How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
greenwald.substack.com
greenwald.substack.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=3
I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations.
Even if the landlord insists on a contract abrogating this, it's unenforceable. Policy restricts this because 1) landlords generally have very high negotiation power, and 2) tenants rarely read the fine print. It seems to me that both conditions are approximately true for the major cloud providers.
If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. AWS/GCP/Gmail/iCloud could ban you as a customer, but only with 90 days notice. Otherwise, immediate eviction could only occur if it involved legally codified egregious behavior, and would require a court judgement.
I think this would eliminate nightmare scenarios where somebody suddenly finds themselves locked out of their Google Drive and Gmail for some algorithmic mishap. But it would put very little operating burden on the cloud providers.
Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?
For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account.
In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days.
I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
Under Damaging a Computer, 1030(a)(5)
> The provision may also be used to prosecute the perpetrators of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which occur, for example, when an attacker overwhelms a server’s ability to process legitimate requests by overloading the server with a flood of illegitimate traffic.
Due process isn't some concept that is only applicable to government actions. IANAL, but I feel like contract law includes lots of elements of due process.
Buying a cheeseburger is also a type of contract. Can you imagine McDonald's having to reserve a court date to kick someone out of their restaurant for disturbing the other customers?
They have just breached that contract and bowed to the mob. For those reasons they're now being sued.
I ask because contracts typically, despite their duration, contain a variety of exit clauses. In this case, Amazon could argue they were exercising a "compliance with laws" clause (if it was in the agreement) such as,
"<Licensee> will not use, or allow its products to be used, in violation of any laws or regulations."
It becomes a legal argument as to whether Parler's members that advocated violence against the government caused Parler to violate the clause, and whether that amounts to a material breach that triggers contract termination.
That is very different than a blanket statement that Amazon "breached that contract and bowed to the mob." In fact, Amazon can sue Parler for breaching the agreement and exposing Amazon to significant liability for (at the most extreme) aiding and abetting terrorism.
Note that I'm not arguing either way, simply stating what lawyers are likely discussing behind the scenes.
that is something that has to be proven in court, before playing any such cards
If that is the case and you defend it, then this is a very unique situation, where law is not enforced by state institution, but by Google, Apple and Amazon. The question is what law? As clearly it is not US law.
If there is breach to the law, then there should be article Nr of breached law, otherwise all of these arguments are nonsensical. Nowhere in the world - even in Saudi Arabia it is possible to be judged and sentenced by unwritten law - by nongovernmental entities. Otherwise it is unlawful lynching by mob and there are countries that allow those, but US kinda positioned themselves as a country that guarantees The Law. Now that guarantee does not work.
None of this is criminal law. It's contract law and it will be dealt with per the laws, procedures, precedents, customs, and traditions of civil jurisprudence.
Nothing needs to be "proven in court, before playing any such cards." It needs to be asserted. Once asserted, there may be a cure period (the licensee might have 30 days to remedy the problem, otherwise the contract terminates).
The party may disagree, and could negotiate different remedies or timelines - again, no court is required here. However, if they can't come to terms, then they can pursue this in contract court.
Be aware that I'm not defending, or justifying, or taking a position on any of this. It's just how it is. If you don't like it, then work on reforming tort and contract law as opposed to stating on Hacker News that the basis of most worldwide commerce is "nonsensical."
Meanwhile Facebook Messenger remains the #1 way Child porn is distributed online
Please, separate legal arguments from emotional arguments. I'm strictly speaking legally.
Regarding Facebook, the choice to enforce, or not to enforce, a contract term is exclusively the right of the parties to the contract. Amazon may have unfairly chosen to enforce contract terms against Parler and not enforce those same terms against Facebook (for example; though I don't believe Messenger is hosted on AWS).
That's completely irrelevant; so far as I know, no law says all parties to all contracts must be treated equitably.
You will have a compelling argument when and if law enforcement chooses to crack down on child porn on Parler but not on Messenger. In this case though, you're comparing apples to baseballs: their similarities are vastly outweighed by their differences.
This is false equivalency. AWS didn't "arbitrarily" kick them out. If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts, a landlord can ABSOLUTELY evict you immediately in all sorts of states.
https://www.arizonalandlord.net/immediate-eviction-action-in...
https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/missouri-eviction-proce...
AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS.
I think AWS can very easily make the argument that continuing to host Parler when they're allowing calls for violence would do significant harm to their business.
In my mind, one holds a different level of accountability when sharing private thoughts with friends as opposed to when wielding an insurrectionist bullhorn.
No doubt radical groups are sustained by access to private encrypted messaging, but they cannot grow into the sort of movement that fuelled the attempted coup that took place on 6January without wielding the reigns of mass propaganda.
I am all for freedom of speech, but liberty is not a death pact. We can’t sit idle while this group, that very nearly interrupted the peaceful transfer of power, openly recruits and plans their next attack.
The mass gathering was propagated via Twitter-style broadcasts sure, but not the actual violent plots. Those will effortlessly move onto Signal.
Furthermore, I was checking in on right wing sites like theDonald.win in the lead up to 6 jan. The loudest voices all argued that the Democratic Party had systemically rigged the election, constitutional remedies had failed them, so the only response available was to fertilise the tree of liberty.
I didn’t sneak into a private telegram group or discord server. This is what these people were saying openly on popular websites that anybody could wander into without so much as making an account.
The same was true of charlottesville, sure parts were undoubtedly organised secretly, but facists like Baked Alaska were live streaming the whole thing - complete with antisemitic commentary.
This nonsense has to end.
It’s distasteful but it’s legal and part of our political culture.
If you think we need to protect MAGA supporters as a class, I just flat out disagree that there's any cause for it. That group of folks are largely already brimming with privilege that protects them (see walking away from storming the Capitol after killing multiple people).
If you think that the government should force private entities to not enforce consequences to speech they disagree with, I believe the government would struggle to prove that that doesn't itself impact the free speech rights of the private entities and it face immediate law suits to overturn such a law. The 1st amendment protects us from the government, not us from each other.
Why do you assume that these people won't be (eventually) charged ?
A particular race is not a protected class. Race is a protected class.
https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...
> For those asking the basis for that last claim: I spent the weekend reporting on the removal of Parler from the internet, including reviewing lots of documents and interviewing people associated with the companies involved, including Parler.
> The article will be up shortly.
(The article is the one this discussion is attached to.)
https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...
The main exodus to Parler happened after Trump was banned from Twitter, i.e. after the events in question.
"The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
Wasn't the claim that the attack had been planned largely using Facebook and not Parler, rather than something that happened after?
Evidence says: "GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody."
Evidence proved Greenwald's statement wrong.
I'm still not seeing the inconsistency, unless you have some evidence that the people who uploaded the videos were the same people who were arrested.
Apple said they banned them because they weren’t moderating enough, “nothing to do with what happened in DC”-esque
Twitter and Parler are mostly public forums.
So that's fine. The rules should be approximately the same as the rental protection laws in the state hosting the data center. If you're running a service that is objectionable, but no cops or feds are knocking on the landlord's door, then there should be notice given that your provider wants to boot you. Again, if the owner has a fed asking him questions about you and your service, that owner should be free to act much faster. No one questions that.
I would assume there is not a fed at your landlord's door because you skinny dip in your pool. There is probably something illegal they suspect of happening at that point.
In this particular instance though, with the Capitol falling, it doesn't help. Because I have to imagine that when the Capitol fell, there were a lot of feds knocking on Amazon's door. But, yes, as long as you're not doing anything that feds are at the door flashing badges about, you should be golden. If you are doing something feds are asking your landlord about, worrying about your landlord is a poor use of your time. You have bigger problems. (In fact, it's probable that your landlord also has bigger problems at that point. Feds generally don't make courtesy calls.)
I also hate this conflation of conservative views and people calling for murder. I have a lot of very conservative family who liked Parler but didn’t like being lumped in with all the Qanon galaxy-brains.
Why have the standards suddenly changed?
Greenwald specifically claims that this is a lie.
Free speech is prevented by the use of force. We held an election. The results where not what some people liked. They tried to cancel the people's voice. That is the real speech suppression here.
The principle of free speech is the idea that open discussion and debate is sufficient to resolve conflicts of ideas. Using force to end discussion is not free expression.
Of course there are limitations when fraud, slander, threats, and the like. But those should be considered in trials by peers or judges as decided in a fair court with due process. Again, words, ideas, and fair institutions are the rule, not decisions by the involved parties who happen to have enough power to get their way.
At least that's the principle.
Should the broadcaster cut him off? I say YES!
In those cases, you make the best argument possible to refute that drinking bleach us harmful... which honestly isn't that hard to make. The hard part is building up a reputation as being someone respectable and respectful enough to deserve attention. I think that silencing of sincerely held beliefs undermines efforts to actually persuade, inform, and make progress (and peace!).
Absolutely. However, not all speech is protected speech. At least not in the US.
Speech can also be part of a conspiracy. And conspiracy to commit criminal acts is a felony.
Which is, as I understand it, what the issue is in this case. Apparently (if you take Amazon's word for it, and once the dump from Parler is available, we can see for ourselves if that's true), folks on Parler were planning acts of violence and insurrection on Parler.
Again, that's my understanding. And if that is the case, it's not just folks exercising free speech. It's folks planning violence and insurrection against the US government. Those are absolutely crimes and not protected speech in the US.
N.B.: IANAL
But Im sure that if Parler is proven innocent they’ll have recourse
but almost every large company blacklisted them in concert
Furthermore it is simply not true that Parler refused to work with Amazon. Parler's policy forbids hate speech and incitement.
What actually happened was, when the mob decided that Parler must go, Amazon gave them little no notice or recourse before shutting them down.
Then the violence erupted in the Capitol, and Amazon's hand was forced. They had been violating Amazon's terms of service, and they did not do enough to resolve the issue, in a timely enough manner. Therefore they no longer got to use the service.
C'mon! IT playing dumb is so stupid, they knew it, they knew what company they were going to host. Parler's whole point was to host conservative voices, yet the attitude is to pretend it's a surprise, shrug and then have a stupid reason like they didn't act fast enough. It's not a genuine response, it's an obvious attack and an insult to anyone paying attention.
You seem to imply they only got 24 hours to resolve the issues on their service. That's not accurate.
It is a cheap excuse to take blame from the actual perpetrators to inconvenient platforms.
I like unfiltered platforms very much and Parler wasn't that attractive, so I appreciate them being the fall guy. But I also have problems with blatant different weights that are used to measure transgressions.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
If they really wanted them to implement some content moderation, it would have been more time, not to mention a clear specification for the feature changes they want, to prevent the solution from getting rejected again.
Valley firms built their financial success on being content neutral and even turning a blind eye to blatantly illegal content until they found ways to automate enforcement (or not), but are now forbidding competitors from being the same.
Now if you compare apples with apples, can you recall people using Google to research how to do bad things? Sure. Plenty of people who went to prison after police found they'd been searching for stuff like "how to hide a body" or bomb making instructions.
AWS is self serve. Anyone can sign up. So, yes, it is unexpected unless you imagine Bezos is negotiating with Parler's CEO.
You imply that all "conservative voices" are raging fuckwits, and while I long resisted that big brush view its becoming harder and harder to do. Especially when self-confessed "conservatives" just assert that yea, that's just the way we talk and act, fuck off if you don't like it. And now the conservative snowflakes scream blue murder when the same rules are applied to them.
I'm inclined to think the Parler mgt preferred this outcome, where they get to play victim, to actually moderating content and making their users angry.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-slams-cap...
Perhaps tech companies simply see the writing on the wall
Defenders of Parler keep repeating various versions of this, but it doesn't reflect reality. So either you're being lied to by their founder and taking him at his word and just repeating it without verifying, or you're intentionally misrepresenting what was actually on the site.
Amazon cited 98 examples of hate speech/calls for violence with included images that they had reported over weeks, long before "the mob" you speak of witnessed an attack on the Capitol and decided enough is enough. Odd choice of words too, "the mob" you speak of are freedom loving Americans who support the peaceful transition of power, even when it doesn't go their way.
> Over the past several weeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence. Here are a few examples below from the ones we’ve sent previously: [See images above.]
>It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
It's evidence that moderation is a hard problem, not that no effort to moderate is made.
The better comparison would be instances of hate speech or calls to violence that were directly reported to Twitter by its hosting provider for the express purpose of requesting that they be taken down. I'd certainly give you even odds that the number of such reports that Twitter both received and ignored during that same time frame was fewer than 98, despite the fact that Twitter is orders of magnitude larger.
No doubt there are instances of similar behavior that go under the radar on Twitter and every other comparable site, but once your hosting provider has contacted you about a specific instance that's probably a sign you should do something about it.
From an Ars Technica article[0]:
"But far from getting cut off suddenly, Parler had months of warning, Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all."
And
"Representatives from AWS spoke with Parler executive leadership on both January 8 and 9 about the platform's "content moderation policies, processes, and tools," Amazon said. In response, Parler allegedly offered steps that would rely on "volunteer" moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze allegedly told AWS that "Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service."
So not so much.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
Sure, corporations will turn a blind eye to a lot for a little more profit, but this does not extend to supporting a platform full of people trying to violently overthrow the government.
Just think about this for a second: every major provider shut down seditious media shortly after what happened on 1/6. When's the last time Apple, Google, Amazon, Shopify, etc., agreed on anything in the same day?
They are not going to risk the lawsuits and possible market share loss to competitors unless they have an iron clad insurance policy. In my opinion, the only thing that offers that kind of policy is a very clear signal from law enforcement.
Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal. Whatever it was, it was scary enough to move every single cloud provider in the same direction within hours of each other. Despite this kind of coordination being more evidence for monopolistic behavior, they all came to the same conclusion: create space between us and anything related to the 1/6 sedition. Now.
https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec...
> Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal.
Do you have any evidence for this at all?
There are several other alternative explanations for them doing this. There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
Also, you can tell that everything is broken when doing something anti-competitive makes it more likely for you to win an antitrust case against you.
> There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.
> And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
It says this:
> Judging from the posts announcing that they've been booted, at least some of the banned Parler users seem to have signed up for the service precisely to test the limits of the app's so-called "freedom of speech" policy.
I read this to mean that people showed up to purposely troll hard enough to get banned so they could claim they got banned, and then they were. Your claim was that they don't "regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content."
> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior.
Even if there was outside pressure, you're still speculating that it was from law enforcement rather than the political branches.
How are you even sure this is the first time this has happened? Certainly it's the most high profile, but tech companies have been quietly disappearing "undesirables" for years.
> There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
Not if they get ground into dust by competitors just as they're hitting the exponential growth stage.
Why is the businesses and politicians aligning a significant thing for you? It should be terrifying.
Also no outside pressure? A small group of employees pushed this for the entire lot. That’s outside pressure.
Is Twitter hosted on AWS? I thought they had their own servers, but I could be wrong
That’s a made up point, though. The AWS contract makes no mention of “reasonable effort” or anything like that.
Yes, it is worthwhile to compare moderation on Parler to that of FB etc, but it has no bearing on whether Amazon had the right to terminate Parler’s contract, which they absolutely did. Within the context of that discussion the comparison to FB and Twitter is just whataboutism. They aren’t Parler and they aren’t hosted by AWS.
Amazon told Parler they had to remove some very specific content or they would be sever their service, and Parler refused.
Amazon's letter terminating Parler calls out refusal to moderate content, not their inability to moderate content.
> But AWS does not host Twitter’s feed, so of course it could not have suspended access to Twitter’s content
Quote from a legal document AWS filed.
I think at most this would allow you to accuse AWS of hypocrisy, but the point is moot since Twitter, while an AWS customer, does not host content on AWS as far as I'm aware.
Really though, it has no bearing. You can argue that AWS is inconsistent in its enforcement but it does not change whether they have the right to that enforcement.
How do we (the people) ensure good behavior?
It is very likely that those incentive structures are exactly what led to this decision, and are working more or less as intended.
This statement omits the fact that Parler's userbase originated from Twitter's crackdown on hate speech and calls for violence that got a fair share of them banned from the platform.
As far as I can tell there's zero evidence that moderation didn't happen with anything that was reported.
They were clearly lying when they claimed everything had been deleted... Their content moderation strategy is based entirely on volunteer moderators. You can keep claiming that AWS is just trying to deplatform conservatives but that's just not what happened.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
Inciting mass assassinations, or even directly plan and coordinate them, is not politics.
Do you have a citation for that? Be interesting to see how many it actually is.
That's obviously not the case. It's very clearly Parler's problem. I don't see why AWS should accommodate a customer just because the customer's problems are "hard".
The rest of your post is basically irrelevant imo, I'm not going to respond to rhetoric about party.
Why is a backlog of 26,000 tasks acceptable? Why can't they auto-flag things upon report and hide them pending review? This is not a hard technical problem. This is a people and motivation problem.
Try getting 26,000 flagged operations behind when the flag is OFAC or underage porn and see who shuts down your business.
I suspect people going after Parler have other motivations due to political reasons.
How did they manage to write that with a straight face?
Ironically, this also feels like a false equivalency to me. I don't believe Parler was putting Amazon/AWS at risk in terms of legal liability (I'm pretty sure in the US you can only sue a hosting provider for material they host if it is copyrighted material and they don't take it down when they receive notices. A Google search didn't turn up anything else.) They also weren't at risk of bringing AWS down.
What really happened, and should be plain to anybody is that something really awful happened last week that shook the country to its core. Parler played a role in that happening, and tech companies didn't want anything to do with them because of that. Both for reputation reasons and I'm sure personal feelings of large swathes of their employees (including leadership.)
I don't actually think they were wrong for what they did. I think private companies should have the right to make such a decision. The problem for me is that these companies were in a position to wipe something out like this in the first place.
This isn't what the web was supposed to be. First it was the switch by most people to using a phone that is locked down as their primary computing device.
Now even websites are subject to unregulated private company control. After all - even if you set up your server somewhere, what's to stop CloudFlare or Google or anybody else who run these huge DNS services from simply blocking the domain? (assuming you can even keep one registered) Etc...
I often hear the argument "Private company, they can do what they want" but at what point does a private company become so powerful that we really do need the government to step in? I've also heard people say that this isn't a slippery slope because it's all terrorist/white supremacist websites so far, but I think to this article I read a while ago about how Apple had decided to ban apps that had anything to do with vaping. This was when some people were dying due to bad black market cartridges.
Vaping isn't illegal. It isn't hateful. It also isn't inherently harmful. People used those apps for legitimate reasons. Some of them used iPhone sensors through APIs that aren't available for websites/web apps. And Apple just decided "Nope, you don't get to exist anymore".
