait until the truth comes out. Because in the end, it always does.
There's plenty of reason to be skeptical about lots of things. There's plenty of reasons to dislike mainstream social media companies and the large companies that do business with them. But not everything is a conspiracy.
spoken as if there is just one cloud hosting provider in the world; it's parlers job to take care of their own security and resilience
Let's say I call Jim's taxi every day, I am his client, and one day Jim refuses to serve me, can I sue him or should I just call another taxi?
Parler wasn't dropped for making Amazon look bad. Parler was dropped for repeatedly failing to address blatant terms of service violations.
AWS still hosts the National Enquirer, the magazine that literally tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos. AWS is hardly in the habit of removing sites that make them look bad.
Parler has gained a reputation for being some sort of free-speech platform, but it was anything but. They had heavy-handed moderation that routinely banned people and removed content for not agreeing with the popular sentiment. They made a deliberate choice to continue to leave explicit calls to violence on their website, and they were removed from AWS for it.
Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.
EDIT: to add, this is just his take. There is obviously 2-sides to the story, so hard to know the full truth here.
[0] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...
And I wouldn't expect them to do so! They're a tech rep, not a legal rep.
Facebook and Twitter don't own their data centers. If the DCs responded to the same pressure about hosting illegal content, the social media giants would disappear too.
Edit: the downvotes and rate limits are about to push me away from HN for good. This is ridiculous.
My platform is anti-fascism. I'm tired of people on both sides trying to shut down the other side.
Facebook certainly owns quite a few.
https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/facebook-infrastructur...
They lease some, but some are definitely custom built just for them:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/facebook/facebook-plans-...
Not true, they do have own data centers.
Imagine if the power company, that provides the electricity for those data centers decided to stop working with them, tommorow.
Surely, you could recognize the issues with doing this? (Lets ignore common carrier laws for a moment, because it is not relevant to the main thrust of the argument, which is that this would be bad)
Which further underscores the perils of architecture built around a central point of failure once more, so far from what I've heard about Parler makes me think it was a den of mainly boomer aged crack-pot Qanon and Trump supporters.
In a way its a lot like 8chan, which also got censored after the last racist shooting, Hotwheels outright condemned this and went on record from the Philippines where he lives now and said he wished he didn't create the thing as the worst things he could ever imagined came out of there in masse, but he had no choice as a person living the US with a disability and no access to medical care and limited employment opportunities.
With that said, I'm indifferent to Qanon BS, and the latest storming of the Capitol underscores how pervasive the cancer that is social media is in deteriorating the social fabric in the US for so many (mainly disenfranchised, and poorly educated people) which makes me want to blame you FAANG types even more. I'm sure Russia and China have a hand in all of this, but that is to be expected after how the US intelligence agencies have weaponized every technology for nearly the entire last century around the World.
But in the end, people have agency and the choice to not use your algo optimized survielence based apps/platforms and fall trap to these abysmal outcomes. And the truth is so many of you people default to the 'If I didn't do it, someone else would' rationalization.
And as I've come to learn in my time in tech, especially in my (limited) time in Silicon Valley, many of you are immigrants on employer sponsored Visas or 1st generation migrants with family back home who need the money to survive, so I can't hate you as a person if that's your situation. I just want to clarify that I hate the system you operate with a passion because it lures you in with the delusion of prestige tied with bloated salaries for focusing your attention on the most pointless, and in modern times clearly dangerous, use of your collective talents and skills at these places when we have so many more real problems to solve.
What I can say is I just sincerely wish you do something worth redeeming you as a Human being as a side project.
Yes. Abuse and copyright violation doesn't get a pass, so why should extremism?
You take calculated risks in these industries when you're using a service provider. Depends on your goals. Sucks to suck.
Either way, without knowing the full picture from both sides (like a court case going through discovering to fully put out the communciations between Amazon and Parler), we don't know the answer. We see that Amazon canceled Parler with little external communication. And we see what Parler is saying. Amazon could share what they communicated with Parler (assuming they legally can), then we could see another side to this story.
It would be nice for this court case to go through discovery, then we'll know who said what and when. But until then, we have very imperfect data and have to weigh it as best we can.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
“In mid-November 2020, AWS received reports that Parler was hosting content threatening violence, in breach of the agreement. Executive 2 Decl. ¶ 4. On November 17, 2020, seeking to better understand Parler’s approach to content moderation, AWS provided Parler two representative examples, asked whether “this type of content ... violate[s] [Parler’s] policies,” and asked for “more detailed information on [Parler’s] policies and processes for handling and mitigating” such content. Id. & Ex. D. Two days later, Parler responded that it had referred one of the examples to its “regular contact for investigation.” Id. Ex. D. Over the next seven weeks, AWS reported more than 100 additional representative pieces of content advocating violence to Parler’s Chief Policy Officer, including...”
