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Comment by rnikander | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else think it's suspicious that they built everything on AWS? I mean, if you know you're going to take heat for your content being less moderated, wouldn't you diversify your infrastructure? I wonder if someone wanted this to happen, in order to increase support for certain legislative action?

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I'm pretty mindblown that after seeing what happened to 4chan/8chan, they didn't forsee this day coming. My theory is that Parler _wanted_ this to happen, so they could raise a stink / file a court case. The founder is a major ideologue and this whole thing might be better for business than if AWS had left them alone.

Ockam's razor man, I doubt they even considered it. And by the time they did, the app was too big to move and/or even secure another cloud provider.

Why would they know they would take heat for their moderation policy? Are there any other examples? I can't think of any.

Edit: I mean examples where companies lose access to core services due to their moderation policy. I know twitter and facebook get shit for theirs all the time, but nothing substantive ever happens.

I think Gab [1] is a relevant example. They were dropped by their GoDaddy, Stripe, PayPal, etc. after the tree of life shooter posted their manifesto on the site. Another example would be Cloudflare dropping 8chan [2] after the El Paso shooter, Christchurch shooter, and Poway synagogue shooter used the site to post their manifestos. Cloudflare also dropped support for the neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer [3] although my impression is that the reason for termination was deeply related to people on the website claiming their continued business relationship signaled ideological sympathy on the part of Cloudflare [4 -- about halfway down]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/far-right-social-network-g...

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

[3]https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

[4] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

I think it was just blind ignorance, evidenced by their rage and disbelief when it happened.

I believe the person who started it was a former AWS engineer. Use what you know.

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