I was not a Parler user and I do not support the attack on the Capitol. I also don't vape. But both of these things do bother me. And they should bother everybody.
You seriously don't think with the amount of publicity Parler was getting, that AWS' reputation was going to be hurt? When my Dad is talking about Parler and AWS it has become a PR nightmare...
>I often hear the argument "Private company, they can do what they want" but at what point does a private company become so powerful that we really do need the government to step in?
If the private company is "so powerful the government needs to step in" then it should be through breaking up a monopoly. But it turns out AWS doesn't have anything approaching a monopoly in hosting, so it would be absurd for the government to step in. There are literally THOUSANDS of other hosting providers out there.
What you're seeing is that nobody agrees with the hate speech Parler is selling, and nobody wants to host it. That is the free market at work.
>Vaping isn't illegal. It isn't hateful. It also isn't inherently harmful. People used those apps for legitimate reasons. Some of them used iPhone sensors through APIs that aren't available for websites/web apps. And Apple just decided "Nope, you don't get to exist anymore".
So don't buy an iPhone? Buy any number of android phones that don't require Apple or Google's app store. If you want the government to dictate who companies do business with, you aren't for capitalism or free market, that's all there is to it. Parler isn't a protected class, vaping isn't a protected class, nobody should be forced to do business with them if they don't want to.
I definitely agree that the government does need to break up some large tech companies. But I don't agree that that should be the only form of regulation. I think the government should regulate technology companies in several ways. Here are some no brainers:
ISPs - Net neutrality required. No data caps allowed. Device manufacturers - Right to repair. Can't lock down the device the way that gaming consoles and mobile phones (and TVs, etc...) often do. Cloud providers - Greater privacy protections like they have in Europe.
>There are literally THOUSANDS of other hosting providers out there.
You're glossing over the other infrastructure examples I named. We're talking about a cumulative effect here. It makes me uncomfortable that key parts of the internet's infrastructure are controlled by private companies with little to no regulation on what they can do. And I feel like it's getting worse every year.
>So don't buy an iPhone? Buy any number of android phones
Not everybody gets to choose what phone they have. Maybe they got their phone handed down to them or donated to them and can't afford to buy a new one. For a lot of people, their phone might be their only computer. Also, vaping was just one example. Apple routinely blocks apps and only backpedals if the app creator has enough clout. They tried to do it with the open source blogging platform WordPress a few months ago.
If there were regulation in place that Apple could maintain their own app store, but couldn't block or make it difficult for regular users to install other apps then nobody to choose. Same thing with like a gaming console - buy a gaming console and you could install Linux and use it as a general purpose machine without having to break some encryption scheme.
It's clear that maintaining an operating system/platform is an expensive endeavor - and maybe it just isn't feasible for more than those two operating systems to exist. That's where regulation comes in. There need to be ground rules especially when the barrier to competition is so high.
>Parler isn't a protected class, vaping isn't a protected class, nobody should be forced to do business with them if they don't want to.
So companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they're not discriminatory/racist about it?
Gee...I wonder why we don't have that.
> So companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they're not discriminatory/racist about it?
Yes, that's actually how the law works. This isn't exactly news to anyone.
I am really trying to understand your perspective on this, because it's so obviously not true. Companies are regulated by the government and limited with what they can do in a lot of different ways.
Net neutrality is a form of regulation that I am advocating for - and it sounds like you're in support of it too which would seem to contradict this.
I was looking at some of your other comments on this subject and saw you posted this one day ago:
>Maybe Cloudflare et al should also be required by law to serve everyone regardless of content.
You're advocating for regulation of tech companies here too.
I was pointing out the irony that net neutrality was repealed under this same administration.
I am yet to be convinced that "neutrality" or a requirement to provide service regardless of content should be enforced by any government regulation above the network layer.
Companies IRL have the right to discriminate against their customers based on their speech. If I walk into your bar and start insulting other patrons it's totally legal for you to kick me out. And in fact if you fail to do that, your other patrons might leave and never come back.
I don't see why that shouldn't extend online. Except at the network layer. Because if you don't have that, you can't have any speech online. Which is also unjust.
I think this is self-consistent. Feel free to tell me if there are any holes in it.
>I am yet to be convinced that "neutrality" or a requirement to provide service regardless of content should be enforced by any government regulation above the network layer.
I agree with you. I wouldn't be in favor of a government regulation at the level of social media that would prevent specific services like Facebook or Twitter from banning things. But the bigger problem for me is that we've all just decided that it's okay for really fundamental things about the web to be controlled by private companies.
The web was designed to be an open system and it's slowly being more closed in. There's still areas of openness, but they get smaller every year. And every time there's a new layer of restriction added there's always someone to point out that you still can do x y and z, it's just 10-20% harder than it used to be.
When apps for phones came out it was "Well, you can always just make a web app. They have no control over that." but consumers are less likely to use a web app and you don't have the same access to the device.
Now it's "Just move to a different hosting company!" which is disingenuous for several reasons. First, any company they move to is going to get pressured to drop them in the same way. Secondly, even if they did find a new hosting company that was okay with them, the pressure would just get applied to a different point (like Cloudflare.) You can roll your own hosting system but it's prohibitively expensive for most people especially if the site has a lot of traffic, DDoS and regular hacking attempts. The fact that web hosting beyond the basics is complex and hard is the reason that cloud services exist and are so popular these days to begin with.
So yeah, I think we're basically on the same page. I don't see this getting better. But I still think it's worth pointing out.
I agree with the tone of your post, but it's not the web that's open (every website is created/owned/controlled by someone), it's the Internet as a whole that needs to be open.
>When apps for phones came out it was "Well, you can always just make a web app. They have no control over that." but consumers are less likely to use a web app and you don't have the same access to the device.
I understand your frustration, but while we have freedom of speech and freedom of association, etc.
And while you certainly have a right to start your own business, you don't have the right to force others to make it easy for you.
Again, I understand your frustration, but what you're arguing for just doesn't make sense.
Why should other companies be forced to change their business practices to make your life/business easier?
That's a rhetorical question of course, but you don't have to treat it as one if you don't want to.
If even Epic Games / Fortnite had to cave in…
Risk management is part of the job. Businesses that don't do it properly will often fail. Sometimes this is an unfortunate thing, sometimes it's a happy accident.
FWIW the Parler CEO claimed 12 hours, an obvious falsehood, and that’s now being used against him in his lawsuit against AWS.
But then they decided to be hosted by AWS willingly, and it's not like they haven't been warned about issues with it. "They made their bed…"
This also reminds me of the situation with youtube-dl's very valuable information stored in GitHub's issues.
Other systems like MinIO and Ceph have S3 interfaces for object storage, so the code could be kept. Operationally you'd need to retrieve it from Amazon S3 and re-store it. RDS is an export, transfer, and import away from being loaded into a normal database server, but that can take quite a bit of time.
Getting geo-sensitive DNS and implicit testing of backends out of Route 53 isn't so simple. Getting stuff out of Lambda and onto a commodity platform isn't quick and easy. If you have data in Glacier there's a substantial lead time to recover your first byte.
I notice it in other areas too like verbiage such as "business logic" or "product owners"
And landlords cannot evict you for being charged with a crime and cannot evict you generally if you are convicted of a crime (some exceptions no doubt).
The correct analogy is that a landlord cannot throw you out on a whim because they don't like your friends or your friends get in trouble. And that is true.
My landlord has a ‘no parties’ clause in my lease because my apartment is in a factory and someone could be easily hurt if one of the machines turned on. I agreed to this contract. If I break it my landlord is within their right to terminate my lease.
It isn't Parler that committed (or arguably, even facilitated, see Section 230) illegal acts, it's (likely, allegedly, some of) Parler's own 'tenants'.
But most importantly, as made explicit in your links, it looks like the landlord can NOT evict the tenant himself, and still has to go both through the justice and the police system ?
Also it seems like that when "illegal activity" is mentioned, it has to be declared illegal by some court, or at least have been processed by the law enforcement ?
Also I note that this only holds in some of the states. (So arguably the laws that allow that might be 'bad'.)
Finally, while it's not as bad for AWS, for App / Play Store it's like only having two landlords in the whole Western World, and get evicted from both (one of which still allows you to set up your tent in his garbage dump).
> AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS.
This is not what Greenwald claims. Do you have any opposing evidence ?
ArsTechnica[0] has some detail from Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit and quotes from Amazon that contradict this. I suppose YMMV.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
I can't say I agree or that I find this analogy valid. Tenant eviction protection is, in part, to protect human life acknowledging the necessity of shelter. The same just doesn't apply to cloud computing.
My lesson here is that the Internet is essential infrastructure, and once companies reach a certain size (Google, Facebook, AWS), they should be regulated similarly to public utilities.
An electric company shouldn't be able to cut off electricity to a crack house or brothel unless law enforcement first asks for it. Law enforcement should have due process appropriate to the situation; a terrorist attack should be cut off right now. A company making pirated copies of Windows should have their day in court. Your propaganda-believing gun-toting drunk crazy uncle should probably keep their electricity (which isn't to say he shouldn't be handled somehow, but perhaps committed to a medical facility).
I don't feel good or bad about them being taken off-line, since I don't actually know what they hosted. I do feel bad about that decision being made by corporations behind closed doors.
It's more than just an analogy when the parent comment claimed that if you support one, you should support the other. I'm not disagreeing that the scenarios aren't analogous. I'm disagreeing that the same logic that makes one of those things essential to a functioning society should be tried to be wedged in as an argument for the other.
No one is entitled to income from their source of choosing. Government provides welfare, not whoever you want to do business with.
Yeah! The employees of organized criminal gangs need to feed their families too!
They're honest, hardworking people. Why should they be penalized because the repressive system in which they live persecutes them for extortion, robbery, murder, sex trafficking and the like.
Arresting them and putting them in jail is just cruel and unfair!
Isn't this the point?
It isn't a responsibility of the electricity company or the landlord to investigate or apply punishments in criminal matters. Arresting them and putting them in jail is something the lawful authorities do, and there is a due process for it.
I don't think 'organized criminal gangs' is an apt description of Parler given that.
Even though it's only a few hours ago, I'm not really sure exactly what point I was trying to make.
Which is kind of sad. I think I need some sleep.
If I can remember what the hell I was blathering on about after I wake up, I'll post again.
Thanks for calling me out.
Parler is not some rube. They are a company with access to legal counsel. They agreed to moderate their end users in accordance with Amazon’s content policy and chose not to. They made extremely stupid decisions they do not deserve to be coddled for.
The government, at some point, decided to regulate utilities. It certainly didn't create them or their monopolies. Most have a natural monopoly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly).
It was a good idea, at the time, and it's just helpful to update our list of what constitutes a utility.
Even this might be a slippery slope – in the URSS at some point it was common to put political dissidents in mad houses.
But it's not a problem as long as there is due process… which wasn't the case for Parler !
It's an analogy unto it's own, and it needs new guidelines. We're seeing them made as we progress.
Commercial leases usually have limited contractual clauses to allow eviction of paying tenants within the, usually 10 year, term.
Of course because AWS/GCS/MCS are sort of an oligopoly, they don't have long duration terms.
Regardless of what end of this debate you're on, I wouldn't be surprised if more customers didn't start asking for lease terms.
If I were really any right-leaning media organization I'd really hesitate going to a cloud provider without some sort of durable contract. Think about - is Fox News at risk if it's on AWS? What about The Wall Street Journal? Even Bloomberg has pretty right-leaning opinion pieces often... should they be worried about their content triggering a backlash since there's no contract?
...or maybe we'll just see a resurgence self-hosted platforms?
Also, in some situations here the landlord may lose the grounds to proceed if they won't press the issue as soon as they become aware of it. This is exactly to avoid situations where the one side arbitrarily decides throw the book on whatever the other's activities they can pin down on them.
(Whether the comparison is adequate depends ofc if AWS has consistently made complaints to Parler about the objectionable content. Their message included a part where they pointed out they had requested moderation action earlier, so I suppose they have.)
I can see the issues relevant to cloud hosting are different enough so that analogies are not 1-1 anyway. In general, it is a good principle that content that encourages violence and other illegalities is removed from the public. It would be still also a good idea to have procedures where the hosted party could protest if they are engaging in illegal acts or other breach of contract claimed by other party and the enforcement is applied equally.
Landlord is entirely justified in immediately changing the locks and contacting law enforcement after.
I don't think google should be able to simply lock people out of their accounts and data without any notice for them to take their data out. I was hit by this personally when google docs locked on of the documents I was working on for school at a time I critically needed it. Their given reason was simply "tos violations" despite nothing in the document being a violation and they unlocked the document 2 days later.
Like with rentals, they can deny me service at the start, but once they take me on to the platform, short of a gross abuse of the service, I should be entitled to a warning before the service is terminated.
Very? Well, they are very different. And it's in those ways that they differ where the reasons for the tenant protections exist..
Tells us you don't understand the purpose of regulation.
The entire premise that regulation is bad is a disinformation campaign against rational thought. Do you understand how regulation comes into existence? Regulation is the result of someone, some corporation, some city, some legal entity abusing the public's trust to the degree a law is enacted to oversee future such situations because the general public has proved it cannot self regulate this aspect of the public's trust.
You're statement that "it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad" is sheer lunacy. Are you listening to yourself? If I listened to your logic, I'd expect airplanes to be falling from the sky, computers are not possible, and the moon landed must be fake - because they is no way, the misunderstandings, the calculation problem, the unintended consequences... humbug.
We as a society have said that is not ok for phone companies to do. Why are we making exceptions for what is now services that are holding a large portion, if not the majority, of online sites and services at this time?
Also, what evidence has been presented of illegal activity on this app and proof they were not following Section 230 law and refusing to remove it? How were they handling things differently from Twitter (or any social media site for that matter), who also has these problems with their service, and why is Twitter still able to be up? No, I don't mean AWS claims they weren't doing it. I want to know actual evidence. If the post exists, their should be screenshots of them still up now, no?
At this point, cloud services have gotten so large that they probably need to be regulated at this point as a public utility is.
To say AWS is the same as a rental/tenant relationship is laughable. If it was, there would be millions of different cloud services one could go to and this would be a non-issue. But, it clearly isn't close to the same.
Also, if illegal activity is being done (and this stuff was handled like a public utility, as frankly that is the size of these cloud services at this point), then that needs to be handled in a court of law.
Maybe because they were shocked and horrified (as I and many other people were) at the assault on the US government?
Just a crazy thought.
And the protection for residential tenants isn't due to the difficulty of finding new accommodation, but the consequences of not finding new accommodation - homelessness. It's substantially harder for commercial tenants to find new space than for residential tenants, but they do not enjoy such protection as residential tenants, because the consequences - going out of business - are substantially less dire.
Given that anyone losing access to AWS faces consequences more along the lines of a commercial tenant being evicted, rather than a residential tenant being evicted, this analogy does not work.
Arguably web hosting is more important to Parler but that makes their lack of prior communication with their vendors like Amazon that much more inexplicable. There are (or were, last I checked) plenty of hosting providers that cater to controversial websites. They charge a premium for not doing this kind of thing. Seems like they tried to pinch pennies in the wrong place.
It happens to everyone in business at some point.
It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever.
Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am.
Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't
Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook.
Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line.
Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform.
You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have? Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!
Edit: utterly ridiculous. Imagine applying the same standards to other physical businesses. Image a bar not being able to evict an unruly patron without 90 days notice or a court order.
This is frankly completely unworkable. And I think once the EU gets off their high horse they’ll find they have to accept that too.
The stuff parler allegedly turned a blind eye to goes way beyond objectionable viewpoints and well into violating contracts.
Nope.
1. Kicking a company off of a cloud platform is not putting someone on the street without notice. Companies are not people, clouds are not beds.
2. It's the company's responsibility to manage risk, including the risk of getting kicked off of a platform. Most companies manage this risk by minimizing it - it's extremely easy, and well trodden territory. Things most companies will do is moderate content, it's pretty much dead simple. If your company won't do those things you'll have to mitigate risk in some other way.
3. You might argue "well companies aren't people, clouds aren't beds, but workers will lose their jobs". This is true, if the company has been poorly managed. But we already have nets for those situations. There's bankruptcy, unemployment, various tax benefits, notice to apply for a new job, etc.
I actually don't feel particularly compelled at all by your analogy.
Nevermind that maybe, just maybe, if your platform users advocate for violent revolution, you're going to have a harder go of things. Prior to approximately October, 2001, there was a taleban.com too. I didn't read any hand-wringing when they got the axe. Newsflash: At least Tor can't remove you.
The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom.
I think its more boring than that. Their platform was built by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Things like soft-deleting posts and auto-incrementing post IDs. This is why it was so easily crawled in a day before the shutdown.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parle...
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/
I believe they also for a long time had a public API^.. and I'm pretty sure they soft-delete posts (bonus that they could revive the tweet down the track if it was a 'mistake'). I don't think the Twitter team are amateurs though.
Having monotonically increasing IDs for non-distributed systems removes the possibility of duplicate IDs. In distributed systems ID conflicts are unavoidable, and you might have less conflicts if you generate random IDs, as well as it becomes difficult for an attacker to guess IDs.
^ likely it would have been rate-limited, which isn't a problem if you've got a large pool of users you can authenticate with
In parler's case, having monotonically increasing ID typed as signed 32-bit integer _guaranteed_ duplicate IDs once they reached 2.1 billion unique items. This is well-known failure mode, and yet it took them by surprise.
1) It invites resource enumeration attack
https://www.cequence.ai/use-cases/enumeration-attacks/
https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Forced_browsing
2) they ran out of ints. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before
It's easy to blame incompetence, but startups are startups and many things are hacked together in a hurry when you're growing fast.
They are getting kicked off AWS because of content that is absolutely criminal in nature, and their inability and inaction in moderating it.
If a platform has ANY illegal content what standard is then acceptable? If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? If someone found 90 examples of calls to violence on Twitter would that make it OK to deplatform them too?
This sounds like you're trying to get us to pretend along that Parler had a moderation policy that was in any way effective, equally applied, or not just pandering to the crowd it was trying to entice.
For instance:
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in...
(IMHO both Facebook and Twitter should be shut down. Size matters.)
This argument is problematic. In any criminal endeavor, what most of the criminals do isn’t illegal or even unusual.
When HSBC was laundering cartel money, they also served regular customers. They processed credit cards, gave loans and so on. 99.9999% legal activities and yet they were fined billions of dollars for fascinating money laundering operation of few murderous warlords.