And some emails, from the Exhibits:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
As well, these are just responses, not actually discovery. I'd be interested exact timelines of things and how emails played out within Parler and within Amazon. Amazon's response is just their take on it trying to justify their own actions.
Amazon bring up some examples of posts that concern them. Parler say they will look at the post that constitute actual threats but have a policy of not removing content like the post that's just a long, content free screed of racial abuse. That alone can easily be considered violation of Amazon's conveniently broad AUP.
Amazon appear not to have chosen to terminate or threaten to at the time, presumably on the basis they were getting plenty of money and relatively little grief for hosting them, but it puts a very different perspective on the idea that Parler was caught completely by surprise, and would have cleaned up everything they could if only they'd had more time and resources.
> The first example, as hateful as it is, would not be deemed a violation of our terms of service. Following Nadine Strossen (New York Law School, ACLU), Parler does not ban "hate speech" insofar as it would be protected by the First Amendment.
By the time of the filing, Parler realized this was mistaken on both counts. As noted in the judge’s denial:
> “Parler is not asserting a violation of any First Amendment rights, which exist only against a governmental entity, and not against a private company like AWS. And indeed, Parler has not disputed that at least some of the abusive and violent posts that gave rise to the issues in this case violate AWS’s Acceptable Use Policy.”
Just to underline that first sentence, for end users on Parler, or Twitter, or AWS, “First Amendment rights” are not a thing.
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...
And keeping National Enquirer doesn't make Amazon "look bad"... you are mixing issues here. National Enquirer itself may not be pro-Amazon, but they'd be that way whereever they are hosted. Their existence on AWS, though, does not impact Amazon one way or the other, because even those who dislike what they publish, aren't generally claiming they should be denied hosting.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
This is like saying that society wasn't ok with Trump when almost half voted for him.
Trying to rewrite history because there's a Ideological and political control of tech companies doesn't mean you're right.
The same goes for law. Just because something is legal or you don't win a case, it doesn't mean it's right or fair.
In my experience, rabid attitudes come up whenever you don't toe conventional lines regarding the good Vs the bad American parties.
You're not allowed to an opinion that's not the right one.
It's that the subjects of multiple anti-trust probes and companies known for on the down colluding in the past happened to be the ones pulling the plug.
You can argue it was "everyone" having a problem with it, but keep in mind that the Valley is not "everyone". That's the funny thing about conspiracies. Everyone whose in on it flatly denies it, even when it is obvious.
Not saying there was one mind. Just pointing out that assuming "management in the Valley" who have go/no-go on firing customers equates to "everyone" not being okay with it. It does not build confidence to many when unilateral decisions by execs shape the landscape for everyone else. Also yes, some of that population who aren't okay with that likely buy in to more conspirarial thought as well. Doesn't change the facts of the matter.
No conspiracy is needed. Same thing happens in neighborhoods - assholes tend to get a reputation as "the asshole neighbor" pretty rapidly. There doesn't have to be a neighborhood meeting to decide this; it just happens.
Iirc it was dropped from the two app stores about 12h apart.
Isn't that mainly due to their amount of revenue? Are newer services supposed to be shut down because they can't(yet?) compete with Twitter on budget for moderation?
I mean, moderation or no moderation, your overall costs are going to roughly correlate with your number of users. If you can't come up with some kind of revenue stream -- be it subscriptions, advertising, or donations -- your site is going to be a money pit.
Besides, depending on what kind of site you're operating, moderation can sometimes be managed by volunteers. Some high profile sites like 4chan make that work pretty well. But it depends on having dedicated volunteers who can agree to enforce rules, which isn't always easy.
Then you stop chasing growth at all costs or you go under/lose business partnerships/etc. Sounds like the free market to me - I don't get the idea that a business is entitled to existence no matter what, whether or not it can afford to pay labour (or even get enough volunteers) to do its work.
Then you're fucked, because you overextended past your available resources, and you crash and burn.
Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and the news media all lean left. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences.
I think all this soft power actually hurts the left in America, because our country's default state is a bit of an echo-chamber. It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.
The Senate and electoral college favor them massively. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to change any laws that might counter their preferences.
Your objection really seems to be engagement in culture wars.
Did you accidently respond to the wrong comment?
What the person said was that a chemical manufacturing company should not be "biting their nails" over some random Marijuana decrimininalization speech, that a random candidate is making.
Turns out being `apolitical` is kind of a myth.
If Valve bans me from Steam for my language is that also violation of my free speech or is it their right to protect their platform?
You do realize both ABC and CNN literally went live and said they won't air his speech, right?
Why? That's a serious question.
