I can imagine Parler also might have some problems attracting the kind of talent needed to run a site like that.

Twitter or Facebook on the other hand, ive seen people call out to riot and burn down cities. Literally, there was a Facebook event to riot in my town (person who planned it was arrested). It led to millions in damages, and I feared for my life.

I was surprised parler got de-platforms because it was the most mundane option TBH.

On a purely technical level Facebook runs their own infra. They would be hard to deplatform. The only people who are probably capable of doing that is the l3 type service providers. Even there Facebook , google own investments in undersea cables.

Also the size of their deal value to the vendor makes a huge difference. Amazon's revenue impact from parler would not even be a rounding number in their annual report. The impact of loosing fb for many vendors could kill them .

Apple can't get rid of Facebook or Google Maps, no matter how much they hate them, but they can easily get rid of pesky startups while claiming to be standing on principles.

Not much of a moral victory there, though! (even if you believe they were right to do so, which I do not.)

It's hardly an apples-to-apples co.parison with Parler.

Why?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...

Search for you will be more aggressive.

Your prosecution will be more aggressive.

Your punishment will be more harsh.

Yea those big tech doing such far left progressive ideals like paying no taxes, dodging all sorts of moral issues, working with another to not poach and lower income. I can’t tell if AOC and Bernie dont run big tech.

* Hell, AOC herself participated in one such illegal riot at the Capitol (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...). And since it was in the pursuit of a political goal (the Green New Deal) that makes her political criminality an act of terrorism, by definition.

A group of people violently breaking into the private and protected areas of a government building, conducting physical assaults on security staff and destroying property, looking for the elected officials that work there while carrying cuffs, calling for their deaths and erecting gallows outside - to me that sounds like insurrection (_a violent uprising against an authority or government._).

Your argument is inconsistent, you judge the capitol rioters as individuals:

> Because if so then the vast majority protested peacefully outside the barriers and broke no laws

But all BLM protesters are rioters?:

> Because BLM rioters did that all 2020 and I didn’t hear their acts termed as insurrections.

I believe you meant to say big tech is neoliberal. If so, I agree. I don't use neoliberal in a positive light. I think it's a net negative. Neoliberals are anything but progressive and in it to truly help society in my opinion. Probably the one common ground we can agree on.

https://youtu.be/jRLH8E_CpP0?t=205

For the record, I'm absolutely fine with Google deciding what content stays and what content goes when it comes to their hosting infrastructure. But in so doing, they need to retain legal culpability for the content that remains.

Naaah, plenty of fash-curious engineers out there.

As the saying goes, "one backup is zero backups."

N+1 backup is N backup

1 backup is 0 backup

No one can setup basic infrastructure beyond the datacenter in 24h.

Granted, given Parler's mantra they should have known they would be particularly vulnerable to getting kicked off AWS, but I'm highly skeptical that many Silicon Valley darlings (and I've worked at some) would have been able to spin up something quickly on a completely new hosting platform.

Just curious as this was my overall sense when I lived in the Bay Area and it would be consistent with a lot of the corporate "censorship" of various diverse viewpoints that's going on now.

Yes, but with an important caveat. Most all good business leaders are pragmatic, because if you're not there's a very good chance you won't be a good business leader.

However, Parler's entire raison d'être was as a right wing alternative to Twitter et al (you can say "free speech" alternative all you want, but it's beyond ridiculous to claim Parler's community wasn't extremely hostile to liberals/progressives on the site, to the point that I rarely if ever saw any on there), so it would be expected for him to be quite political as it aligns with the business culture of his company. His problem was that he wanted to make his stand without an adequate technological plan if he had to build everything off the major (and even not-so-major) cloud providers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outag...

Genuine question

Are there any tools for hosting large volumes of user generated content in a decentralized permissionless way?

Even if you have to pare down the front end and reduce reliance on some infrastructure concepts, is there any way to do it right now?

Nope. Since Web browsers don't speak any fancy decentralized protocols you either need a centralized/censored gateway like ipfs.io or everyone has to install client software which kills adoption.

I don't understand why they should have expected everyone to deplatform them. Facebook hosts the same content in far greater quantity and has clearly demonstrated that they can't moderate effectively, but there's no bulls-eye on them over that. What's different about Parler besides the ownership?

Facebook is 233x larger, profitable, and self-hosting - they don't have to keep their cloud service provider happy.

Parler was dependent on AWS for services but didn't comply with their terms.

Facebook is bigger, and has power.

That means that (a) they're harder to attack, and (b) they have purposes beyond ONLY fomenting insurrection and genocide. That means they'll operate in more of a gray area by intention, and will in fact try to self-moderate when the cost of fomenting insurrection and genocide risks becoming more expensive than the profit (ideological OR financial) for fomenting insurrection and genocide.

The difference between Parler and Facebook is, Facebook will take your money but then throw you under the bus if you're malicious and endangering their platform. Parler went down with the ship because it was more important to them than just taking the money.

And in any case, they own their own DC's.

Wait, which of those companies is using the publicly offered terms of any public cloud vendor?

This is basic stuff, the problem with Parler is that their team seems to have no experience hosting controversial content.

> surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.

Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though

If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?

But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.

It's fine to use k8s and containers, but don't lock yourself into Lambda, SQS, etc.

You should be able to spin up anywhere.

The sites you listed are notorious bad actors but they at least have a degree of moderation.

Imagine hypothetically that you have website about the plight of the Uyghurs and Amazon was a Chinese business.

Amazon's behavior revealed they are not above terminating service for businesses. I can imagine a world where they become emboldened and attempt to deny service to parties they don't like.

Perhaps you're hosted on AwS and they make an offer to acquire your business. Can they shut you off or raise your prices if you reject their offer? Can they escape antitrust scrutiny and use this as a strategy to low ball you?

I view the response to Parler as an operational test of the death star.

We have less and less power the larger these giants become.

I don't think we should force amazon to host ISIS' terrorist planning

What percentage of Parler users were advocating or planning for violent protest?

Also note that this stuff happens on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks all the time, and yet they're still online.

These are really messy gray areas, and the choices we're making will set precedents for our future.

There are so many potential responses by both the host and the service/platform. You can ask the network to deal with it (as they did with Parler), you can involve the FBI, invoke lawsuits... I don't think deplatforming is the second course of action to take when politely asking doesn't work out.

Was it even Amazon's prerogative to ask for content removal? It might be in their TOS, but what would the DOJ say?

Unless the FBI or CIA says it needs to go, I don't think it's Amazon's call. That should be our bar.

Social networks should be able to set their own rules and operate within the laws of the United States. Web hosts shouldn't meddle.

As a society we make value judgements all the time. I think most people were in favor of shutting down parler. Most people are not in favor of letting AWS deny you service if you don't accept their aquisition offer and the response will be different.