This is about money and power, nothing else. Facebook is “too big to fail” so clearly it will never face any consequences, while Parler is a random little site that’s easy to pick on.
IMHO social media needs to be regulated, companies should not be able to simply cut you off from the rest of the public and you shouldn't be unaccountable for your actions and there must be ways for harm reduction. (if you tell/share a something, them maybe people affected by it should have right to equal exposure to challenge it. i.e. their POV could be attached to your post and everyone who interacted with your post receives a notification that the post was challenged)
My understanding is that the law simply says that doing _some_ moderation doesn't make you the publisher.
Maybe the techies with those skills dont want to work there and so the existing employees might not have the skills to do that.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-...
Parler hasn't seen 1/10th the the deplatforming that The Pirate Bay has seen for example, yet that managed to survive throughout the years and is still up now. The reality is that whoever was running Parler had no clue what they were doing.
Large divergences in worldview and values, combined with universal policies, create underserved market segments, and thus opportunities.
"Aid and abet" and "insurrection" are part of a framing that not everyone accepts.
anyone that tries to both sides this shit deserves eternal shame
I personally just want a social network were I don't have to worry about being banned every minute. (Not sure if PArler qualifies, but I suppose it is their selling point).
Funny how it's working out now…
No, it's on the open Web.
I hope they will be back, stronger than before.
"Matze said that Parler had faced trouble in finding a new service provider, ... He also said that others had refused to work with Parler: "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_onli...
It is probably easier to find an alternative hosting platform when you are booted from AWS because of porn. In the case of parler they also might need to migrate more data.
Soon people will understand why it was taken down.
I don't agree that "infringement of free speech" can happen in a commercial context. The right to free speech is the right that you cannot have government force act on you for what you are saying; e.g. the government has no right to tell you "don't say this or it will have consequences". As for private contracts: Trying to enforce "free speech" that must not be infringed upon in private contracts would also mean all NDAs are always void, and would be a huge intrusion into another liberty: That of entering into arbitrary agreements with each other.
The .cn regulator cracking down on Ant Financial because they did not like what Jack Ma said is an infringement on free speech. A private business actor deciding to terminate a contract because they don't like the business partner is not.
Related: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/midtown-uniform-patagonia-will-...
I think a lot of confusion comes from people who only acknowledge free-speech-as-legal-right encountering people who support free-speech-as-moral-principle.
My personal belief about why free speech should exist is that it helps us discover the truth, both morally and factually. As such, I think we should make spaces accessible that allow any idea to be discussed, even the ones we currently think are wrong, and if we limit speech we should do it such that no idea is rendered inexpressible. However, I understand that not every space should be a complete free-for-all, and I have no problem with limiting the way in which an idea can be presented to ensure politeness or harmlessness.
Within the scope of this belief, I find it obviously okay to deplatform speech up until doing so harms our overall ability to discover the truth. Past that point a tradeoff exists. I think that the removal of Parler is a tradeoff between the free speech of its users, vs the self-determination of Google, the potential harm done by Parler, and the existence of other spaces where ideas can still be discussed. While I therefore find removing Parler to be acceptable, I still feel that the moral principle of free speech must be applied to that decision, even if it's outweighed by other factors.
1. The moral principle of what should be platformed (which you agree is not everything) 2. The moral principle of free speech (which is what is in the constitution preventing the government from preventing freedom of expression)
Here's the rub, I think most people also support limiting extreme speech. IDK that there are many (any?) defenders of someone shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.
That, to me, indicates that the morality of limiting speech is more than just a simple binary choice "any limits are bad, no limits are good".
That's what "Free-speech-as-legal-right" is really trying to get at. It is the law trying to make the moral arguments for what free speech is and isn't and when it can be morally curtailed.
To me, the law has struck a decent balance. I don't think it's hugely immoral for a social media company to moderate their own content however they choose. Are downvotes in HN immoral? I don't think so. Do people here in HN believe flagged content is immoral or content that goes against the community rules? I don't think so.
To me, the only way this would be an issue is if Parler had no method to get their platform running. That's not the case. They can self host if they so choose. It isn't unreasonable for them to do that (many companies do).
That being said, I DO have an issue with ISPs choosing what content their customers have access to. That is mainly because a lot of people DON'T have a choice of provider. There is often only 1 high speed choice in a region. For them to filter or block content is a major issue.
Not really. There's not currently any huge controversy about banning spammers, DDoS attacks, or child pornography. A few fringe groups will argue it, but most sensible discussion concedes that censorship is useful and we need limits.
Parler's moderation policies caused their own problems. They decided they wanted to be a platform friendly to violent extremists. Their noted lack of moderation of violent rhetoric, calls to violence, and planning of violence made them a pariah.
Amazon is free to associate with whoever they want. They don't owe service to Parler or anyone else.
And it's not as if you can just go to the social media network down the street. Sites like Parler are trying to be those alternatives, and it's a tough business to even be #2 in.
Higher quality people might not like the seedy pawn shop in that strip mall with all the WW2 memorabilia, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to try to do business.
No part of AWS or Twilio fall under common carrier regulations. They can choose with whom they do business. They would and do cancel service for clients doing illegal things or against their TOS.
Amazon doesn't owe Parler a viable business. Parler made themselves into a toxic environment that drove third parties to abandon them.
If you're coming at this from the point of view who sees considers private companies doing the bare legal minimum to be fine and acceptable than pretty much everyone who think private entities should be more accommodating to speech than that is just going to look like various flavors of free speech absolutists/extremists.
I disagree with this argument not because I disagree with your conclusion, but because the issue is much, much darker.
It's not that folks are claiming "you must allow all speech," it's that they're saying "your free speech rights aren't as important as mine. As such, you should be forced to host/amplify my speech even if you don't want to do so."
That's not advocating for free speech, that's demanding that some folks' free speech rights be limited in favor of those of others.
And that's not only wrong, it's hypocritical and morally reprehensible.
These preachers set a great example of batshit old guy. Some times an amateur philosopher would debate them. Usually everyone in the audience came away convinced if the horrors of homosexual bigotry.
Where are people to see these shining examples and learn not to go down that path? How do they sharpen their arguments or even know the opposition?
The same place they've always been. On college campuses debating with philosophers. As well as everywhere else that happens.
I think we can agree that there is confusion but not on the type of confusion.
Even free-speech-as-moral-principle has limits, as defined by John Stuart Mill, who said that free speech can be curtailed when the expression causes harm. People get confused about this because they think free speech means all speech is free of consequence.
Inciting violence, coordinating death threats against individuals, and other similar expression causes harm.
There is no protection for calls to violence.
I don't think anyone has asserted that Parler or its employees are advocating violence.
This is a violation of AWS's TOS which is why they're breaking it.
The comment I was responding to was misleading IMHO ("the speech Parler is being kicked off AWS for").
As you point out, they aren't being kicked off "for speech" they are being kicked off for insufficient moderation of someone else's speech, which speaks to the difficulties of being an at-scale content provider.
Again though, we’re getting lost in the weeds here. Parler’s entire selling point, and the only reason it had any users or any product, was the implicit promise that “we won’t moderate content”.
Maybe they were, it'll be tricky to show it for certain from our vantage point, but it certainly doesn't help their case that the whole point of platform that they weren't going to moderate said content.
You can’t build a platform for organizing murders, knowingly allow users to organize murders on your site, and then claim it’s not your fault because technically you aren’t responsible for UGC. Surely there’s a line where it’s just a veneer of an excuse.
Is it possible to build a platform with user generated content that is agnostic regarding the content in the same way that a traditional telco is agnostic about the content of phone calls (or SMS)? Is the difference that the messages are private rather than public?
We don't expect telco's to create filters or to independently moderate or to block the content of phone calls or SMS messages and basically legal mechanisms must be used to trigger any action against a subscriber. I realize that this is largely due to the legal framework of a "common carrier".
What I'm asking is, what would a "common carrier" look like for platform that had user generated content? Perhaps it isn't possible?
But perhaps there simply is an inherent problem with being a platform for user-generated content and that it requires somewhat robust moderation to avoid being cancelled, sued, or arrested.
I think you need to define was "common-carrier" means.
As far as I'm concerned, once a message is deemed to be intended to be public, "common carrier" goes away for the service that is going to be broadcasting that message to others. The copper/fiber/etc. lines between me and Twitter are still a common carrier, because even though my Tweet is going to be public, the individual TCP packets going to Twitter are still intended to be private.
Any system for publicly posting messages that isn't moderated will be overwhelmed by bad actors, since bad actors will nearly always be kicked off of moderated platforms.
The problem with a social service behaving that way is everyone who tried the "anything goes" approach over the last 30 years started idealistic either gave up and added some rules or became a toxic cesspool.
That makes sense to me. There are zero social environments on earth where some type of obnoxious behavior won't get you thrown out. Why would the web be all that different?
--
To be clear, this is a hypothetical about idealists acting in good faith. Over the years we've also seen bad actors feign utopian motives to try and avoid responsibility for their actions, which is a different conversation entirely.
100%. Absolutely.
> We don't expect telco's to create filters or to independently moderate or to block the content of phone calls or SMS messages and basically legal mechanisms must be used to trigger any action against a subscriber. I realize that this is largely due to the legal framework of a "common carrier".
Not only do we not expect it, but the more privacy-oriented people expect it to not even be possible, and use things like end-to-end encryption that make it impossible for the carrier to know what the messages contain.
There were guillotine memes with 50k upvotes on reddit right before the "insurrection" happened!
Actually yours is the predominant view of those on the left and HN in general - “they are private companies so deal with it”. From a purely legal perspective, that view is almost certainly correct.
The issue is a societal one. Half the country isn’t just going to sit down and shut up because a few liberal billionaires told them to. They’ll create alternatives, and then we will have not just a philosophically divided country, but effectively two Internets - one for conservatives and one for liberals. Where does it end from there? Do hotels and restaurants in California demand to see proof that you are a registered Democrat before you are allowed to patronize them? Do liberal employers start carrying out mass firings of conservative employees?
We are seeing the beginnings of a country of ~300 million people being cracked in two, on a much deeper level than has ever happened before. I can’t think of something less American than a bunch of business owners ganging together to strangle the life out of a small business because they disagree with the politics of some its users.
But we are starting to break that norm, beginning with the natural wedges: commerce where the service or product _IS_ enabling the purchasing in a direct way. The question is if we can stop at _direct_ enablement or whether it will continue to indirect forms.
A scary example would be for Square to start refusing to process payments for ideological reasons.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/stripe-stops-processing-payment...
Except that's not what happened. Stripe didn't cut off the Trump campaign's ability to raise funds. They didn't block access to their bank accounts. They didn't freeze their assets.
Rather, one company (and they aren't even close to the largest player in that industry) chose not to process online credit card transactions for them.
The Trump campaign has many other online payment processors that it can do business with. They can still accept donations via many other means (checks, bank transfers, cash, etc., etc.).
A single company (which is just a group of people) decided they didn't want to do business with another group of people.
Stripe, it's shareholders and employees are under no obligation to do business with anyone.
And the fact that the customer is a political entity strengthens that, as their right to support (or not) any particular political entity, candidate or position is integral to a free society.
I don't see how people can make this argument with a straight face. If you accept that this one company should be allowed to decide to cut off someone for ideological reasons, you tacitly accept that all companies could cut someone off for the same reason. Hiding behind it being "only one" right now is to use a technicality to dodge having to defend the principle you are implicitly advocating. The action isn't more right or wrong because one or more company is doing it--you either defend the principle at full usage or you disavow it.
I'm not people. I'm just me and don't represent anyone else except myself.
As for it being "just one company," that isn't really important. It could be 10 or 100 or 1000 companies and I'd say the same thing.
And not because of the content of the political views being (or not) supported.
It has nothing to do with any of that.
If the government can force Stripe (or anyone else) to support a particular (it doesn't matter which one either) viewpoint by forcing them to associate with a person or group they don't wish to associate with, then they can force me (or you, for that matter) to do the same.
I can't and don't speak for anyone else. For me, it's about specific constitutional rights. I don't and won't support abridgement of those rights for anyone, whether I agree with them or not.
If you believe that it's just fine for persons or organizations to have their freedom of association rights abridged, then you are anti-freedom and stand in opposition to the liberties and ideals in my constitution.
And if that's true, then so be it. But don't try to pretend that your argument is anything other than an anti-liberty, anti-democratic (small d) one.
This is utter nonsense. For example, abridging a company's right to not "associate" with minorities/gays/etc, i.e. their right to not serve them, is not anti-liberty. If the goal is maximizing liberty, it takes targeted regulation to achieve the maximal state. Ensuring everyone can participate in the economic and social infrastructure is a feature of maximizing liberty.
I didn't realize that I needed to specify that this didn't apply to protected classes[0]. I assumed that was understood, but I guess not.
Yes, there are a number of groups (see link) which individuals and businesses are barred from discriminating against. But in this circumstance, that's irrelevant.
Because political affiliation is not a protected class under federal law, and even where it is (CA, NY and a few other states) that only applies to employment issues, not business-to-business contracts/transactions.
The right to political association has never been abridged, nor should it be. Any suggestion otherwise is, as I said, anti-liberty and anti-democratic.
Political choice is a bedrock principle of our system. And forcing anyone to support a political viewpoint they do not wish to support violates both settled constitutional law and the ideals of a free society.
Nitpick about protected groups if you like, but there's no "there" there.
The law is the law. We are a nation of laws. We are not a nation of "do what hackinthebochs wants."
For stripe, the example would be refusing to process any CC payments (as a consumer) for registered republicans whatsoever. Beyond it being foolish commercially, it is much more intrusive than a refusing a direct 1:1 contract.
Actually it is the predominant view, left and right. Except in this specific case, where the right doesn't like it.
> We are seeing the beginnings of a country of ~300 million people being cracked in two, on a much deeper level than has ever happened before.
The Civil War may beg to differ. The real issue is that we've never reconciled the divergent view point from that war. Race is still the largest dividing factor in this country and this incident was about race (and ego) more than anything else.
Show me an instance where anything remotely close to this happened - right leaning businesses banding together to take a left-leaning business entirely offline by cutting off all services to them. I’ll wait.
Civil War...
The Civil War occurred at a time when actual physical war was the predominant way that societal differences were settled. That is no longer the case, except perhaps in the minds of some of the idiots that stormed the Capitol.
But on an intellectual level, this event with Parler is akin to an act of modern civil war. When you endeavor to kill an organization, are you not in a sense declaring war on them? Further, was this action not designed to frighten others into getting in line with the ruling party, lest they suffer the same fate? While no guns were used, those seem very similar to the actions normally taken by those engaging in civil war.
An example is pirate sites or underground drug sites. Those are largely blacklisted -- and fit into a (far) left-leaning philosophy around a class of freedom. I'd argue most of those are less extreme than Parler.
> When you endeavor to kill an organization, are you not in a sense declaring war on them?
Isn't that what Trump wanted to do with the NFL after Kaep took a knee?
> Further, was this action not designed to frighten others into getting in line with the ruling party, lest they suffer the same fate?
Sure, in the same way that death penalty is meant to scare murderers.
You're trying to make this out to be a site of critical thinkers espousing different views that are being trampled on, while most everyone else recognizes it more like a revenge porn site.
You are comparing the exercise of freedom of speech to committing murder. Not quite the same thing in my opinion.
An example is pirate sites or underground drug sites. Those are largely blacklisted -- and fit into a (far) left-leaning philosophy around a class of freedom.
Those sites are offering illegal goods and services. That is why they are offline. Companies are generally ordered by law enforcement to take them down. Again...hardly comparable.
The point is they weren't only exercising free speech. They were inciting a violent riot.
> Those sites are offering illegal goods and services. That is why they are offline. Companies are generally ordered by law enforcement to take them down. Again...hardly comparable.
Again, the calls to march into the Capitol, provocation of violence, etc... are also illegal. But you won't find our government ever willing to take that stand. The distinction is less clear than you suggest.
Lets put it this way, no one is suggesting to blacklist the WSJ or the National Review. The Parler is the equivalent to an Antifa social media network for planning attacks on right wing establishments.
Speaking of Antifa...if Parler is equivalent to it...it’s bit hypocritical that they still have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/antifaintl?s=21
Note, Parler does have a Twitter account too. I have not heard people looking to ban that — so really not hypocritical at all.
Yet.
Except those are false equivalences. It's not "conservatives" that are the problem. And they aren't.
They have just as much right as anyone else to their point of view, political preferences and to advocate for them as anyone else.
However, those who would use violence, intimidation and lies to advance their political goals are not conservatives. Or liberals.
They are, at best criminal thugs and, at worst, radical insurrectionists bent on destroying our constitutional republic and the rule of law.
And calling such folks out for their behavior isn't a slap at "conservatives," because those who are honest when they call themselves that (at least in the US) want to preserve our constitutional system of government and the rule of law.
Don't conflate the two. Because they aren't even remotely similar.
That escalated quickly!
Given that being “censored” by sites like Twitter is also a big complaint of the far left (because it has happened a lot), my hope is that splintering to alternative sites won’t be so binary. Having 40 Twitter clones seems better to me than having just one or two.
This is the most American thing I can think of if you remove the last bit about "because of politics".
(1) There is a better solution. The problem is that they are monopolies. So bust the monopolies. Require interoperability — a proven solution in other industries. A service needs to be treated as a utility — meaning large amounts of regulation — when it is a natural monopoly, meaning there’s no practical way to avoid a monopoly. That’s not the case here. Don’t use a ton of regulation where a much smaller amount will do.
(2) It doesn’t solve the problem. A social network utility still needs moderation. How would making a social network a utility make the moderation decisions better than what you’re getting now? Complicating things, in the US the first amendment means the government can’t establish laws to limit free speech, so a public utility would have to be a minimally moderated cesspool.
I guess they want a monopoly in being the only platforms allowed to subvert democracies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...
https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/i-have-guns-and-ammo-v...
I used to love Glenn, But I don't know what happened to him after Snowden. He's been an unapologetic hypocritical bootlicker ever since.
> It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
Edit: It looks like Greenwald wasnt even wrong about what he said, people are just accusing him of lying for some reason
https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457?s=2...
Edit: Has the left accomplished all of its goals? No? Then it needs to figure out what its doing wrong.
https://images.theconversation.com/files/26668/original/ngww...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies...
https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...
Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act. Without Greenwald and Snowden the New York Times wouldn’t even touch the topic.