The reason liability protections exist for information services is because information services can't exist without them. It's not possible for an information service provider to be strictly liable for what their users post while having anything like a reasonable quality of service or cost. Think 10 hour moderation queues to post on Instagram, which costs $15/month, and requires using your driver's license or other photo ID to sign up so they can forward libel suits to you.
Requiring strict liability on the part of information service providers will likely drastically reduce the amount of free speech. Because they're going to aggressively take down/reject anything that has the slightest possibility of them getting sued. They won't suddenly morph into the town square because an unmoderated Internet town square is a filthy, ugly place that repels users and advertisers and hurts the bottom line.
I would propose that moderation decisions be logged and reviewable on demand (at the plantiff's cost) in front of a reputable arbitrator of the platform's choice.
What part of Section 230 do you think had any bearing on the issue being discussed?
That makes no sense, since the entire, explicit purpose of Section 230 was to free platforms from preexisting disincentives si that they could be free to “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” without incurring liability that would otherwise attend such editorial control.
You are literally suggesting that the price of Section 230 protection ought to be not doing the things to which Section 230 protection applies in the first place.
Also, I think it's wrong, in any cases, to think of Section 230 as a special grant of liability protection, any more than the preexisting different liability of distributors from that of publishers is a special grant. It's a recognition that online media enables models that would not be practical with the media for which the traditional liability roles for content developed, and that venues for content which wasn't pre-screened in detail but over which largely reactive editorial control was exercised was all of technically and economically practical on the internet, inconsistent with the premises of the classic publisher vs. distributor liability analysis, and already, at the time the Act was considered, starting to be stifled by application of the traditional publisher vs. distributor rules. We don't force bookstores to be neutral platforms to be free of publisher liability, because we recognize that bookstores aren't naturally going to be pre-screening content at the detailed level print publishers will, and it doesn't make sense to stifle them by forcing them to. 230 is the same idea, just for a business activity that didn't exist when the common law of liability was evolving.
Plenty of conservatives left on Twitter.
Second, the other is accountable to the same laws as anyone else.
Are they, though?
> the other is largely unaccountable
No the market will hold them to account.
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1352293847385124864
If voting in this country wasn't suppressed at the local level by Republican state governments, the federal government would look very different. It would be much more diverse and representative of real Americans, not just white male Americans.
[0] year,dem_candidate,dem_votes,gop_candidate,gop_votes
1992,Bill Clinton,44909806,George H. W. Bush,39104550
1996,Bill Clinton,47401185,Bob Dole,39197469
2000,Al Gore,50999897,George W. Bush,50456002
2004,John Kerry,59028444,George W. Bush,62040610
2008,Barack Obama,69498516,John McCain,59948323
2012,Barack Obama,65915795,Mitt Romney,60933504
2016,Hillary Clinton,65853514,Donald Trump,62984828
2020,Joe Biden,81268867,Donald Trump,74216747
This is all pointless anyway for a union of states. Germany is underpowered compared to Luxembourg in the EU by design -- the same is true in the US. Should California ever go back to being conservative, as it was until Clinton, it will disadvantage Republicans just the same.
I think we're operating on different definitions of "favored". The definition I'm using (and which most of the English-speaking world uses) is "have a fundamental advantage". He won the electoral college narrowly. He won the popular vote handsomely. That's a sign of a thumb on the scale in a pretty fundamental way.
He didn't though. He won 57% of the electoral vote and 51% of the popular vote.
"Favor" only matters to extent it helps a candidate get over 270 EV.
The electoral college was decided by about 40k votes this time, and about 80k votes last time. The popular vote margin was in the millions. That should tell you something about how far the EC is from reality.
The 50 senators who represent semi-conservative states represent the same number of states as the 50 who represent more liberal states.
I'm aware of that. And that structure favors one side more than another. This is not a controversial statement - the numbers (y'know, facts and logic) back that up.
States are lines on a map. In the current setup they have more influence than the actual people living in those states. Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?
Saying this doesn't make them less important, it just shows a childish attitude. Local and State governments and representation are important parts of the Republic.
Dollars are just numbers in a database. Will you give me all your money? Or is it only certain "made-up" things that are important to you?
> Do you seriously not see how that can lead to disproportionate representation of some views?
Yes, and straight up popular vote leads to the same thing. That's why we have a system that is a combination of popular vote and state vote.
* The People are represented by the House.
* The States are represented by the Senate.
* Both are represented by the President.
Seems like a well-balanced system to me.
Why? What even is a state, if not its people? What even is a local or state government, if not the people in the city or state? Can you even have a state or a state government if there are no people in the state?
What's special about the state or state government specifically that it should get its representation separate from the people it governs? Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it represented?
