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?
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.