Snowden did not work on PRISM, nor did he ever claim to. He had failed a test necessary to even see data collected under Section 702, so he couldn't so much as see the data that PRISM ingested. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden-tri...
> and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.
No. It goes through the normal court order process where the company will push back if it isn't legit. Section 702 court orders can only request data for non-Americans outside the US, and the company that gets the order will have a good idea of whether this is true for a particular account.
> Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act.
The only illegal US program that they exposed was phone metadata collection. The pair of illiterates thought that PRISM was something supremely sinister (that anybody with the most rudimentary computing and reading skills can easily figure out it isn't), so they hyped that story a lot. People corrected Greenwald on Twitter on day one, but it took years for him to understand how much he botched that story, and his ego prevented him from issuing a correction. Instead, he just stopped talking about it and now only ever mentions phone metadata. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...
>Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube
The tweet you linked shows a post on parler dated November 16. That's not evidence the poster was an "active user of Parler". In fact, it suggests the opposite. All we know is he made one post in November.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106213432/https://parler.co...
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-breaking/...
So this claim is trivially falsifiable with even the most minimal journalistic effort.
So the parler exec probably looked at this list, checked to see if any one of these people used his platform, and found none did. Then he told Glenn. However, more people have since been charged.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/thirteen-charged-federal-cour...
This post from 2 weeks ago aged like a corpse.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarian...
Edit: congratulations drally you win
(Parler is run by a CEO who married a politically prominent Russian (not Russian-American) spouse with essentially zero ties to the USA.)
"Have you know shame Senator McCarthy"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/prosecutor...
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brazil-sergio-moro-corr...
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/glenn-greenwald-charged-...
His family has been threatened and he is constantly targeted by the far right in Brazil. How ignorant and naive you must be to call him a bootlicker?
You just feel betrayed that he went from criticism government to criticizing corporate, and to calling out the double standards in the culture that protect liberals, and punish conservatives, which as a "tolerant centrist" you should be against.
Instead you call him a gimp while it's your attitude that sounds like unapologetic hypocrisy feverishly licking the boots of whoever you're no longer allowed to criticize... As George Carlin (i think) said, that tells you who's in charge and what they fear. I'm sure they thank you for supporting their cause.
> they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections.
Not stripping EXIF data, getting social security number from users, using the trial version of their IAM system, poorly coded allowing everyone to exfiltrate the data and god knows how many other exploits. So much for privacy...
> As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family
Yeah, what happened to that? Looks like they suddenly stopped caring about that, and no one ever managed to corroborate the obviously fake news pushed by NYP. Let's not forget how Carlson went on a whole fake drama about "losing incriminating papers", but then when UPS found the papers, suddenly Carlson says he no longer wants to spill secrets about hunters private life... What?
This whole thing is BS. The Pirate Bay was deplatformed orders of magnitude harder than Parler ever did and they survived just fine. Parler was just created by a bunch of people who had no clue what they were doing, and they crumbled by their own inaptitude.
Tired of these bullshit conspiracy theories running rampant on certain media platforms. There have been dozens of them since the election alone and not a single one has been validated. You would think people would be tired of being obviously fooled over and over, but it seems every time another fake story comes along, they take the bait.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarian...
Just last week, all of right wing media was full of posts about those 3 people at the capitol being antifa. Their proof? A cropped image of Q Shaman at a BLM protest (coincidentally cropping his Q sign), and a Google Image Search finding a photo of the other two guys on phillyantifa.com, even though clicking on the page showed that it was an article about white supremacists.
Feel free to come back and post here once the hunter biden "fiasco" gets resolved, but the fact that Tucker Carlson suddenly decided that he no longer cared right after receiving his "highly incriminating secret papers" tells me everything I need to know about the drama.
Trump's own children literally got jobs at the white house, ffs. The hypocrisy is deafening.
One politician being corrupt does not reduce the likelihood of another politician being corrupt.
At least two of the messages were DKIM-authenticated by an unrelated third party. Combine that with:
* The FBI, the DOJ, and the DNI all refuting the "Russian disinfo" theory
* Biden's campaign explicitly refusing to call the emails inauthentic
* Pics of Hunter in compromising positions
* The laptop being the subject of a grand jury subpoena
...and there's more evidence pointing towards the story's legitimacy than away from it. In fact, that leaves the only real thing pointing away as "it's a sketchy-ass tabloid", which is adhom at the end of the day.
Perhaps these companies are all secretly happy for the excuse, but there’s no question they did the right thing in this case.
The president and his supporters are unrepentant, proud of their successes, and will do more if they can.
Additionally: wasn't there a post recently about the investors being unknown? I read speculations about a Mercer involvement but other than that little is known. How can Greenwald make naive assumptions like this only looking at the public figures? Aren't there connections to Russia that had to be investigated? (Can't find source right now, it's on HN though)
If Parler had done this, the ways they could have been "destroyed" would have been:
1. refusal to provide DNS for their address
2. refusal to certify an SSL certificate (not absolutely required but more than just a detail in 2021)
3. refusal by an ISP to carry their bits
Instead, Parler followed the unfortunate dumbification of online presence over the last 20-30 years, and instead of doing the above, contracted with a large corporation to take care of things for them. The large corporation decided they didn't want to do that anymore, and Parler lost its online presence.
Parler is not exactly unique in having made this choice. But perhaps the consequence of the choice they made might convince more people/organizations/corporations to think a bit more clearly about the type of hosting infrastructure they really want/need. If Parler had followed the self-hosted pathway, I think it is extremely unlikely (though sure, not impossible) that they would be offline at this point.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/amazon-godaddy-boots...
I can't find an obvious link between godaddy and epik (though one may exist).
Their current DNS service is provided by ... AWS :)
I'm not convinced that the quote from godaddy is technically informative here, though using the word "registrar" would seem to be more indicative of something other than hosting.
Source: a thread on the forum
Domain Name: AR15.COM
Registry Domain ID: 984217_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.epik.com
Registrar URL: http://www.epik.com
Updated Date: 2021-01-12T19:30:31Z
Creation Date: 1997-03-28T05:00:00Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2023-03-29T04:00:00Z
Registrar: Epik Inc.
Correct. Even more interestingly if you backorder a domain name owned by another person and that domain name expires, the creation date reflected in the WHOIS record once you obtain it will be the previous owner's creation date, not the date you obtained the domain. I think this behavior varies by registrar but that is how it seems to function on GoDaddy.
Given the amount of time it's been openly operating, if there was anything done related to gun trafficking, the ATF would have shut it down long ago.
Just because a site has a LEGAL private sales section and you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's "trafficking".
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/pirated-academic-database-sc...
Strongly disagree. The comments here would be overwhelmingly in support with crap like "you can't force a private company to give you a certificate!"
>"ISRG may, in its sole discretion, refuse to grant Your request for a Let’s Encrypt Certificate, including for any lawful reason stated or not stated in this Agreement."
From:
https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-201... (Section 3.3)
Reading the rest now to see if they can revoke.
Edit. Aaaand there it is:
>"You also acknowledge and accept that ISRG may, without advance notice, immediately revoke Your Certificate if ISRG determines, in its sole discretion, that [...]
(v) You have violated any applicable law, agreement (including this Agreement), or other obligation;
(vi) Your Certificate is being used, or has been used, to enable any criminal activity (such as phishing attacks, fraud or the distribution of malware);
(ix) ISRG is legally required to revoke Your Certificate pursuant to a valid court order issued by a court of competent jurisdiction;
(x) this Agreement has terminated; or
(xi) there are other reasonable and lawful grounds for revocation "
Refusing to grant the initial cert. seems unlikely for a new organization, so revocation is the key problem. And indeed (xi) is a problem there.
I wonder if LE really thinks this way. Their primary role is to say "foobar has certified that they really are foobar". I wonder how suspectible they are to the sorts of considerations that have driven FANGT to take the steps that they did.
Here's the full quote:
>Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
Here's the EFF article about it with some good links for context:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/fighting-neo-nazis-fut...
Neo-nazis who claimed that Cloudflare supported them.
when my code doesn't work. I send in the murder hornets for retaliation.
the latter requires much less knowledge and enginnering than the former.
the process has been dumbified
Get an instance, choose some linux distro image that comes with ssh and nginx installed, start it up, configure a few files, grab an elastic IP, you're done.
I set up the first public web server in the pacific northwest in 1993. It wasn't that hard, but mostly because I already admin'ed the machine(s) it ran on anyway.
4. Their hosting provider could pull the power/network from their cabinet.
5. Law enforcement could just come and get their servers.
Both of which definitely happened in the 90s, and no one complained about.
Against: ISP needs to cover more than just the last mile, and for everything except the last mile, competition seems like a positive thing (though potentially wasteful).
So I'd like to see all physical layer providers bound to absolute net neutrality (service and contracts can never be pulled based on contet), and the last mile regulated similarly to other utilities.
Jeff Bezos wants us to think of Amazon as a utility, but this is obviously one way that it is very different.
5 doesn't really cover the scenarios that I think we're talking about. Yes, if you believe that we live in a fascist, near-fascist or just plain punitive state, then fear of law enforcement is probably going to make this concern rank fairly high for you. But I think for most of us, if law enforcement is coming to remove your servers from a colo facility, something much bigger is going on.
2- Signing an SSL certificate is a one-time thing.
3- A bit more complicated but still doable to have fiber to more than one ISP. To say nothing about net neutrality.
Certificates are definitely the weak spot here, as many of them already have a poor track record regarding security so probably poor spines too. Certificates requires central authority somewhere in the chain, and if they don't let you in, you don't stand a chance. Self-signed certificates are not gonna fly for most parts, unless you teach people to self-validate certificates with out-of-band ones.
Which might cover incitement to insurrection.
Some still sell 2 or 3 year certificates but that's a marketing ploy. You pay the price for the next 3 years in advance but you still have to renew it every year.
[1] https://docs.digicert.com/manage-certificates/end-2-year-pub...
1. You should be running your own authoritative DNS, it's not hard. The only thing that can really happen to you is your registrar pulling your domain name, so you need to have a bunch registered piratebay-style. You should also own your IP space but that can be a bit pricey -- but once you own it it basically can't ever be revoked and you can advertise it to whoever you wish.
2. I sincerely doubt Let's Encrypt / ISRG would blacklist a domain name for cert issuance. Even if they did there's a whole lotta roots in the trust stores, I'm sure you'd find an issuer happy to make you a cert for a fee.
3. I deal with T1/T2 carriers in $dayjob and I promise they don't give a triangular shit about what you push through their pipes, given the constant stream of phishing/spam/ddos/malware they're happy to carry as long as someone pays the bills.
The author knows that these companies aren't actually monopolies, so he insinuates that the whole region (Silicon Valley) is a monopoly. And one of these companies (Amazon) it isn't even located in the Silicon Valley region; it's located in the state of Washington.
So really the author has expanded the target of the ire to a whole industry. That is to say, the tech industry has a monopoly on the tech industry.
Further, the investigation is related to Amazon's retail marketplace business, not Amazon as a provider of cloud infrastructure. What is congress investigating Amazon for? I think you need to be more specific.
1. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law "In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws that regulate the conduct and organization of business corporations and are generally intended to promote competition for the benefit of consumers."
Now are they competitive? Maybe, but that's not the same thing as being a monopoly.
2) Antitrust accusations are relatively low cost to make and sometimes used as cheap political tools to score points with a base, despite not having a chance to go anywhere.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
There is no distinction between "platform" and "publisher" in Section 230.
And you can't "lose" your section 230 protections. Section 230 protects every person and every device in the US. There are no limitations to that.
Because Section 230 isn't what you think it is. The important part says (paraphrase):
"You can't be sued for something another person says." Full stop.
That other person can be sued.
If you personally engage in illegal or tortious activity, you can be prosecuted or sued.
But you can't be prosecuted or sued for what someone else says.
That's Section 230. That's it. Full stop.
That's as may be. However, none of that is the law.
I strongly agree that Facebook, Twitter, et al have disproportionate influence due to the strong network effects of their user bases.
And I believe that we should take steps to limit that power and influence. However, modifying/repealing Section 230 is not the way to do so.
In fact, reducing or eliminating the protections of Section 230 would have the opposite effect, because only those with deep, deep pockets could continue to operate in a world without Section 230.
I made other suggestions[0] which I think could help by providing other places for people to go.
Any success would depend on folks voting with their feet. Let's make that easy to do and give people a better, more positive experience, with more privacy and choice and less ads and tracking, and people will run away from these monsters.
I'll say it again. Repealing/weakening Section 230 would hurt everyone else much more than it would hurt Facebook and Twitter. In fact, it would significantly harm free speech on the Internet -- which is what Section 230 was designed to (and has done for 25 years) protect.
Thanks for beating me to it.
While it's a shame when the HN crowd takes down a site due to us mobbing it, given the number of folks who are seriously confused about Section 230 I wouldn't mind if techdirt took that hit.
It would save me (and you) from having to post that link every 25 minutes or so.
EDIT: I think we have enough to discuss here without bringing up hypothetical situations that would make us all very sad.
If you can be booted from Amazon because it's a private company then you can also be refused service by your ISP. And there's an argument to be made that, at some point down the chain (AWS, DNS, ISP) you should have a right to internet access. Should Amazon be forced to offer unconditional access to Parler? Probably not. But right now there's nothing stopping ISPs from cutting people's internet connection just because they don't like what the customers are doing with it, and that's a much thornier issue.
Regulating ISPs like utilities would delineate a clear line in the sand for problems like this.
Other technologies that build upon the basic connectivity are much more subjective in their entitlements. I.e. you could run your own DNS name servers, so perhaps something like DNS or DDoS protection is viewed more as an open-market opportunity on top of the utility.
The barest of essentials for a self-operated cloud service would be IP connectivity, public TLS CA and domain registrar. Maybe we should look at these technology features in the same way we do frequency control, voltage and standardization in the electrical grid. DNS, compute, storage, DDoS protection, et. al., would be analogous to all of the various appliances you have connected to your electrical system at home or work.
I'd go further than that. Requiring ISPs to be dumb pipes (that means no port blocking or throttling, among other things) can reduce the power and influence of the large social media players by making it easier to host your own data[0][1][2] and share what you want with whom you want.
No middlemen, no abusive data mining/tracking, etc.
But doing so requires that ISPs are not gatekeepers, just suppliers of bandwidth/routing.
[0] https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation_guides
This is a bad, needlessly hyperbolic analogy. The reasons there are regulations prohibiting the shutoff of utilities is that these are basic needs without which people can be directly harmed (often very seriously, if you cut off heating in the winter, etc...).
There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account.
I'm not saying I disagree that some level of regulation is appropriate. But this issue is (for somewhat obvious reasons) being wildly overstated. Parler was shut down for explicitly violent rhetoric which inspired real political violence, period.
Surely everyone agrees that this particular speech should have been banned, right? We just disagree about the specifics of how it should be done. If so, why are we screaming so loud about "Silicon Valley" showing "Monopolistic Force"?
Is hyperbole really the answer here? Or is it an attempt to deflect discussion from things that seem a little more important at the moment?
Canada considers internet access a basic human right, and it's pretty clear the rest of the world will move in that direction shortly.
I think it's very clear you can harm a person by cutting them off from the world / loved ones, news, etc. Especially in communities that have no outside access other than internet based.
Maybe not Parler specifically, but certainly internet access. And if the vast majority of the world and people around you are getting news and info and social life from <website>, it could be argued that denying access to <website> will harm a person.
They also weren't banned. Their hosting provider refused to continue hosting them. There are thousands of competing companies out there they can take their business to.
Tons of companies host their own infrastructure.
If we grant that the reason we're currently in this crisis of democracy is that people are addicted to an outrage machine (stop the steal, #resistance, whatever), then maybe it's our job to get us off the train.
Why can't banning Parler just be about banning Parler and not an assault on democracy or whatever? I mean, we all agree that the kind of speech banned should be banned somehow, right?
>Canada considers internet access a basic human right, and it's pretty clear the rest of the world will move in that direction shortly.
Having a Parler account and having access to the internet are two different things.
Funny that you mention Canada. Parler would likely have trouble existing as a Canadian entity due to Canada’s hate speech laws and the courts’ propensity to leave carriers exposed to liability for hosting content that violates those laws.
Also, the Canadian government has a broad power to restrict speech in times of crisis through the War Measures Act. They could easily have switched a site like Parler off if a similar event occurred.
In my head I would liken your ISP to the USPS or a utility, while platforms I would liken to the press.
Using that same technique, I can say "Comparing internet access to being able to use your toaster is the height of disingenuous absurdity". You can see why this technique isn't really legitimate and should be avoided in public arguments.
This is not a switch, but a spectrum. Monopolies/oligopolies should be either broken down or regulated. Electrical companies should be more regulated, cloud providers less regulated, social networks perhaps much less regulated.
I frankly don't think social networks are that important at all, but I am trying to account for my biases. For many people and organizations, they are not really like a newspaper, a comparison many make here - they are more like a printing press, or a radio transmitter or something. If one company owns the entire radio spectrum or all the printing presses, it ought to be regulated.
Sure.
> You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house
Uh... are you sure you understand what it means for something to be a utility?
Governments and police can absolutely cut power to your house if you hole up inside and broadcast death threats. They've done so for far less [1] [2].
[1] https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20160928/electricity-...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-angeles-shut-off-water-powe...
You probably wouldn't need to cut their power in order to stop the broadcast. Just call the local police.
Come think of it, in my original analogy, it would be more like cutting power to an entire condo building because one resident is broadcasting death threats.
Not if we aren’t first regulating lower levels of the internet infrastructure that way. Starting with ISPs, DNS providerd, etc. And even if we were doing the lower levels, it still wouldn't be, but we might relieve the perceived need.
What amount to algorithmically assembled personalized magazines, like all the newsfeed-focussed social media outlets, are pretty much the least utility-like and most-media-outlet like (hence, the name) parts of the internet, and regulating them like state-directed utilities makes as much sense as treating the New York Times as a state-directed utility.
I do not have anywhere near this level of choice in Social Media.
In my opinion the question of whether or not these companies should be regulated has nothing at all to do with whether they more resemble media companies or they more resemble utilities.
You don't have to use social media to be online. But if all 5 ISPs decide to cut you off, you can't even access your social media accounts.
Seriously, secure the lower parts of the stack first. This administration went and did the exact opposite of that by repealing net neutrality. I have no sympathy for them if their ISP cancels their accounts. It's called reaping what you sow.
For social media you have: Facebook (Instagram, Whatsapp), Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, WeChat, TikTok. And these are just the ones with > 100 million users. You can find way more with users in the tens of millions or less.