Moreover, if this was really and actually true, why was the 17th Amendment passed? Why aren't senators still chosen by state legislatures, or nominated by governors and confirmed by legislatures? Why does the state get represented twice (Senate and EC) but the people only get represented once? Isn't that an imbalance?
> Seems like a well-balanced system to me.
Because it favors your side. You'd be singing a different tune if it was the other way around.
The United States is a union of states. The people have representation at the federal level, and the state level.
> Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it represented?
No. The people of the state are the state, not the government of the state. Again, the state gets representation because we are a union of states. And local governments get representation at the state level. There are many concerns of a people, and we have people representing those concerns at different levels of government, from local to state to federal. Otherwise we could just have a single person represent everyone.
> Why does the state get represented twice (Senate and EC) but the people only get represented once? Isn't that an imbalance?
The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC). The EC is the House + Senate. So no, it's not an imbalance.
> Because it favors your side. You'd be singing a different tune if it was the other way around.
I don't have a side. I vote for policies that I agree with, which has changed over time. Party support of certain issues has changed over time as well.
I am pretty tired, however, of people crying about foundational aspects of my country because they lost an election. I think the increasing concentration of power in the federal government is a bad idea.
It's more a genuine concern that continuing on this path will result in a federal government whose policies don't reflect the views of the vast majority of the nation. You can already see this on issues such as cannabis.
> The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that the EC adequately represents the people, since it takes the Senate numbers into account.
Amendments, like the 17th, are one way to change that union, with the consent of those members of it -- but if you push too far there won't be a union any more, because a portion of those states will walk away from a union no longer defined as they define it.
As the lopsidedness of representation grows ever more pronounced, it increases the probability that federal law and policy will diverge significantly from the views of the majority of the nation. This will likely increase disenchantment with the federal government even further, which is just as great a danger to the union. Surely you agree that this situation isn't ideal either, even if the Constitution says it's supposed to be like that?
If the people don't want things to be that way, they can pass amendments to change it.
If you don't want to call that a "referenda", I think you're incorrect, but it doesn't really matter.
It doesn't have to be people voting directly. It shouldn't be.
* electoral districts are represented by the House [0]
* states are represented by the Senate
* who represents the people as a whole (if anyone) ?
* who or what does the President represent?
So that you can understand how your contribution is being consumed by others: when I came to that sentence fragment I stopped reading and down-voted your post. The remainder of your contribution might have been insightful... but I'll never know.
The state level representation of the senate is very arbitrary
We can do that all day to no real effect.
The electoral college does not matter. They go the way their states go as was made quite clear in the last election.
EDIT: Of course it matters how the voting system was designed. The EC votes the way their State votes.
The forefathers intended for states to have some say in the matter. We are a representative democracy. That is how the system was designed.
You are arguing that the Democrats cheated more than the Republicans, or "better". Do you have any evidence of this? This needs to be evidence from the past election, not Chicago in 1962 or something.
Citation required.
> I cannot possibly prove any of this to you.
So why bother saying it?
You have no evidence that USPS function "favored" Democrats.
You are perpetuating the lies that have been told by the former president and his supporters for the last 2+ months.
This is false, and the core of the criticism of the EC. Each state gets 2 votes independent of its population, which is biased toward small population states, and for over a century the definition of states was constrained by a compromise to protect slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
The same approach (all states having two senators) biases the Senate in favor of low population states.
This appears to have been intentional on the part of the founders, but that doesn't make it right.
[ EDIT: s/two/three/ ]
So big states couldn't bully around small ones.
How is that not "bullying"?
How does that play any role in an actual democratic nation, as opposed to some pre-Lincoln concept of the US a series of independent states merely "unioned"? The answer is obvious: it doesn't.
39,510,000/55 = 718363.636364
In addition, there's 0 reason for the house to be as malapportioned as it is. 435 house members isn't written in the constitution.
Third, the entire concept of smaller states having an outsized voice in the federal government comes from the slave owners from the South in 1789. There's no rational basis for it any longer.
People like to pretend the founders were deities and the constitution is handed down from god. But they weren't and it wasn't. A lot of their ideas were really stupid. I mean JFC, we couldn't even get through 3 elections before they had to redo it.
Vermont has a lot more in common these days with California than it does North Dakota. The EC and Senate are outmoded relics from a stupider time that should be abolished.
No. It had to do with Connecticut, New Jersey and other small population states who wouldn't have ratified the Constitution unless there was state representation (as we have in the Senate) to balance out the representation by population (cf. The Connecticut Compromise[0]).
The southern states had (or expected to have) large populations, and as such, wanted representation by population.
History and facts matter.
