"The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks." [2]
Apparently US authorities were happy to want Twitter to keep those accounts alive for some time as they could use them to track activity - the point remains it's wrong to the point of naive to believe that these decisions are not political.
Facebook was enabling genocidal activity [3].
It's incredibly hypocritical to look at the historical activities of ISIS on Twitter, Facebook and all of these platforms, and then to hear about the 'political violence' caused by Parler.
I don't like Parler, the hypocrisy is staggering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_social_media_by_the_Isl...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
The difference is, there was actual moderation. Parler, a tiny (2 orders of magnitude tinier than Twitter) appears to have had no moderation infrastructure at all.
Even the data in your first reference seems to suggest that Twitter alone has probably moderated more accounts than Parler has actually had.
Broken record: I'm still surprised so many people here have so little exposure to the hosting business to believe that there's actually an inviolate right to due process in keeping your stuff hosted somewhere. Hosting providers have to kick users off all the time. It is a basic fact of life in hosting: people abuse stuff.
Parler wasn't running a phishing scam, spamming, or DDoS'ing people, but that's not my point; my point is: if you're a hosting provider, your contracts basically have to give you the right to boot people at your discretion. The idea that anyone thought AWS's might not? Baffling.
The following is an excerpt from https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/34/parler-llc-... the order denying the injunction.
"AWS has submitted to the Court multiple representative examples, reflecting content posted on Parler during this period, that AWS claims violated the terms of the AUP and the parties’ Agreement. ... Parler has not denied that these posts are abusive or that they violate the Acceptable Use Policy. "
Asking a customer to stick to the rules they agreed to and eventually ending the business relationship when the customer chooses not to is hardly a 'partisan act'. Parler could have just done what AWS asked (even temporarily, to keep themselves online while looking for alternatives). They didn't.