1. https://ilsr.org/repealing-net-neutrality-puts-177-million-a...
This just reminded me there are laws, such as changing one's name, which require things to be announced in one or more prominent local papers (which laws depends on your state and local governments).
I'm not totally sure if that's evidence against making a "utility" social media or for making a "utility" newspaper.
Facebook is not really an "magazine". In this analogy, it's more like a print shop or a point of sale, except that 3 giant corporations own all the printing equipment/all the newspaper stands, and they decided to stop printing/selling NYT because some opinion piece in there used bad language.
There are degrees of regulation; people on HN tend to like "net neutrality", and I don't think many people are against anti-discrimination laws for businesses, so why not "hosting neutrality" where cloud platforms, oligopolic in particular, don't get to kick people off their hosting just because they supposedly disagree with them?
I'm not sure I like that solution.
you might be on to something...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...
But the evidence in this article didn't seem to match the claims. To prove that Parler banned people with different political views, they show a screenshot of CEO John Matze posting this message:
>To all the ANTIFA supporters who have been spinning up Parler accounts... next time you should leave your chat server private... Im pretty sad you guys kicked me out... PS. Your VPNs can't save you
The article author treats that as evidence that Matze indiscriminately kicked out people who identify as part of Antifa. I think it's hard to tell from that screenshot alone, but my reading of the quote is that Matze found a public chat server where Antifa members were conspiring to create Parler accounts strictly for the sake of disrupting the platform. I don't view this as political censorship.
The article also paints Matze as hypocritical for banning Parler users who disrupt conversations by spamming porn or pictures of feces. That doesn't seem hypocritical to me, either. You can be welcoming to alternative viewpoints while still enforcing rules that encourage constructive discussion.
If they are just unhappy with the way their hosting providers behaved, and what arguments they used to explain their eviction, then, well, it's understandable.
The 'Freedom of Speech'-line of reasoning is invalid in a laissez-faire context, though it _is_ however an argument I'd expect to bee seen as valid by several large crowds between the political extremes.
The problem I see that everyone sees e.g. Parler as so toxic that they expect their reputation to increase, on average, for kicking them away. It's the low tolerance to dissent and the high social opinion pressure what is troubling, not the action.
Take away that government-giveaway, and the problem is solved.
The CDA was always a bad idea.
For anyone who may be confused, please see:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201030/09165945621/your-...
Without section 230, companies can carry whatever content they like, but they’re legally liable for it.
A common carrier is not responsible for the content they carry, as long as they carry it for customers without discrimination.
In exchange for serving the public good, common carriers are granted the privilege of immunity.
Section 230, however, eliminates that exchange — a government grant of privileged immunity, in exchange for nothing — while also having editorial control over what they publish.
Also you can't realistically remove section 230, the risk is too high. Say a rogue user uploads an illegal image to your site, you've now hosted this illegal image which is a felony. Even if you delete it quickly, you've already committed the crime by hosting it in the first place. It's completely impractical to run any internet service without this protection.
Not if they operate as a common carrier —- just like how the phone company cannot be sued for carrying calls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
It's worth noting that in 2015, ISPs were granted status as common carriers, but that was removed in 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
You said:
>Section 230 of the CDA is the government getting in the way of business; granting these businesses privileged immunity such that they can have all the advantages of operating as a common carrier, while actually operating as a publisher.
Section 230 doesn't "grant these businesses privileged immunity." Section 230 applies to all persons and all devices connected to the Internet in the United States.
It provides that you cannot be sued for something another person says. That's it.
And it applies to you and me and Hacker News and fuckfacebook.pro and Twitter and your github repo, your favorite twitch channel and any other internet user or resource when more than one person can share bits.
If there was no section 230, it would destroy free speech on the Internet.
Let's take HackerNews as an example. Without Section 230, if the owners of HackerNews continued to allow up/downvotes/flags, they would be liable to be sued for any content they did not delete that anyone chose to sue over.
Given that they almost certainly can't afford that sort of liability, they would have three choices:
1. Do not allow any third-party content (user submissions, user comments), which would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of the site except as a place to drop PR pieces for YC companies;
2. Do not perform any moderation at all. Which would include spam, porn and all other manner of ridiculous, offensive and/or irrelevant material, or;
3. Shut down the site.
And that would be true for all sites (including github repos, mailing lists, mastodon instances, most web sites, etc., etc., etc) except those with deep enough pockets to be able to fight the innumerable lawsuits.
Who would that be? Facebook, Twitter and Google. The very people you decry would be the only ones who could afford the liability in a world without Section 230.
That is, exactly, what you're wrong about.
This is specious; said blanket immunity is a privilege, and we do not demand any concessions in return. We allow platforms (happier?) to profit from the benefits of operating as a public square and an editorial publisher, simultaneously.
> If there was no section 230, it would destroy free speech on the Internet.
Prior to the CDA’s passage in 1996, the internet provided almost unlimited, unhindered free speech. What we have now pales in comparison.
If you think existing protections for common carriers and “mechanical distributors” are not strong enough, then we can surely update them for the internet.
However, that does not even remotely begin to justify the give-away that 230 represents. If we’re going to grant the privilege of immunity to platforms such that they can safely privatize the public square, we ought to demand they actually make some concessions to operate like actual public squares.
The only reason you're able to have this conversation with us is because of Section 230. Without it, the only people left on this site would be spammers, trolls, and racists.
I can assure you, we did.
The evidence suggests users like moderated spaces. Otherwise wouldn't your utopias of unmoderated free speech still be flourishing? Why aren't you on Usenet right now, and making your arguments over there?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Moderated_and_unmoderat...
They are fine with people getting burned, scammed, defrauded all in the name of a kamikaze style capitalism.
We can't live it to billionaires and their profit-orientated companies to fix things.
Somebody needs to copy paste the Mark Twain quote.
Its like a a half dozen interdependently owned companies each choosing on their own to not associate with Parler.
If you piss off everyone at the same time and everyone decides to not do business with you, thats not a monopoly issue.
that's patently untrue. it's untrue in the simplistic sense that you can access the internet with non-mobile technology, and its even untrue in the slightly less simplistic sense that an organization can provides its online presence as a website (gasp!) so as to avoid the need to have an app available on corporately-controlled stores.
Not to mention the fact that if you're kicked out of only one of the two you're basically finished if you live on network effect. If Google decided to kick Whatsapp out of the Android store, even those who have iPhones would have no reason to use it any more.
Actually, what is written is, and I quote, "a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler." But I'm sure that was an innocent mistake on your part, not a straight-up lie like you accuse Greenwald of.
"a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler."
So Greenwald reports that there were 13 people, a number small enough to stretch credulity, and they all happen to be inactive. The thrust of this statement, that it was a handful of inactive accounts is functionally the same as saying that there weren't any Parler users involved in the insurrection.
13 inactive accounts vs no accounts has little meaningful difference in meaning.
He did not make this assertion in the article. Quote:
>Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.”
Oh? Where did he say that? I'd like to read what he said with context.
Edit: on reading the article, his source for the assertion seems to be Parler employees: "Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler."
He reported that on Twitter as "Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero."
I think that's bad journalism even if you agree with his conclusions. It's single-sourced and the source has every reason to downplay their involvement in the events of January 6th. I think that at the very least, Greenwald should have checked those 13 users to see if they had active Parler accounts, rather than just taking Parler's word for it.
Further, the number is inaccurate. The DoJ press release (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/thirteen-charged-federal-cour...) says 13 people were charged in federal court, and 40 were charged in superior court. That was as of Friday; I can't quickly find info on whether or not more people were charged over the weekend, but then again, I'm not a professional journalist.
Parker was destroyed when their business partners exercised freedom of association and cancelled on them.
Everybody can see that in the last few years banning got centralized, there’s no real competition between the big companies anymore on free speech. Like others have written it, it’s a cartel at this poimt.
Of course the CEO's answer was all non-answers. Nobody was surprised of that.
Then Mark was asked personal questions and he was shocked...the same questions that he knows about everybody in the world.
Truth is it was good PR to obliterate Parler for everyone involved and they weren't a big enough player to be able to fight back.
Also, it's worth looking at some of the hacked info that was released - Parler had a serious moderation system, but it was used to make sure people had MAGA viewpoints, not to prevent violence. This is not some free and open platform, it was a controlled one that purposely built an echo chamber of violent rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc., and while they may not do an ideal (or even good) job at it, the fact is they're broad platforms used for a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people and are absolutely not comparable to Parler.
Also, during the riots of 2020, it was extremely common to find calls to violence in twitter that weren't deleted.
They are perfectly within their rights as a private business to make those exceptions. Is it fair? No. Would we much rather they apply things consistently? Yes.
The question is, do we want to enforce who and what they can and cannot allow on their platform via law, or do we want private businesses to control who they are allowed to do business with?
These free-speech advocates still have the ability to create mastodon instances or a listserv or something else where a company doesn't have that leverage over them. They still have options and this crying is overblown.
If anything, we should be more bothered that people consider something like AWS or any of the other major clouds, core infrastructure akin to backhaul or electricity. (Google Play and the App Store have always had very clear TOS rules that limit certain types of content so I don’t even see them as being part of the discussion.)
I fundamentally agree that something like Parler, as abhorrent as much of its content was, has the right to exist somewhere on the internet, but I just as fundamentally disagree that Amazon should be forced to provide them with services or that we should equate having a right to exist with “having the right to exist on X’s brand of compute.”
What a store can’t do (at least in the US), is say, “we won’t let you shop here because your skin color is this, or you’re from this part of town, or you practice this religion, or are this sexual orientation.” Now, if a person who matches one of those descriptions and chooses to violate rules and screams at people in the middle of the store, they can be denied service for that reason, just not on the basis of their race or religion, etc.
Parler violated AWS’s terms of service. I’m not going to be obtuse pretend that the type of political ideology that Parler actively seeks out/evangelizes/caters to, doesn’t make them a target, of course it does. That doesn’t negate the fact that the TOS was violated and there was no real plan of action from excising content that violated Amazon’s TOS from the platform. (Although I want to be clear, getting a bunch of conservative celebrities and Fox News hosts on your platform as a way to try to buy respectability doesn’t mean that the rhetoric extolled by Parler CEO and championed by the service is mainstream or even mainstream conservative. Parler was/is a place that was not about free speech but about pro-Trump speech; dissenters were banned from the service, which is Parler’s right, but it was hardly a “free speech” platform.)
Again, I’m not arguing Parler doesn’t have the right to exist. But I am arguing that AWS shouldn’t be obligated to host it. I’m also arguing that as big as AWS and the other clouds are, they are not yet at the point of being true pieces of immovable infrastructure. And honestly, I hope they never are. Even those of us who don’t shed any tears for Parler, probably agree that we don’t want to live in a world where the only options for hosting a website or app belong to a FAANG.
If it were an issue of an ISP or a backhaul provider denying access to the service, I would be the very first person criticizing and standing up to the action. But that’s not what happened here. Someone came into a store without shoes, without a shirt, without a mask, screaming in the face of the employees and other customers. They aren’t allowed to shop at that store anymore. But a store that might be a little further away is still an option.
We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
Now obviously it's a blurry line, but again, the neo-Nazis storming the capital and their ilk are just way over the line. Just because it's blurry doesn't mean we have to pretend it doesn't exist out of some sense of fairness.
> We need to stop pretending like everyone's viewpoint is equal and we shouldn't exclude people for what they believe. Violent racists should be ostracized and pushed out of society. People who choose to have those kinds of beliefs are a constant threat to the safety of people around them.
I will hard disagree with this every day of the week. To me this is a clear example of how ideology has taken the place of religion in today's society. It's no longer enough for you to be civil and respect the laws, but even having the wrong thoughts is considered criminal, just like lust and envy are considered sinful in religion.
We're heading in a dark direction if we're re-adopting the same principles and perspectives that were behind McCarthyism, let alone used to burn witches and conduct the Inquisition.
And this would be an issue if we were actually talking about government action, but we are talking about private individuals deciding who they will associate with. When the government gets involved then you have reason for concern, but if this is private parties engaging in commerce you have absolutely no leg to stand on.
(cue the desperate, too-cute-by-half arguments "but are they REALLY inciting violence?")
It's a bad faith argument, yet it's everywhere. I'd think HN would be better than that, yet here we are, having the same fight every time free speech is the topic.
Also note that the parent mentioned "government action" whereas the GP is referring to a business taking action. The distinction is incredibly important, yet so many free-speech purists respond to corporate action as if it was a government action.
Less sarcastically, do you agree that the amplification of thought and rhetoric possible using social media isn't something that was considered 500 years ago? i.e. having wrong thoughts isn't dangerous, but having 75 million followers and pushing your wrong thoughts on them is dangerous. It isn't thoughts any longer - it's an action.
Speech is a kind of action, isn't it?
Well then it's a good thing being kicked out of a bar isn't "prosecution".
The US tends to bias towards letting market pressures take care of this sort of thing, and then stepping in if there are enough high-profile cases of failure.
There are also a bunch of edge cases that I think most people would be ok with. There are conservative-only dating sites. I wouldn't be allowed on the platform, but that doesn't really bother me. If there was a republican-only grocery store, that gets sketchy. And if there was a democrat-only government program, that would clearly be illegal.
It depends on the context.
Political affiliation is a protected class for employment in some states[0].
Political affiliation is a protected class for accommodations such as grocery stores in DC[1] and Madison, Wisconsin[2].
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits
[2] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
In Parler's case, the issue isn't that they are conservative. The issue is that they refuse to take any responsibility for the hate and violence on their platform. John Matze had every opportunity to take responsibility for the content, but he was vocal that he would not do anything about it.
If I were running a cloud provider company, I wouldn't want anything to do with this behavior either. Who cares whether the users lean right or left - hate and violence are unacceptable.
That surprises me. "Political opinion" is not a protected class [1] in most jurisdictions in the US, and I assume that the same holds for whatever the local equivalent is to protected class. Especially considering that a lot of European countries also have laws that prohibit Holocaust denial--which are unconstitutional in the US per the 1st Amendment.
[1] Protected class, in US discrimination law jargon, is an attribute that you cannot legally use to discriminate against. The usual protected classes are sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity, although there is some variation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (e.g., military service is protected in my state).
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
There are other laws that prevent business owners from denying people entry or removing somebody from their store or similar (see Supreme Court decision NJA 1995 s. 84). They can’t even prevent people who have historically stolen from them from coming in and spending time in the store. But apparently they don’t have to do business with them. I thought they did.
Can a business in the US refuse you service if you're gay / black ?
Same argument applies.
Had Parler done this these companies wouldn’t have distanced themselves from them. But also their whole brand is enabling those accounts so had they blocked those accounts they wouldn’t have a community.
It's not about illegal content. It's about politics and ethics. (And private companies can choose to do or not do business with whomever they want - except a few protected things. But there's a gay wedding cake somewhere too in this. Free association and free speech. Ethically it's hard to coerce anyone to say or not say something, and to host or not host some content.)
Furthermore, there's the power imbalance aspect. Twitter banning SciHub is probably Twitter abusing its power, Twitter banning Trump is less likely an abuse. (Though there very well could be and are exceptions.)
By all means "deplatform" Facebook, please, but why would you condone that and condemn deplatforming Parler? makes no sense.
I've made this exact argument. It's a blatant double standard that Youtube or Twitter, as you said, aren't held liable for the content their users upload, but Amazon and Google can deplatform whoever they want for whatever they want.
I've read a joke that we're officially in a cyberpunk world now that corporations are "going to war" with each other. I've thought that our society has been heading towards civil war for years, but only in the past year with so many riots and corporate overreach have I started to believe it might actually come sooner than later.
It isn't perfect but they are actively and publicly doing so. Parler publicly seems to take the stance of no to little moderation. I haven't read the hacked info from the site on principle of how it was distributed/hacked but seems that data confirms it based on others notes in the thread
If its the latter, then lets continue to deplatform people. If its the former, then lets ban facebook, twitter et al given their proven history of allowing violence and hate speech and as an essential tool to organize mobs.
The logic here is terrible and you can't argue against that. No matter how many users parler gets, it won't even come close to having the same reach.
Sounds good to me... They're totally culpable for the domestic terrorism that happened at the capitol. Facebook too. Dogshit companies that track our behavior and make money off of outrage.
Compare that to Parler which has built its whole marketing image on "absolute free speech" which technically isn't legal and their platform's contents reflect that.
Parler is blatantly NOT trying to stop illegal material, the other platforms are at least trying to...
If you're trying really hard no to, but still facilitate 1000x the amount of violence (made up statistics), it doesn't matter. The real world results are what matter. At least, its what should matter.
Even at a moderately busy McDonalds there will be errors in your order. You can always go back and tell them to fix it and then you will wait... because they are busy filling new orders. And even after you waited there is a chance that they forgot about your fix, they remade it and it is still wrong, or something else happens.
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. In fact, restaurants and food safety scores are the epitome of "try Olympics." You can have a rat in a kitchen in San Francisco and still not be immediately closed. But if you are making conscious efforts to remedy that, you can stay open and often have a long time to fix it.
Counter argument : twitter letting "Hang Mike Pence" trends.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend...
Parler likely had a much higher percentage of content advocating for violence, but youtube and twitter probably have hundreds or thousands of times the quantity and reach for the violence advocacy content they host.
This is really just a lesson about what happens when you squander your reputation and lose the presumption of good faith.
However, it’s far too late in the day for me to put together coherent thoughts. Perhaps others further west could try. Thanks, and buona notte.
Parlour used AWS property to allow its members to help organize sedition. AWS has the right to nope out.
All the problems with large private entities like Twitter and Facebook hosting speech on their own terms pale in to comparison with letting governments dictate how they host speech.
Parlour can find or create another hosting device and get back up quickly. If they want to use mainstream services, they should moderate out something other than liberals.
You've seen this play out in sports hundreds of times. Politics isn't any different. It's even got WWE-esque storylines.
However, I am going to worry more that it existed in the first place than it being destroyed.
But I don't feel the same way about AWS, because they are not as critical as an ISP would be. Nothing is stopping Parler from plugging in and managing their own servers. I see AWS as a convenience, and as such I don't think anyone is entitled to it.
As a side note: I would like to take a minute to remind the youngsters that no one owes them a revolution. If you want to go fight against the status quo, you should really have a plan for when the status quo fights back.
AWS cares because they're a public company with a reputation, and many of their customers and employees are anti-rioter.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
'On January 8, 2021, AWS brought concerns to Parler about user content that encouraged violence. Parler addressed them, and then AWS said it was “okay” with Parler.'