The Southern States were underrepresented in the Senate compared to the House by the initial apportionment in the Constitution, represented at very close to the same ratio in each House in the apportionment for the 1790 Census (largely reflecting that they had been overrepresented relative to population, in the House, in the Constitutional apportionment), and substantially overrepresented in the Senate compared to the House after the 1800 Census.
They were well aware of the imminent demographic trends and acted accordingly.
> History and facts matter.
Indeed they do, but the history and facts aren't on the side of “the Southern States had large initial and expected future populations as counted for apportionment in the House and, so by-State representation in the Senate was contrary to, rather than designed to serve, their regional interest.”
That's orthogonal to the concerns of small population states, in 1787, when the Connecticut Compromise was adopted.
What's more, the results of 1790 and 1800 Censuses didn't impact support or opposition to that compromise, as they hadn't been performed yet.
>by-State representation in the Senate was contrary to, rather than designed to serve, their regional interest.”
Which is the flip-side of the coin to what I said.
The key term is "now". After getting about 40m more votes. Be honest. Is that balanced?
To say the Republicans have any kind of advantage right now except for maybe the courts is incorrect.
As another user said: "The Senate is split 50-50, but the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people than the 50 Republicans"
You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.
The United States was designed as a representative democracy on purpose by the forefathers. That is fact.
And the argument is that this democracy isn't sufficiently "representative", since it doesn't represent everyone equally. Indeed that's an explicit non-goal.
> You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.
But you can agree that the rules of the game are rigged against one side. You don't get to deny that just because you're winning.
There are many other representative democracies that do not have any of these "features".
Also, I thought a reply ago, you stated that the left was winning, not losing.
This has nothing to do with Orwell. Im not sure why you bring him up.
The forefathers designed the system this way. I agree with the way it was designed. It prevents big states like California and New York from calling all the shots.
I agree with the forefathers. You do not. Simple.
Because saying "it's a representative democracy" is doublespeak. If you have one person representing tens of millions and another person representing a small city (~150k people), and they have the same vote, it's not meaningfully "representative". Saying "it's a representative democracy" doesn't tell you anything about the fairness of the system.
> I agree with the way it was designed.
Because it favors you. It would be a bad system even if it was the other way around (i.e. it favored the other side).
> It prevents big states like California and New York from calling all the shots.
I'm still to hear a good argument for why it's better for small states to call shots instead.
> I agree with the forefathers. You do not. Simple.
I'm fine with that. They were as fallible as anyone else and could not have foreseen that their system might have flaws. There's no need to deify them and think that everything they did was right.
Similar logic applies to the Senate: regardless of population every state gets two senators. Right-wing senators have received fewer actual votes (by individual voters) than left-wing senators for years, yet in that time right-wing control of the senate has been more common than left-wing control. Right now the split in the Senate is 50-50 (Vice President, a Democrat, breaks the tie) but the total number of votes cast for Democratic senators was much higher than the number cast for Republicans.
You literally have to deny reality when you deny that the electoral college and the senate represent a structural advantage for Republicans right now.
Reality is we are representative democracy. The forefathers deliberately designed it that way.
Reality must line up with your arguments. It does not.
If what you say is true, Trump would most likely be president right now.
Dems own entire cities with the largest population centers. Dems have better organized grassroots. Dems have California and New York, the main stream media.
What advantages you speak of are moot compared to those ones.
We are a representative democracy and we always have been.
The EC was more than a compromise, it was an integral part of a system that prevents too much power being handed to any one institution or demographic. And forcing national candidates to appeal to a multitude of states rather than a handful of cities has a moderating effect.
If anything, what's outdated about the EC is we need more checks on the political influence that is centralized in cities because the founders didn't anticipate urbanization.
I believe it is because to be break out successful in any medium that demands an array of skill you must not discriminate against people: The company must not have or create a forum for a culture of exclusion.
That is to say, it should not matter if a person is gay if they are skilled in acting, coding or teaching. They are welcomed for their talent.
However, these “right leaning” groups typically are at best on the back foot of accepting the reality of diversity. And are often financially backed by people who seek to make laws that restrict the freedom of others to protect some existing homogeneous power structure.
So lack of traction in these industries is because you can’t constrict the talent pool to fit a narrow idea of what a completely equally protected human is and expect to get enough talent to be very successful.
This 2004 article includes discussion of the benefits of acceptance: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/02/26/the-case-for-ga...
Silicon Valley is right-wing on economics and defense of monopoly, and left when you talk about race and gender equity in the board room.
You can see echoes of this on HN where many people support restrictions of speech if they come from a private platform ("laissez-faire" approach to private property), but still call for a shut down of hate speech and a correction of "misinformation".
The Democrats' cultural mores center around postmodernist principles of "language makes reality" "there are power imbalances" "the power imbalances intersect around race and gender" and finally "correcting how we talk about these topics will help the marginalized." ... But, we're reminded, Twitter and AWS and Facebook are private property, and you should read and follow the TOS ("laissez-faire").
actual bonafide leftists have very little real political power in ths u.s afaik...
Hollywood (the industry funded by the US Military to put pro-military-industrial-state advertisements into movies) is not "left leaning" in any meaningful way. "News Media" all lean either slight-right (MSNBC, NPR) to hard-right (Fox News, NYT, WSJ). Silicon Valley is primarily driven by right-leaning "libertarian" conservative types (at both big corps and small startups). Democrats are largely all conservative (in that, Democrats of 2021 mostly all hold identical views to what Republicans used to hold in the year 1998)
We do have a few centrist politicians and groups (Bernie Sanders / AOC+Squad, etc), and a few centrist movements (rights for LGBTQ+, or "Defund the Police", for example, is largely politically-centrist initiatives).
But I'm not aware of even a single left-leaning politician in any federal elected office. For example, no elected federal politician is advocating for the nationalization of all private corporations, or elimination of all for-profit entities, or for a complete cap on individual wealth, or for giving Hawaii back to the aboriginal Hawaiians, or anything like that, that could be considered a full-left position. (But meanwhile, on the right, there is a meaningful ultra-far-right political movement arguing that we should ignore replace democratically-elected officials with dicatorships, for example. And that group has elected members sitting in the House + Senate today)
so, given this, that NPR is right-leaning, and bernie/AOC are 'centrist', am I correct in your assessment that basically just about only bolshevism counts as 'left'?
> NPR is right-leaning
Yes.
> bernie/AOC are 'centrist'
Yes. Though I would describe Sanders as left-of-centre (apart from her stance on the environment, Ocasio-Cortez is quite the centrist).
> am I correct in your assessment that basically just about only bolshevism counts as 'left'?
No. There is an entire range of actual leftist politics and economics that Americans tend to utterly refuse to engage with in good faith - the Cold War really did a number on that country's collective sense of a political spectrum. Left/right are instead essentially reduced to only being about social issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights, with some lip service paid to the environment.
"Imperialist capitalism, but make the marginal tax rate somewhat higher and appoint more minorities" is not leftism.
Geopolitically speaking, opposition to colonialism and imperialism (and their neo- variants) are generally considered to be leftist ideals. Internationalism skews left and globalism skews right, despite American conservatives' pearl-clutching in that regard. Decentralisation of power (with the extreme including advocating for anarchic/acephalous societies) also skews heavily left, with the flaw that without strong systems this often leads to the re-centralisation of power in the hands of one or a few (conversely, hierarchism which skews heavily right often leads to codification of power in de facto aristocracies).
Economically, capitalism is unambiguously a right-wing economic theory (note that capitalism is not the same think as markets - another thing that people would rather remain cheerfully ignorant about). If your politico-economic system involves capitalism, you'd be very hard pressed to describe it as anything further left than centrist at best (as most mixed economies are). Actual leftist economics would include the somewhat vague blob that is left-libertarianism, encompassing everything from Georgism (often criticised as capitalism lite) to syndicalism, mutualism, anarcho-collectivism and the (of particular interest to me) various schools of African socialism. Opposition to capital/private ownership/wage theft takes many forms, not only that of the communist bogeyman.
Why do people want to think of themselves/be thought of as being on the left so badly when they're completely unwilling to actually engage with what leftism means?
Yeah, no. If someone is going to call AOC or Bernie Sanders as "centrists", then I am going to need you to point to an actual, real life example of a true "leftist" government to understand wtf you are talking about.
Examples are needed so you can't make a bunch of stuff up, and wash you hands with the actual, real life examples of how your "ideals" turned out in real life.
> unwilling to actually engage with what leftism means
Hey, I did try to give examples of actual leftist governments, so we can evaluate how those real life, not made up in your head, examples actually turned out.
When talking about this stuff, the only actual thing that I will except is real life examples of your ideal government. Because, if I don't do that, then leftists will just make a bunch of stuff up, that is not grounded in reality.
Unfortunately the gap in what a leftist will claim that they want, and how they claim things will turn out is miles and miles away different from how actual leftist governments attempt to implement their ideals.
It doesn't make claiming that I'm making stuff up when I'm referring to actual, much-written-about schools of thought that have been critiqued and analysed by people all over the spectrum any less intellectually barren. Reading is free, and many of the works in question are in the public domain.
> and wash you hands with the actual, real life examples of how your "ideals" turned out in real life.
As if you don't?