'The next day, January 9, 2021, AWS brought more “bad” content to Parler and Parler took down all of that content by the evening'
https://www.scribd.com/document/490405156/Parler-sues-Amazon
"AWS knew its allegations contained in the letter it leaked to the press that Parler was not able to find and remove content that encouraged violence was false—because over the last few days Parler had removed everything AWS had brought to its attention and more. Yet AWS sought to defame Parler nonetheless."
If you are going to run a site full of user content, you really need to read the rules you are agreeing to regarding what content services you depend on such as web hosting allows, and put in place mechanisms to keep your users from posting that kind of content and to find and remove it when it does get through.
We do have a big tech problem. Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple should be broken up. Twitter should be required to improve moderation and bot removal. Public/Private enterprises should be established to provide alternates to Twitter/Parler.
If so, when can I start hosting raves in your front room?
Freedom of speech is, colloquially, about being able to discuss things. That's something I'd like to support, and to see more of,
but I'm going to draw a stark categorization between discussion and incitement. Both use words, sure. Are both speech that should be free?
Edit: To be clear, not a rhetorical question: actual question, one I don't have an answer to.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Onl...
1) You could be wrong. Numerous examples exist throughout history regarding the wrong opinion turning out to the be the truth.
2) Knowing wrong opinions makes you have greater understanding of the correct ones.
3) Roughly the expression argument you mention.
I'm not buying the premise of this argument. If anything, Parler, a social network, was a (diminutive) competitor to Facebook and Twitter. Amazon, Google and Apple do not come to mind as companies standing to gain by destroying it.
The author seems to have an axe to grind against companies he perceives as monopolies and is stretching the facts to support his world view.
The timeline of events almost feels like Google, Apple, and Amazon took those steps as part of a means to convince Twitter to commit to a ban.
Without Parler, Twitter is able to stem any right-wing exodus due to a Trump ban.
Read the letter [AWS sent them][1]. This isn't AWS punishing a corporation for having different political views, this is AWS not taking on the risk that their infra contributes to violent acts.
[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
It's not that they could only find those examples.
And among those examples were specific calls to bomb AWS data centers.
> It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you.
They sent the examples well before they sent the final letter, gave Parler plenty of time, and Parler refused to even moderate under those extremely generous circumstances.
https://www.scribd.com/document/490405156/Parler-sues-Amazon
That's legal code for "we're pulling this out of our ass".
It is unclear how this could be enforced in the internet domain, but maybe the website could have huge fines levied against it or criminal charges levied against the founders (so not the posters) if its possible to prove violent intent. Its also not a very slippery slope. We have hate crime laws, but they are notoriously hard to prove. I imagine violent intent on the internet will be similarly hard to prove and only be applied to the extremely obvious cases.
Its also a bit weird. Nobody made a huge deal about PornHub (from what I can tell) being forced to take down tons of content due to Visa, because guess what. Its hard to disagree that the source of a lot of content on PornHub is troubling and very likely illegal. This isn't that much different from what Amazon and other companies are doing to Parler. The intent of a lot of posters (even if its a minority) seems to be to incite violence. Parler actively didn't try to monitor the content and boom, it got taken down. I imagine if PornHub didn't make a good faith attempt to remove a lot of content, we'd have seen Amazon (or whoever hosts PornHub).
Also, plenty of people complained about Pornhub being forced to take down content. You were either in a bubble, it's not paying attention. Specifically, that it appears that if you want to avoid getting bullied by online activists through your providers, you also seem to need to have your own bank.
You're right that this will be damn near impossible to enforce except in the most stupidly obvious cases.
Reading greenwald's take on it I come to feel that it seems likely that this cabal of corporate hegemons, utilized multiple private intelligence security firms to stoke and instigate the riot for the purposes of destroying their competitor as well as sending a message to people who dared utilize that app instead of one of the conventional apps that you're not safe if you do that. it was an extremely effective and coordinated campaign and I respect their ingenuity and will to dominance. fledgling startups should be aware of these sort of tactics and take steps to mitigate them for their own success, but I think aside from the purely political and free speech problems that poses I think and the important corporate monopolistic issues are companies should not be delivering these negative results for consumers who want to choose to use an alternate app, they shouldn't be using their monopoly power nor coordinating with other monopolies in order to shut out a competitor.
Perhaps this operation was a favor to the incoming administration who promised to go soft on the antitrust stuff if the techs would pull off this coup against these politically inconvenient free speech enabling technologies that go against the dominant ideology advocated by the group trying to maintain control. Win win.
Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself (i.e. the American colloquial phrase, "Everyone is out to get me").
But it isn't ready or willing to even start.
Until then, it's hard to really care about any of this. I don't like censorship or big companies deciding what's acceptable. But someone has to, and no one else is willing to oppose some of the worst people and events we've had in generations.
If you rely completely on third party vendors and don’t understand and know their TOS then you only have yourself to blame.
But calling Amazon a monopoly of the cloud is ridiculous. They could use A litany of other providers. Oracle, 1to1, Microsoft, linode, digital ocean, vulture. The list is almost endless.
Diversity of hosting is key to uptime and scaling.
Also, with a little bit of work, they could deploy open stack on their own servers in a matter of hours to days if they weren’t complete noobs.
The complaint Parler filed in its lawsuit against AWS cites 30% market share. It also mentions they've been unable to find another hosting company, though it doesn't go into why. The antitrust claim wasn't that AWS cut them off. That was the breach of contract claim. The antitrust claim was based on allegations that AWS and Twitter just did a multi-year cloud deal, and conspired to shut Parler down. Section 1 anticompetitive conduct claim. IIRC, the relevant market was microblogging, not cloud infra.
The Nadler Committee report Glenn cites puts AWS at 24% of US spend and "close to half" of global spend on cloud services. US courts don't typically find "market power" below 50% in the relevant market. The concept of abusing "dominant position", mentioned over and over in the report, comes from European competition law, not US antitrust law.
Anecdotally, I use cloud services and I don't use AWS at all anymore. As an attorney who advises on terms of service for cloud services, I'd also expect every major cloud platform has broad "acceptable use" or similar terms that let them refuse or terminate customers that cause more problems---law enforcement requests, law suits, marketing crises---than they're worth.
A number of my cloud clients rack their own iron. Others intentionally seek out providers and services with permissive or aligned activist reputations. Those services often cost more, both because they're smaller and because they deal with more warrants, lawsuits, DMCA takedowns, &c. &c. &c. I personally prefer to patronize smaller, upstart providers. Which is only possible if you don't bite the hooks---k8s, vendor-specific APIs, and so on.
On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here.
On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. But in the absence of political will for these laws, what should be done? I think we are better off without Parler, but how can we do that in an even handed and consistent way?
Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.
I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately.
> They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services.
This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.
I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.
How so? Are you incapable of using non-digital media to communicate? Are you incapable of creating your own digital platforms for communication or using alternative, less popular means to do so? Are you prevented from going to city hall, council meetings, political rallies, or voting? Your speech as it relates to your rights granted in the constitution remains completely intact. Your rights are unaffected by your access to certain digital platforms.
If you don't believe free speech absolutism should be allowed, say so, but free speech and this level of corporate dominance are not compatible.
I agree, but that's a common position here.
Oh how I wish this were actually true sometimes. Try going to any zoning board meeting.
>If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools
I see the conflict you're bringing up, it's in effect illegal to communicate in person a lot of the time due to the pandemic, so digital tools are very useful for you to be able to communicate, but if you are somehow banned from those you have few options, if any. I think the thing that is incorrect here is actually the government making it illegal to communicate via non-digital tools, even if a lot of times it is in an individual's best interest to stay inside. And once again, no one owes you a platform. You are, in your words, silenced, but I don't think that that is an issue that requires government action.
Let's consider the other extreme with a fictional corporation "MEGA INC", which suppose owns all web hosting, all ISPs. Let's also throw in that they have a monopoly over paper production and publishing. Now, do you think your argument that "this private entity can do whatever it wants" is problematic? I should hope so.
I'm not making the case that it's black/white and that this situation with Big Tech is equivalent to MEGA INC. But, it's not that our free speech rights are binary. My point is simply that we're somewhere along the spectrum spanning "private home" <-> "MEGA INC", and at this point rights are actually being diminished because of the oligopolistic nature of a significant corner where discourse happens.
So, unfortunately, I think it's a nuanced situation that's not easily reduced to a simplistic principle such as what you've stated. We have clear principles to reason about the extremes, but it's hard to make an argument in the hairy middle because both can be made to apply.
The oligopoly only concerns distribution to the widest possible audience, whether it's social media or broadcast media. And even a First Amendment constrained government is allowed to pick and choose which speech it distributes
I can see the argument that basic Internet access should be similarly regulated, especially as it uses either public frequencies (e.g. 5G) or public land (sidewalks etc) to provide the service.
First amendment rights are orthogonal.
I think this is a really important point. How I have framed this to others is: "the 6 o'clock news isn't required to give you airtime."
In the past, you could write articles to the newspaper, or contact the news and hope they picked up your story. There was not a right to be heard.
That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about what has transpired in the last week. Freedom of speech (as a principle, not in the US legal sense) has always felt like a core principle of the Internet.
We have. That's why millions of people have pushed these companies to take a stand against hate. None of these companies are doing this because they want to lose money. If they thought it would be profitable long-term, they would keep doing it. It's the invisible hand of the market that you're really upset with here.
The weird politicization of commerce is baffling to me.
I think the issue isn't really controlled speech with these platforms but more often a loss of control of the narrative. They are ill-preppared to deal with hate speech and often will act as the very propagators of it. (See FB in 2016). The real issue to be found is the massive control they have in light of their blindness to the context of their product and inability to enact real censorship of things that are truly intolerant. Personally looking from the outside in, I think that makes them a long-term risk to themselves rather than just a risk to society. It's worth noting that this will likely lead to a platform that intentionally 'free' to intolerant behavior that will compete and likely compete well as it will be additive to those looking for hate.
Yes, imagine a small town, and there's a guy known for always ranting about the coming insurrection, pedophile conspiracies, how "The Great Awakening" is near... then one day he walks into the town gun store and asks to buy a bunch of AR-15s and a ton of ammo, and the owner of the store says: "Hmm... no."
Craft store noticed their brand logo was on a poster board with messages calling for rape and execution of named individuals (a clearly illegal act). Craft store said in their sale recipt that the reserve the right to stop serving customers that promote illegal conduct.
First, however, the craft store asked the organizer to stop providing their poster boards to people organizing mass rape and execution event planning. "Please moderate, and you can continue to use our service"
The organizer days "go bleep yourself", to the store, followed by "if my members want to organize a mass execution of people, that's their protected speech!”
Store says "okay, your not welcome here anymore, see our terms of service"
AWS gave them a chance.. but at the end of the day, those messages calling for illegal acts are stored on AWS servers.. and Parler wanted to promote that kind of content to continue and amplify (it's good for business), but every day AWS is probably getting 50 warrants for information tied to having Parler as a customer. AWS service mark up doesn't cover 20 full time lawyers
If he follows that up with "Allahu Akbar," do you expect the gun store to complete the sale, or call the feds? Is that a limit on "freedom of religion"?
Or if you go to buy a ton of fertilizer, and as they're loading it into your truck, you talk about blowing up the white house -- what do you think is gonna happen?
Yet we do not treat them like regulated broadcast media, which I guess is unsurprising in that regulation lags behind technology. In the context of Parler, it seems they tried to make the best of a bad situation.
But I don't know that we should cheer this as "the right outcome", even if, in this case, it seems justified (my gut is that this was the right thing to do, in this specific case). It's time to ask broader questions around whether these companies should have that power at all, or if we need government to step in.
One can always list all the players in an industry and call that set "a monopoly and should be broken up". Or we can just take this for what it is, which is that some entity is so toxic that none of these companies (which compete with each other otherwise) want to touch it.
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are
monopolies and should be broken up.
For a monopoly, you need anticompetitive practices. Is Facebook unfairly preventing the success of other social networks? A good example of a monopoly was 90's era Microsoft, which prevented its OEMs from shipping competing operating systems.
Terminology aside, I completely agree with you that we need far, far more choice in the marketplace.
Granted these are just lawsuits at the moment and not final verdicts but still it's not hard to see how they don't play a fair game.
(1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process.
(2) deplatforming could be at the sole discretion of platforms, but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols such that it is sufficiently easy for those who were deplatformed to switch to the opposition or self-platform (for example: ios allowing competing app stores). This would be difficult and technically challenging to enact in many situations (what does it mean in the case of social networks for example?), And if there's no competition we need antitrust ASAP
If all the competition are also deplatforming you, I think at a certain point it becomes fair to say that you were more or less democratically rejected, much like if every bar in town kicks out neo-nazis that's not a failure of free speech but a success of the free market. But that relies on a large, healthy, robust competitive ecosystem which does not exist in a billionaire-dominated tech scene.
Think gay wedding cakes
> (2) ... but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols
Open standards and protocols like `https` and HTML?
No, because you don't need AWS or Twitter or Cloudflare or any of the name tech companies to run a high-traffic web site successfully.
I wonder if this was the same sort of argument used to justify denying minorities homes / home loans? "Well they're free to build their own house!" "Well they're free to cut their own lumber!" "Well they're free to forge their own hammers!" "Well they're free to..."
This situation lies somewhere between “refusing service based on someone’s religion” and “refusing service because I just don’t like them.” Political affiliation is not yet recognized as a religious belief, so they are not a protected class. I don’t know enough about the law to say on what grounds a company stands if they drop/refuse service because they think someone is being a dick.
[1] it’s more nuanced than that of course, but I’m speaking broadly here
I do agree with you that AWS dropping them isn't evidence of a monopoly. There's plenty of competitors in that space. None of them, however, are going to touch Parler with a 10ft pole at this point.
And I’m saying they “could”. They might decide not to.
Although I don’t think anyone could have foreseen level of censorship we have now, even 5 years ago, so who knows what it will look like in 2025.
And I think if you ask the average HN reader he wouldn’t be opposed to blocking websites for political reasons.
Nowadays, the public square, the thing that the constitution is supposed to protect, which is the difference between feudalism and democracy, is de-facto (though not de-jure), owned by monopolistic corporations. They are only accountable to their shareholders, and they have nearly complete power over their platforms. The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.
This is an oversight in the current legal framework, and will have to be corrected eventually.
Host on your own infrastructure. Present a mobile-responsive web site. Take Bitcoin.
(we're talking, politely, about free speech extremists - so none of this seems wildly inappropriate, right?)
This is all fair. If your goal is to exist on the fringe of the acceptable and legal, you're going to have to DIY.
As a bonus, I'll just add this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
My personal opinion is that this discussion about tech, politics, censorship, etc. is something that needs to happen, and maybe all parties were completely within their rights to act how they did.
There are a lot of people who don't see that as self-evident, and what they are hearing is "if you are pro-Trump, you deserve to be a social pariah." That is a real quick path to radicalization.
Society is based on a set of mutually agreed upon rules. If you convince enough people through your actions that the rules are "Heads I win, Tails you lose", then they'll decide not to play by those rules anymore. And then all hell breaks loose.
Agreed, and it follows from that that "political affiliation" protection cannot include "wants to destroy the government" -- no matter from what quadrant that sentiment flows (anarchist, socialist, fascist, whatever).
Agreeing to democracy -- and probably republicanism -- (note, both lowercase) is a bright line across which you've really decided to step outside of our mutual rules.
The trouble is that many of the same people saying these actions were perfectly acceptable also have a habit of casually stating that all people who voted for Trump are the irredeemable scum of the earth.
Try Homage to Catalonia. You'll find the author likes shooting fascists, not platforming them.
That's quite the exaggeration. You can quite literally still gather in a physical public square. Just because it's more convenient to do so online doesn't mean it's a granted right.
> The vast majority of public discourse, news and financial transactions take place on these feudal fiefdoms.
And? If a bank decides they don't want you as a customer, you can still perform cash transactions. You aren't entitled to a bank account just because the majority of people do banking.
You can? Last I checked I can't, if I do that I get arrested for breaking social distancing...
> you can still perform cash transactions.
You mean, like in Japan and Sweden, that decided to attempt to go cashless by creating more and more rules on cash so that only debit (or credit) cards are practical?
This is inaccurate at best. The gathering in D.C. last Wednesday had a legal permit for thousands of people to join.
For a while now. Sex workers, sex shops have complained about it for years. Nobody cared. I find it ironic that the same group of people advocating against consumer and worker protections now seem to demand them.
Now, suddenly, it's a great big issue because a bunch of neo-Nazis got run out of town? Not a great look, eh.
The problem is you need to rely on someone.
1) Some parts are still single points of failure, e.g. domains, dns servers
2) There are switching costs (particularly on the infra slide) both in time and money (time was the issue here).
I'm not surprised at the end result, but the effort to retain free speech was a valiant one. Forcing extremist views underground doesn't silence them, it emboldens them and makes it harder to know what they're up to. Not a good idea.
censorship is NOT the underlying problem here
Parler was moderated, and it was explicitly moderated for coherence with a right-wing/reactionary viewpoint. It was not a neutral, unfiltered platform.
This is just false. They censored all kinds of things: antifa, parody accounts, obscene usernames, porn, etc.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...
That's pretty much been newspapers in the UK for as long as I can remember!
It’s just the last 20 years or so of everybody having a megaphone that is outside the norm.
With social media, your feed is perfectly catered to you as an individual, by using as much data on you as they can get their hands on, and a nearly endless supply of content from the "megaphones" of other users. Even if you have many of the same friends as someone, and politically align with them, you probably would find scrolling through their feed to be less interesting than scrolling through your own.
I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true.
And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice?
But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.
It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle.
I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction.
Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.
If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.
If you think it is good that the recent bans took place then you have no choice but to delegate decision making authority to the industry, because the government is not constitutionally permitted to demand that tech companies make those decisions.
not theoretic (not pumping my post but amusing you would comment simultaneously with my noticing this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749923
Personally I think we need anti-trust action against a lot of larger tech companies and second that they have now opened the door on further regulation regarding content moderation. I think getting rid of Section 230 entirely would be a mistake but I won't be surprised to see it amended in some form.
From Ars article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/amazon-cuts-off-...
Amazon said: "It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t "feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform." This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts."
What they could've done is consistently enforced their rules all the way along, to people of all political persuasions.
Should we have to mute ourselves because crazy people might use our words as justification for their madness? Should others censor my opinions because in their opinion, a third party might use my words for justification for their madness?