All your boogeymen (boogeymen that I'm willing to wager have never actually had an effect on your life) are communists. All _my_ boogeymen are capitalists, to this very moment: the UK, France, the Western world in general, first with literal colonisation and currently with a decades-long trail of neocolonialism and outsourcing the cruelty and inequity needed to sustain their economic systems to the parts of the world nobody really cares about. It's incredibly telling which of the atrocities of the 20th century get dragged out all the time and which get swept under the rug.
> When talking about this stuff, the only actual thing that I will except is real life examples of your ideal government. Because, if I don't do that, then leftists will just make a bunch of stuff up, that is not grounded in reality.
You know the funny thing about this? My proto-ideal society (cannot really be described or named as a government, because it was acephalous communalism) did exist, and fragments of it still remain. But then the British came.
And that's essentially the story of the late 19th and the 20th century - nascent right-wing politics and economics running roughshod over nascent leftism, particularly violently so. First with a new wave of colonisation in Africa and Asia to fuel the growth of imperialist capitalism, squashing and integrating various societies that traditionally leant left along the way. And a few decades later with the fascism that swept Western Europe (the quote that free speech advocates like to bring up does not start out with "first they came for the socialists/trade unionists" apropos of nothing). The leftist movements that survived were the ones that were big enough and violent enough to resist destruction, and like I have already said without strong systems such movements were doomed to turn totalitarian. Much like right-wing economics was doomed to turn into this current mess of cronyism, de facto oligarchy, and murder for profit.
But, again, understanding that would require engaging in good faith and recognising that there are multiple factors that influence this topic, which you seem somewhat loath to do.
> If your stance is that leftism is evil
You are hyper focused on that one word that I used, when that wasn't really my main point. If you don't like that word, then how about I'll rephase. So how about this: "You did not provide any examples of a major leftist government that did not go horrible wrong, and have lots of problems."
> I'm making stuff up
By "making stuff up", I was saying that you were not referencing actual examples that I can look at, that exist in the real world, and are instead talking about hypotheticals that do not reflect how those hypotheticals exist in the real world.
> to this very moment: the UK, France, the Western world in general
And I am going to say that I would much rather live in any of these countries, than any real life examples of leftist governments.
Based on that, and based on comparing real world examples, I am going to say that I would deal with less problems by living in a western country.
> My proto-ideal society did exist, and fragments of it still remain. But then the British came.
Sounds like your ideal society didn't work out so great then and has a lot of horrible problems. If all the leftist governments implode because they can't defend themselves, then it sounds like that is a pretty big problem, and I would never want to live in such a society.
> Much like right-wing economics was doomed
Well at least it is a lot better to live in than the alternative leftist governments! I would still much prefer living in the right wing economies than in any of the leftist ones.
No one advocates a monarchy either, but that doesn't mean no one is "right-leaning".
The reality of the US is: 33.7% of Americans didn't even vote in 2020, 34% voted "left", 31% voted "right" (the rest of the votes went to third party candidates). Those who voted on the right are further subdivided into even smaller groups. One of those smaller groups on the political right side includes extremists who attacked the capitol.
Distaste for Parler, due to the actions of some of those extremists who were using it actually crossed political boundaries: folks who didn't vote, folks on the "left" and even folks on the "right". The shunning of Parler isn't about "soft power" on the left its about the fact that a small group of people managed to do something so reprehensible that a LOT more than just 50% of people felt that association with them was tainting.
This is not technically true. (1) politics is a spectrum (2) the US is generally left leaning as a whole, but the largest demographic designation of people in the US is generally considered moderate.
> This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences.
The population of the US leans left - those outlets are simply a reflection of that. It's absurd to think that all of these elite people who run those companies get together and conspire to keep left ideas alive. If you know anything about the Democratic party you would know they are horrible at creating a coordinated strategy. To think that same party is somehow regurgitating a coordinated theme through commercial means while at the same time having an uncoordinated government strategy is absurd.
> It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.
I agree with this but not for your aforementioned reasons. Those echo-chambers exist because communication is no longer at the town square but on social media and messaging apps.
I don't think American news media or academia or Silicon Valley skews left. It skews ... urban and educated? Silicon Valley seems libertarian-ish, news and media seems like they do in every other country. From here it doesn't even look like the US has organised, left-wing political actors.
citation needed.
Silicon Valley is a monument to capitalism and most if not all entrepreneurs lean libertarian.
As for the news media, as an example, Fox News has the highest viewership in the US. And for the others, ever thought about why you're not seeing a lot of coverage about unions/worker rights/worker strikes? Don't mistake anti-Trump rhetoric with 'left leaning'..
So I'm not sure we're you're getting your 'data' from.
But MSNBC viewers self-identify as Democrat at the rate of 95%, NYT as 91%, NPR at 87%, CNN at 79%.
You need to compare aggregate numbers if you're trying to be fair.