See: Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969)
The usage I’m seeing does not fit the below defined criteria: The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?
If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?
FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?
These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.
As it happens, these actions are not coordinated en masse, are neither promoted nor supported by even the vast majority of people who are supposedly aligned ideologically with is perpetrators, and are not organized in spaces mostly devoted to that purpose.
I was actually in Seattle while similar protests occured, and seeing things myself, I can say that the media did mis-portray things greatly. 99% of the protestors were completely peaceful and tens of thousands of people rallied to protest day over day all peacefully. I was surprised the media coverage didn't really cover those much, it chose to focus on like the single instance of a car lit on fire at 3am and those very minor instances, sometimes the media photoshopped images too, where they'd like superimpose a person holding a weapon in front of the photo of the car on fire and things like that. And I mean all media, left-wing, right-wing, small media, big media, like they all did this, which I was very surprised about.
I felt pretty safe for the most part, when people weren't protesting I'd still go and have coffee and order croissant at my favourite places in the area that was "occupied".
Things got scary when "anti-protester" started showing up, and suddenly everyone felt like people would show up with guns so protesters felt they needed guns too, and then there was this weird tension of like why we all have guns?
I was really surprised personally at the intensity of the police response, especially in the beginning, and to me it felt like the police really escalated tensions early on which is what led to protesters starting to bring fireworks and umbrellas to protect themselves from police "croud control". Like if a single person in the croud threw a single bottle that was enough for the police to just start pepper spraying and tear gazing everyone. I always wondered why the police doesn't just go after that person that threw a bottle or broke a window, I'm not sure what justified all this collateral damage from them. There were kids and moms and even handicapped people at a lot of those protests.
Most striking is the way the police organises around protesters, even though the protests are peaceful, they flank the croud, and really position themselves like the police and protesters are about to have a Braveheart style face off. I don't understand why the police doesn't spread themselves through the croud and instead help keep the protest peaceful by deterring the few people who are there to cause raucous. They should focus on the people disrupting the protests, help protect others from them, and arrest those.
I was just really surprised by that, because if there was a parade, the police would do what I'm describing, but for a protest it seems they treat the protesters like a huge threat and that makes the whole thing really tense and makes people feel like the police is actually against them. It didn't help that the protesters were there to protest police brutality and they were welcomed by more police brutality and confrontation.
What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Now in Seattle, you had 60000!! Yes I said Sixty Thousand!!! PEOPLE marching an entire day completely peacefully without a single broken window or fire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in... when the population of the whole city is 600000. That means 1 in 10 people participated in this protest, and there were not even minor raucous! That's the most peaceful assembly of such a large number of people I've ever seen in my life.
In Montreal, you have 1k people in the street it doesn't matter why and there's more raucous then that.
And these protests, they didn't just happen once, day over day thousands of people over and over again, and everytime only a handful of incidents, mostly in the late evening or at night. Just do the math, 60k people, if 100 of them broke windows, threw rocks and lit some things on fire that would be 0.16% of the protestors. It be enough for the media to have footage ad-nauseam and publish 100 article about the "riots" and for police to bring out the tear gas. But it also means that 99.84% of the protestors were peaceful. Honestly, if it was for me, I think I'd call these the most peaceful protest I've ever seen, I think they should be given an award for how peaceful these were given the amount of people and the circumstances of how tense the topic was and how they were received by the authorities.
Disclosure: I'm just a bystander here, I didn't participate in the protests myself, I only observed and watched from the sidelines, and I knew people who did and heard from them. So take my info for what it is.
Happens in almost every city I've ever lived in. I've seen far more violence at a Los Angeles Lakers or San Francisco Giants riots after they win a championship than at my local BLM protests.
The Unites States is not in that list. Hence it is more vulnerable to problems associated with allowing hate speech (i.e. incitement of violence by foreign-state actors, etc.).
Companies that operate on the global markets tend to operate with the standards that are acceptable globally. In particular: "On 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours."
So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.
Best practices for maintaining a democracy or best practices for maintaining social order? There's a difference. You might argue that restricting hate speech is actually a step away from democracy towards more government control.
And consider how moderation of hate speech affects these parameters. Evaluating these on an example of presidential debates of 2020 might be a good option. As there is a contrast between the first debate, that included no moderation and a second debate, that included some.
It's harder to refute lies in the marketplace of ideas if everyone with a megaphone is obligated to echo them. Perhaps this wouldn't be true if people were perfectly rational, but if people were perfectly rational they wouldn't be believing and spreading lies in the first place.
>Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
It's one thing if I say the election was stolen. I should not be censored for saying that it was. My voice alone will not sway anything. The problem is that so much power is concentrated with the president that it ONLY takes his voice to throw an entire country into chaos. That's too much power with one person.
So what am I saying? That I should have freedoms the president should not?
Well, the USA could impeach and remove that person, or they could reduce the power of his office. But so far the people and their elected representatives have opted not to do either of those things.
"do nothing", just like they did nothing when riots were breaking out in BLM protests.
I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be).
Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.
For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.
We have strong bill of rights restrictions on governmental power because of the massive amount of power held by the government. So having that power be controlled by small numbers of entirely unaccountable figures with more power than the government in certain areas doesn't seem better at all?
Eventually the federal government came in and decided race was a protected class.
Obviously the problem isn't as simple as saying Google or anyone else must allow certain groups to use their platforms. Because that compels speech. Which the government also can't do.
Proper legal experts would have to craft it but I think the limit should be somewhere around access and use of the infrastructure. Domain registrars and hosts cannot discriminate. However If Twitter doesn't want someone on their platform I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to kick them. We just cant allow for those paltform hosts to collude with the infrastructure providers to deplatform others completely.
And I can think of two reasons why from a legal standpoint. 1: most of the internet infrastructure in the US was built with public dollars. Even if its nominally owned by a private ISP, they were paid by the government to build it. Historically the courts have used government funds as a way to enforce legal limits.
2: coordinated deplatforming like what happened with Parlor looks an awful lot like it was an intentional hit to take out a potential competitor to the current online status quo. That should worry everyone really.
This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?
Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
The problem isn't just that they had more, though logic would suggest they did; after all, their user base are refugees from other platforms that pushed them out for extremist language, advocating for violence, conspiracy theories, etc.
It's that Parler refused to remove it.
So even if the rate of introduction of this content was the same on Parler (which I don't buy for a second, see argument above), the total concentration and visibility of it is higher because it's not taken down.
"Everyone said Pence sold out!!! Time to enter the capitol. Go patriots. Echo and enter the building dont let them vote. Put pressure. We are riding in!!! Echo big"
66 comments, 301 echoes (i.e. retweets), 375 upvotes (i.e. likes)
There's a torrent of Parler posts that is being analyzed, so there may be better conclusions published soon: https://parler-archive.deadops.de/parler_2020-01-06_posts-pa...
That said, I still don't support taking down a site because there's no moderation. These people won't go away; I wonder if decentralized/p2p technologies will see more adoption by the radical right for this reason.
It seems as though there is in inverse relationship between ease of use and centralization (obviously). As communication becomes decentralized, the ability to accrue a large audience becomes more difficult. This supports the rise of ideas that can gain widespread support on their merit, as opposed to gaining widespread support via having a mass audience to start with.
To illustrate: on one side, we have a centralized extreme: Twitter (or Reddit, or Facebook). On the other side we have a decentralized extreme: spoken word. Which is easier to radicalize a country with?
If extremists move to decentralized or p2p alternatives to social media, they will shrink in the long run, letting the fringe ideas remain on the fringe.
If all social media went the way of decentralization, we would see far less extremism in general, simply because most people wouldn't go looking for it and it's pretty hard to spread extremist ideas in a one-on-one conversation.
What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about storming the capitol isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for exmaple, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but moderated in Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets.
"On September 17, 2020 we will lay siege to The @WhiteHouse for exactly fifty days.
We need your wisdom and expertise to pull off a radically democratic toneshift in our politics.
Are you ready for #revolution?
This is the #WhiteHouseSiege"
Just because radical things are posted on your website doesn't mean all the discourse on the site is bad and your site should be deplatformed. We already apply that standard to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others.
As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
A policy that was FAR more relaxed than any of their competitors, which was by design and part of their marketing pitch: come here to say those things you're not allowed to say elsewhere.
Parler's position is: unless the language is strictly illegal according to the letter of the law that's designed limit government censorship of speech, then it's allowed.
By that definition, if I call for someone's death, unless I have the means and the opportunity and mention a specific time, then it doesn't count and the post stays up.
Clearly Amazon, Google, and Apple have policies that are more strict than US law. And that makes sense: US law is shaped by the constitution, which is meant to restrict the government's ability to limit speech. And we should absolutely want the rules regarding government censorship to be as narrow as possible.
But private services are free to operate by different rules.
For example, if I walk into a McDonalds and start swearing at all the customers, I'll get kicked out even if I'm not breaking the letter of the law.
So, did they have a moderation policy? Yes, technically. But did that policy allow extremist and violent language to persist on their site at a level above and beyond what's seen on any competing platform outside of, say, 8chan? Absolutely.
> As a side note, I've heard that the people who actually stormed the Capitol Building (not just holding signs outside of it, which is perfectly fine) used Facebook to coordinate and not Parler.
And Facebook would pull that content down if they found it.
Parler won't.
That's what got them pulled from AWS, and the Google and Apple app stores.
But that's just it, isn't it? Parler tried to make a new service that plays by a new set of rules. And they were crushed, because it turns out that you actually can't have your own rules unless you are already at the scale of Apple, AWS, etc.
That's not an infringement on my rights, that's the free market at work
Before this, the power was somewhat theoretical and used in tiny marginal cases. Now, it's proven that they can effectively exercise the power in a major way, and that's news.
Honestly, it's really not. We've seen groups like ISIS kicked off social media, for example, and no one blinked an eye. Heck, Milo Yiannopoulos was deplatformed way back in 2016.
The thing that's news is that a significant percentage of a major US political party is now associated with a form of right wing extremism and wrapped up in a major conspiracy theory movement whose adherents are willing to commit violence in an attempt to subvert an election.
That's not at all true. If I recall the same thing happened to 8chan/8kun. Yet somehow they live on. If Parler has a market, they'll find a way.
That said, it sucks but, well, that's capitalism for ya.
What else would you suggest? Regulating these various companies such that the government gets to decide who can use their services?
Because if so, a) that would require new laws, b) it'd probably fall afoul of the first amendment, and c) it doesn't seem to align well with free market conservative ideology, and so should be opposed by the very users of Parler that are being affected by this.
Facebook ultimately started removing Holocaust denial content because it violated their harassment policy, not because it was illegal.
I think it's a non-sequitur.
But man, wow. I joined Parler several months ago and that's literally all my default feed was -- various flavors of right wing rage. Not all was violent or racist. Some were verified celebrities and right wing politicians; those tended to be rather mild.
But typing various slurs or words like "shoot" or "hang" into the search box returned some eye-watering results.
The difference between it and Twitter was not subtle.
I think it's very interesting that you lead off citing good faith in a situation where, in my experience, you're about to demonstrate literal bad faith. It's like you wish to take off the table the interpretation that you are intentionally lying for the sake of argument.
Let me fix that:
> that multiple countries and international organizations categorize as hate speech?
A casual reminder that when most think these open air rules are intended to stifle conversation it is generally for very clear legal and moral reasons. If you believe this is used by them to control people then you should also believe that a replacement should view this speech as antithetical to the existence of the free speech social company.
It's one thing to ban talk about the platform you are talking on.
It's not the same thing to ban intolerant behavior.
It all leads back to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
He goes on to explain what situation would call for use of suppression, for example, the use of violence or rejecting reason or logic by the intolerant (Which, obviously both are what happened in January 6th and in this narrative) ;)
The ban isn't on conservative viewpoints, it is on intolerant speech that has no want to make a logical discussion and resorts to violence. Trust me, I'm using it correctly.
Unwillingness to accept(or tolerate) views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own.
When we talk about intolerant behavior we are talking about actions and statements that are intended to demean others by design (and praise the inverse), this is pretty easy to define. Saying that a person's skin color or gender makes them lesser or to be despised is clearly intolerant, the person in context is clearly unable to change this as it is how they are. Whats funny about this is that the US Bill of rights is a statement on intolerance by design. It's meant to both give rights but also set tone.
Maybe something is lost over text, but I genuinely prefaced my question because I know it's a delicate political topic for people. But your response is just childish. I literally barely know anything about Parler. Also, how is asking for evidence so triggering? That should be the cornerstone of any these types of discussions.
But to answer your question: No, I can't prove to you what I'm thinking. Nobody ever can. So perhaps you should just take my question on face value and stop assuming malicious intent.
I think the parent raises a very legitimate question of what defines a "hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism." I've never had a Twitter account myself, but some of the publicly-available content I've seen there there certainly fits that description. Conversely, I did briefly have a Parler account, and what I saw in my particular bubble did not fit that description at all - It was crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and comedians. I'm not trying to imply that my anecdote is data or that Parler is some bastion of positivity, but the way your premise is stated only requires a single counterexample: some "hate speech" exists on Twitter, and not everything on Parler is.
You say, "the purpose of Parler's existence is (was) to facilitate communication that larger social networks stifle." To me that sounds like the old adage that "the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." At least five years ago that was largely seen as a feature rather than a bug. But recently the tide of popular opinion seems to have shifted in general favor of censorship. Undeniably there are some bad ideas out there, but I worry that the "cure" of censorship is a slippery slope that could very quickly become worse than the disease.
I really dodged a bullet. Thank God for our tech overlords and their new Ministry of Truth. I can now sleep easy knowing that they are busy scouring the rest of the internet and it's marketplace of ideas for more doubleplusbadthink from which to shield me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... is a concrete example of speech that would be banned from Twitter and Facebook. I think it's telling that there are 25k up votes.
What I'm getting at is, I understand Parler is generally a right-leaning platform, and therefore the types of "hate" will be right-leaning. Twitter is a generally left-leaning platform, so I would expect their type of hate to be generally left-leaning. So I think a tweet about e.g. storming the Capitol being banned on Twitter but not Parler isn't good evidence that Twitter is better. Because, for example, perhaps a violent Antifa tweet would be left alone on Twitter but censored on Parler. Perhaps some ML bot can quantity sentiment of tweets. That's the kind of evidence I would like to see.
If I start a new social media service, what are the objective measures I can use to ensure I'm moderating well and quickly enough? How should we allow this to interact with scale?
If a new startup goes from 10 to 10,000 users overnight, and 0.5% of users post offensive comments that first day, how long does that startup have to remove them all before they are designated as "bad"?
Also, how should we view overmoderation within this context? I think most people would find it injust and orwellian to ban a black sociology professor for posting an academic analysis of the use of the n-word through history, but I fear society is going to overcorrect.
Nobody would bat an eye if you were banned from HN or reddit for hate speech. Why should a platform be any different? If my customer started using my services to spread Nazism, I'd ban them too. Let's say I was a baker - would it be reasonable that I be compelled to draw swastikas on cakes? Obviously, that's absurd! It is equally absurd to demand that other businesses provide platforms for behavior they don't condone.
Freedom of speech is freedom from oppression by government. Parler isn't being oppressed, they just aren't being given a platform to oppress others by private citizens and corporations. Well, not anymore, although lots of corps made some money from them while they could.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see GOP resurgence in 2022, along with another very real attack on section 230.
Twitter et al booting persons from their services is the neighbour slamming their door in your face, or the baker refusing to do business with you.
The town square is tcp/ip, not the services on top of it.
Twitter is more like a mall owned by a large corporation and while there is some trouble there, they will kick people off the property that are too offensive. If you try to start an insurrection at a mall, you will be kicked out and banned.
It is in Twitters and mall owners best interest to start insurrections on their properties because there will be ramifications for allowing that to happen, that is not good for business.
This justification doesn't work if elsewhere is shut down too.
"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."This book may have been pivotal to British utilitarianists, but it didn't have much, if any, impact on the U.S.
Before then, "free speech" as a concept did not exist. (The closest was the freedom of religious practice, which is not the same thing.)
Now that is a heavy claim to be making. Do you have anything to back it up?
Before the U.S., nobody even thought free speech was possible. England was the closest, but their version of free speech was still subject to government censorship.
It was the writings of the Founding Fathers, and the Bill of Rights in particular, that established the doctrine that is today known as "freedom of speech."
"The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law."
Specifically, how does banning people for their actions work well as an analogy for banning someone for who they are (and you must take that for granted, because that's the legal frameworks opinions on the matter)?
That's also an even worse example because the supreme court found in favor of the cake shop.
I think this analogy needs a lot of work.
While there are significant improvements that could be made to our laws, the most significant failure here is one of enforcement. When Republican senators chose not to hear witnesses during the impeachment trial they took a significant step towards making Donald Trump a despot and legitimizing the alt-right. The recent strife is a direct consequence.
You can argue that the violent events of last week would have simply taken place early last year, but at least it might not have threatened peaceful transfer of power after the elections.
That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm.
Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades.
The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company.
In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?
As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.
Just listen to the Parler executives account of what happened. Contrary to all the nonsense being spewed by ideologues, Parler did have a moderation policy that prohibited incitement to violence, and they did enforce it, but it was neither perfect nor instantaneous (since, by deliberate choice, only humans were involved). They also complied to the requests from the three tech titans, but of course that did not matter, their fate was sealed before the first letter was sent.
This is a moment of astonishing hypocrisy and terrible abuse of power. Silicon Valley has proven to half of America that the system is rigged beyond recourse, and for a number of those Americans that might be the straw that breaks the camels back, leading them into radicalization and terrorism. It would be very wise for all of us in tech, in any position of influence, to urge calm and dialogue and to provide space for all speech that is not urging violence. We are not children to throw away our country because of a single deranged fool. We need to show to the country that tech is not an instrument available to only those of a certain ideological bent and that we can talk and sort out our differences without violence or repression.
These moderators were overwhelmingly MAGA/Trump supporters, so I'm sure you can guess what kind of posts they expected to see before they unblocked a new user.
This was all shared/revealed on Twitter, so take it as "evidence" with whatever grain of salt you like, but people didn't just make up these claims about what Parler was..
So while perhaps Parler claimed to be a place for open debate and unrestricted ideas, it is seems that was just a thin cover for their much more focused goal of being a home for all this extremist right-wing talk in America.
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/
She links to a bunch of other articles and sources as well, including lists of moderators etc...
I guess shutting down mosques that promoted terrorism led to more terrorism?