The source for the above is Pew Research Center, Sept 12, 2020, published in this Tweet: https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1304908656543178752
Saying 'all media is left leaning' is factually false.
> As for the news media, as an example, Fox News has the highest viewership in the US.
Yes one channel is different than every other, of course viewership is concentrated there -- all the lefty viewers are spread out over the remaining channels.
If the other news channels aren't "left-wing" then Fox isn't "right-wing", and everything is meaningless. There isn't a large population of commies or nazis in the US, despite what the media would have you believe. Both parties are pretty near the center, with some individual outliers.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/2024-republican-prim... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/fact-check-marjorie-... https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/01/21/conspiracy-th...
That being said, they did not have the engineering expertise to even make a resilient stack on top of AWS. If you're running a free trial version of Okta to secure your assets in production [1], all of what you're proposing is a distant dream.
If your company gets put on an terrorist list, you'll be removed from US services very quickly.
Gab after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
The only way forward in my view is to actually change laws. Anything short of that, is a fool's errand. All this is already settled law and has been litigated previously multiple times. You have to change the law in order to reclassify these entities if you want things to change.
What orgs like Parler keep doing right now is spitting into the wind.
It would have made sense if their belief system (ie, Trump and alt-right moving mountains to make them viable) were in place. Clearly that wasn't the case and they will be a footnote in history.
> Parler wanted to be taken down so that they could fight this legal battle
?
What will we feel if Microsoft and Apple start deciding what kind of contents can be generated and saved in their operating systems? It feels like time is ripe for a cloud provider that simply provides a platform.
Im with everything your post says, but I’m not even fully convinced this is an issue.
Twitter can argue a good faith effort and point to millions of accounts and posts it has removed–from all political persuasions. It can also point to constant policy changes to address what Amazons policy sees as a very real problem.
parler on the other hand has had its ceo say quite clearly that they have zero intention as a company to even address this problem.
Don't know if sentiment analysis ML algorithms are powerful enough to do something like this, but there has to be some scientific consensus on the relative hateful content that each site allows right? Or at least some pretty graphs.
Twitter also hosts lots of content that's way better. Among the highly relevant, when it comes to AWS decision making, AWS evangelists like Jeff Barr and Andy Jassy use Twitter to communicate with customers. AWS itself has a Twitter account for status updates. There's just a ton of stuff on Twitter that is absolutely fine and would be collateral damage were Twitter shut down.
In the realm of taking down providers for copyright violations, the courts recognize a standard of "substantial non-infringing use" as a way to minimize that collateral damage. A provider like YouTube, which had a ton of both legal and illegal content prior to the Google acquisition, was allowed to stay up whereas a provider like Napster was shut down because they found it to be almost entirely copyright violation.
It seems like directly equating Twitter and Parler is a false equivalence. Twitter is a generic platform that some users use for problematic political discussion. Parler is a platform specifically targeted at problematic political discussion. You can't target the problematic stuff and expect the same protection as someone who casts a wider net.
The first trouble is that you are opening the doors to all sorts of extremists. Whether they're far left, far right or simply personally unhinged, they are as predatory as spammers. They have no qualms about abusing your good will and s**ing in the punch bowl.
Same thing happened with Gab and Minds, but also smaller bulletin boards I've seen over the years. You set up a free speech site, and next thing you have a bunch of Nazis festooning it with swastikas. They're just like spammers, except they're spamming ideology instead of work from home scams.
The second trouble is that Parler is a competitor to established media corporations, who have a strong incentive to shut them down. That's a reality that every new business needs to face: established firms do not want competition.
All the people running amok provide the established firms with plenty of ammo to tar the upstart's reputation. And while they are biased by their incentives, they feel they are acting justly because they see all the extremist lunatics there. AWS didn't fabricate those incidents on Parler, all those were real posts.
It doesn't make a lot of business sense to say, "we invite everyone in" and then plan on kicking out a lot of users.
There are loads of simpler reasons why lefties thought they were getting booted, especially incompetence on Parler's part.
AWS didn’t see Parler as competition, just a liability.
Nonsense. Parler was created to host content which Twitter blocked and users which Twitter banned. Not suggesting Twitter was in the clear here, but suggesting Twitter was worse is BS. Parler tolerated much worse content, and on average content on Parler was much more incendiary.
If it was the left being censored I would be outraged on their behalf as well.
Edit: Not if, when the left gets censored by big tech, I will stand for freedom of speech with them, but I don't think many conservatives will be left to stand with us.
What about the Summer violence from BLM? Dozens of people died, with Twitter being used as a communications hub to attack specific individuals.
One group is using violence to maintain their power, while the other is using anything they can to make their lives better.
Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand and pretend the risk of de-platforming never existed.