And in any case, it seems pretty straightforward to forbid platforms from banning PEOPLE, it should only be possible to ban utterances. At the very least, Trump should have a legal right to be unbanned as long as he doesn’t post things that Twitter doesn’t allow.
By that point, what would having your own tech stack do? How do you even collect revenue when banks and payment providers cancel on you? This is the power of freedom of association at work, the power behind cancellation.
Even for people who don't agree with his libertarian politics, there's no arguing that he is anything short of an uncommonly decent man. He's certainly the closest I've ever seen anyone come to being the mythical "honest politician." So of course they're attacking him...
I have a hunch that any "extremely racist" comments may have been more to the effect that although slavery was very bad indeed, there might have been better ways to dismantle it than by half the country fighting the other half [0], which is a sentiment worth considering in the context of current events.
[0] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-...
This will push towards a balkanization of the
Internet at the platform level as people will
want to self-determine the terms of service
for the basis of their communication.
My feeling is that most people would not like to belong to a space where open racism and other abhorrent views are tolerated and encouraged.
Those that do can have their fringe spaces, but they shouldn't expect mainstream companies to help them do so.
I never thought I would say this, but I have become a fan of Europe's approach to regulation. They've pushed for GDPR which at least gets us the ability to obtain and delete our data, they've acknowledged the right to repair, and as self-serving as it may be, they understand the ramifications of a unilateral takedown of the communications of a head of state – particularly the precedent it sets. They will likely continue their fight until they've setup their own alternatives to SV-based infrastructure.
Citation needed. Neither I nor my friends or acquaintances used it for any of these things. Hell, I've hired people off of Parler.
I find it ironic that the ban is what makes people think the techCos are controlling society rather than the fact that all actions of social networks and hosting services impact society. Like the time when FB make some news feeds more negative to track impact and engagement. Or how the radicalization of users on FB can happen due to the Algo.
Ultimately this is a legislative failure, but it also is how a free market should defend itself of dangerous content as well. (keep in mind a Civil war 2 isn't exactly great for the economy).
What is wild is that the laws for this all exist and are in use. The behavior here is the use of Section 230 as designed. The definition of insurrection and hate speech are all defined. Clearly what has happened is actually late action by social platforms rather than overreach as the US Gov lacks any mode to actually take on this content.
We have laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, sexuality, etc. A grocery store can't refuse to serve people by race. Maybe we should expand these protected classes and make sure they apply to Internet businesses as well. I don't think we will (or should) expand them in such a way that Parler would be included, though.
And so is Facebook. And Twitter. And YouTube.
And so what? If you don’t like that stuff, you are free to not use services that you don’t like.
Yes? I mean, look where you're posting. HN is very heavily moderated. Check out dang's post history for all the work he has to do. HN has very clear ideas on what speech is "acceptable" and what is not, and they are significantly more complicated than the "don't incite political violence" standard being enforced against Parler.
I mean, really. Parler failed to clear even the simplest, most straightforward, most consensus- and norm-driven ideals of how public discourse is supposed to work. And they didn't really get "moderated" any harder than any of us would have.
Yet we still have to rally behind them as the standard-bearer for megacorp censorship? Really? Can't we wait for at least a tiny bit of evidence that they're misusing their power first?
Comments that are unacceptable on Parler: Pretending to be a cow owned by Devin Nunes
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is...
IMO it's reasonable to consider it a hate site or a site which embraces racist behavior.
But this isn't about criminalising speech promoting conspiracy theories, radicalisation, and racism. It's about private entities withdrawing the infrastructure of speech, which obviously gets a lot more complicated to reason about and legislate.
I'm mostly okay with Apple and Google removing the app from their stores. I'm slightly less okay with Amazon withdrawing their services. But if Parler ends up reborn on a server running out of someones house or business I would be very much against their utility providers cutting off access.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm with you and don't quite know what to think about this either.
However I do worry that if we're not careful as a society someone posting on HN (or maybe a government approved Facebook group) will eventually say:
>The internet was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it.
Are you supposed to rebuild the entire tech ecosystem that the entire world runs on? Fight through every damn moat along the way? Is this the bar we set here?
Its easy to talk free speech for popular speech. It's how people react to unpopular speech that shows their true colours.
It doesn't mean private individuals have to humor you. It doesn't even mean they have to listen to you.
The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android.
So the issue is primarily one of anti-trust laws. Monopolies do not get to arbitrarily and selectively enforce their ToS against competitors; that is an illegal abuse of market power.
The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies, a violation of RICO statutes.
I think it is fair to say that Parler, like every social network, could be used to post hateful messages, or messages advocating violence. GP stated that Parler was a “hate site” but I think it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages. It was by no means a site formed or designed specifically to carry hate.
A corollary that I would raise is a similar standard in copyright infringement. Sites which are designed specifically with the intent of committing copyright infringement are now criminally liable — it has recently become a serious felony to make these kinds of sites. However, site that show a significant non-infringement purpose are not illegal, even if some infringement takes place on their platform. You might recall that YouTube was a site that got its start with rampant copyright infringement, and to this day has a significant amount of infringing material on its servers, but it is not criminally liable, or even civilly liable for that content due to the fact that the site has a significant non-infringement purpose. I think that’s a fair analogy with Parler.
If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform. Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy, and in any case should be done through a court of law, not through the actions of a monopolistic cartel.
Maybe Facebook, but...
How did Parler compete with Apple? What market were they competing in?
How did Parler compete with AWS? Did they share the same sort of clients?
How did Parler compete with Google?
Remember Parler was asked by the tech co's to moderate such content, and it refused.
I also don't see how Parler competed with AWS.
For many kinds of criminal content posing an acute public safety hazard, it does, and it's very simple: if you have knowledge of the existence of the material, you must take it down or become yourself criminally liable for it, in addition to anyone who is already criminally liable. (For copyright, there's the DMCA takedown process, which is more generous because people don't tend to get killed as a forseeable consequence of civil copyright violations.)
Of course, if you are a second level host and don't have item-by-item control (such as AWS for a site hosted there by another firm), the only efficient way to acheived that may be to drop the entire account.
I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech was to overturn the conviction of a Anthony Elois, who posted some truly disgusting things online. [1]
I'm not aware of any case where an internet platform was held crminally liable for content posted on their platform, in fact Section 230 provides "wide immunity" for both criminal and civil liability for the content that users post. [2]
For example, from [2];
> A recent case [3] out of the 2nd Circuit illustrates the types of issues courts are facing in our era of social media predominance and terrorist attacks.
> The 2nd Circuit case arose after Hamas posted content on Facebook that both directly and indirectly led to the attack and death of several Israeli nationals, including a 10 year-old girl. The victims subsequently sued Facebook for allowing the posts to exist, and to “match” terrorist sympathizers with terrorist organizations.
> While the content at issue violated Facebook’s terms of service and Community Standards, Facebook did not remove the content prior to the attacks.
[1] - https://gizmodo.com/supreme-court-online-threats-legal-as-lo...
[2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/second_circuit/2019/08/what-legal-...
[3] - https://caselaw.findlaw.com/summary/opinion/us-2nd-circuit/2...
> I'd be quite surprised if this is true in the USA. If you could provide an example of such a case I'd be very interested. The only time I'm aware of the Supreme Court ruling on online hate speech
This isn't about hate speech, which is protected speech. It's about a subset of content which is itself criminal (that is, for which the source would be criminally liable), where a service provider knows of the content and the facts which make it criminal (whether or not they understand the criminal prohibition itself)
And it's not about civil liability (things some private party can sue you for damages, and where therefore the Section 230 protection is likely to apply) but criminal liability, that is, things where the government can take action leading to criminal fines and/or imprisonment.
Examples of laws creating this kind of knowledge-based obligation are 18 USC Sec 2339A regarding material sorry to terrorists and 18 USC Sec 1466A with regard to obscene visual representation of the sexual abuse of children.
> ...it is necessary that a defendant in some sort associate himself with the venture, that he participate in it as in something that he wishes to bring about, [and] that he seek by his action to make it succeed.”
The example of Sec 1466a is an excellent one. Facebook is the world’s largest platform for sharing exactly those types images, and they have not been charged under 1466a, because they are not liable under it.
What would be pertinent is 18 USC 2258A [2] which requires service providers to report any such content that that are made aware of to the tip line, but by now we are far afield of the topic at hand.
A simple introduction on hosting and platform liability, for example [1].
[1] - https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
Coordinated? Competitor? Where do you find evidence of coordination? Why do you think parler is a competitor?
> it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages
Not accurate at all. Why do you think people used parler instead of twitter.
> Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy
When the entire platform resists and refuses to moderate, nuking from orbit is a fine remedy. Parler was too stupid to build alternatives into their risk profile. I think they believed their own hype.
But I also think the rights of the services providers have to considered as well. Should Nintendo be forced to publish porn apps in their Switch online store for example? Should HN be prevented from moderating comments here? Should thedonald.win be prevented from deleting anti-Trump comments? No is my answer to those rhetorical questions.
At the same time I don't think that electricity, water, and internet service providers should be allowed to cut off Westboro Baptist Church either. Likewise for their domain name provider.
I think things like AWS and payment services are more like electric and water suppliers then they are like app stores and web forums. So I suppose that I'm in favour of drawing a line in a reasonable place, it's just not clear to me yet exactly where that line should be.
What would help is what we should have done a long time ago: Apple should either allow users to install different app stores or submit to regulation as a platform.
That approach, combined with filter bubbles and AI recommendations driving engagement/addiction, gave us rise of things like Antivax movement, Trump, QAnon and now an attempted coup in the US.
We should probably think hard before we consider it the only possible approach.
At the same time, saying "some speech actually isn't ok" doesn't mean that unaccountable monopolies of corporate overlords that wield more power than some nation states are ok. Both things can be true at the same time.
It’s a lack of confidence and trust in our governments and corporations. The fact that those same governments and corporations own our media makes it even worse.
I think criminalising unpopular speech will make the symptoms of this problem worse rather than better.
Is sharing someone else's private information, publishing outright lies about safety of vaccines, or claiming some ethnicities or nationalities are subhuman and should be murdered right now "unpopular speech"?
I mean, I sure as hell hope it is unpopular!
But it is much more than just "unpopular speech". Framing it like "criminalizing unpopular speech" makes it sound like someone wants to criminalize saying "I think the Twilight series were genuinely good movies." but we're talking about people saying "All those <insert slur> should be killed."
And yet, you are right that in some cases this happens - for example when some US states decided to solve problem of people complaining about animal cruelty by making filming on farms illegal. That's a complete bullshit and it is harmful to the society.
But people who incite violence and Antivaxxers who actively hurt people by spreading diseases? I don't think so.
I use the term unpopular speech as a binary divider of speech between popular speech and unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t require protection by definition so the implication is that free speech laws exist to protect unpopular speech. I wasn’t suggesting that “I like Twilight” is equivalent to “<slurs> should be killed.”
Yes I would describe lies about vaccines, claiming that some groups of humans are subhuman, and doxing as both harmful and as examples of unpopular speech. Also they are unpopular because they are harmful rather than because they are untrue (doxing people is harmful directly because the information is correct).
All those things, despite being harmful, are legal. It seems that you are suggesting that we should consider banning some forms of unpopular speech because it is harmful. By banning it I assume you mean to make it illegal. If you mean something else please let me know!
Not vaccines though, but that might come to pass as well, since vaccine safety misinformation is basically manipulation that runs vulnerable people into biological weapons and that's pretty bad.
And life is ... fine. We go on without having the (pretty much uniquely USian) 100 % unlimited free speech.
Comparing different places is always difficult - Germany is understandably much harsher at limiting Nazis than US is - but saying there's less school shooters and domestic terrorists because of it probably doesn't see the whole truth like mental healthcare, quality of education and access to weapons etc.
So I'm not sure what to make of it.
* In general, tech companies should be less powerful and monopolistic.
* In this specific case, the tech companies used the power they have in a way that is overall beneficial to society.
Trump incited a violent insurrection on the US Capitol. If Senators and Representatives had not successfully escaped through tunnels before the rioters got to them, some of them would be dead. The fact that Trump is still in office after that shows that the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch to check Trump's executive power.
In the absence of that, we need some entity powerful enough to push back against rising fascism and authoritarianism. I don't like that that power apparently has to be a handful of tech giant companies, but I'll take that (temporarily at least) over the US becoming a right-wing dictatorship.
> the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch
I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.
The overwhelming vast majority of the people on Parler were simply normal people tired of what they perceived as a double standard in Twitter's treatment of conservatives as opposed to liberals, and wished to support a competitor.
Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.
Not your right to be provided an audience
The right to a platform has never been guaranteed. The only difference is that with social media, your message is broadcast first and moderated after.
FB's "platform" feature is largely listener-driven. You can still use FB and not listen to persons X, Y and Z. It's all posted by users, and users decide what to follow or read (except paid content). Not like TV Stations and Newspapers. That's what Social Media companies have been telling us for a while!
But if we want apply usual standards of platform rights and responsibilities to FB, we should then require it to also be responsible for what's posted there.
You can't have it both ways.
I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.
I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.
Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).
The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.
All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever.
I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case.
Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.
The financial bifurcation in the US and to a lesser extent in many other parts of the developed world is quite big, and I don't know how big it has to get before a competent demagogue gets traction in the US. The extremes in both the GOP and the DNC have just been handed a dangerous working template with Trump's history lesson. They just learned that extremism works, and it scales from local to national politics. It was not always so; one of the salient features of American politics in the past was just how consistently difficult it was to move the center any appreciable distance politically, the infamous "lumpentariat".
I believe this is because the US valuation landscape is fundamentally broken. This goes way beyond the economic or financial system. How we account for value over time is structured in very perverse incentive structures leading to the power law popping up in an all-over fashion when in the past it didn't use to dominate the landscape so much (it had localized instantiations but these were more local maxima than a general law more widely applicable). It's generating a "desperation deciles" that the means and averages of metrics sweep under statistical rugs.
I think these deciles are mattering now due to the law of large numbers. With "only" a 100M population base, such deciles are manageable, whether through coercion (unfavorable), assistance (nominal approach), or generationally long-term rehabilitative policy like public education (ideal). But I suspect there is something about near-billion- and billion-scale population governance our governing systems are not scaling to meet.
Also, a consistent theme I see in these kinds of discussions is similar to your "...if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy...". In my humble and limited experience, the ones in the developed world are short-term focused on survival, putting food on the table and a roof over their heads, then with what limited discretionary time and cognitive energy left over, trying to find some happiness in a pretty bleak outlook as globalism systemically blocks their avenues of escape.
There are some limited avenues left, but the arithmetic doesn't support lifting enough of the desperation deciles out of poverty or functional poverty to matter through transitioning them to plumbers, welders, fitters, rig work, etc. While there are currently screaming needs for many of those skills, it isn't in the tens of millions scale we're needing (law of large numbers).
Poor people don't riot if their poverty is perceptibly, contiguously improving over time. Rich people don't incite malign ideologies if there aren't poor people who will act as foot soldiers absorbing the brunt of adverse consequences of swearing fealty to such beliefs. When there is a chicken in every pot, people will riot over sports teams, but not politics. Actual getting-policies-and-legislation-established-and-practiced politics is dead-ass boring to the vast majority, so getting this many people to even pay attention to just the cartoonish depictions of politics we see in the US now is a major signal. I currently don't think it is a good signal. And I suspect it is a more complex signal than "get the wrongthink upper middle class suburbanites to shut up". But I'm just a layperson throwing some brush strokes out there and wanting to hear thoughts from folks like you. I hope I'm wrong-wrong-wrong since I'm operating from very limited data. I don't know what the hell the on-the-money forecasters are making of all this, but in a world this big, I gotta believe there is someone or some entity out there that has had access to sufficient data and has been consistently right for a couple decades plus, and some very wealthy people are paying very dearly for their ongoing analysis.
What evidence do you base this on? Do you have evidence quantifying how Parler users are more hateful than Twitter or Facebook?
Whether it will be applied even-handedly remains to be seen, but there is a law to deal with this, and I suspect it's a factor in why businesses of all kinds are running screaming from anything connected to the attacks (including other businesses that fail to themselves cut off any activity with a nexus to the attack, the attackers, and the apparent planning for future attacks): 18 USC Sec 2339A, which makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide any goods or services except medicine and religious materials connected to any of an enumerated list of federal criminal offenses collectively designated “terrorism”, punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years unless death occurs as a result of the crime, in which case the imprisonment becomes for any term of years or life.
Individuals are not held responsible for the threats and illegal speech they make. Look at all the threats made against people on social media. The fact that there is almost no accountability means it keeps happening.
The only repercussions most of the time is that the platform kicks you off. Part of it is, its their platform and from a business perspective having you around if you are too toxic isn't wise.
It seems like a society problem. Non enforcement and a lot of people with nothing to loose.
We support a market place of ideas because, it was argued that bad ideas would eventually be trumped by better ideas - only by examining bad ideas would we be able to move past them.
Part of that remains true today, but it does not account for the realities of mass communication.
The model ends up painting a passive, solitary image of ideas.
But ideas are neither passive, nor without context. Signal without context is noise.
Nor are brains neutral processors of information, they are vulnerable to psyops, malformed arguments, pressure, ignorance and emotion.
I have read propaganda, I have seen arguments which sound legitimate, but underlying it is xenophobia and hatred.
I know for a fact, that Popper was right and you cannot tolerate the intolerant.
They do not come to discuss or exchange ideas. They come to use your platform as an opportunity to gain followers.
And they use the gaps in our norms to create space for themselves.
Counter speech is not a panacea, it require conditions to work. If those conditions are not satisfied, the strategy fails.
The norms behind modern speech need to account for these trade offs.
The status quo comes with the trade off that partisanship will increase, more people will be radicalized.
This is the trade off, and people have to decide if they are willing to enjoy this trade off.
> ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does.... Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such.
[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-...
Parler was co-founded by an unelected billionaire as a "grassroots" way for the Mercers to push their ideology and their version of "acceptable speech". I don't really have any qualms with their power play getting shut down, and I don't think other businesses should be forced to support it.
It's no shock that DailyKos shouldn't have to host pro-Trump content. Nor should /theDonald have to host pro-Bernie content. We all agree that people can choose who to associate with, and that free association is important.
But AWS (and Facebook and others) didn't say "we're sites that present only one kind of content" the way /theDonald and DailyKos did. They presented themselves as universal tools for people to express themselves, build their own sites, install apps, etc.
So it comes as a shock when AWS says "we actually only want to support sites that present views that Jeff Bezos thinks are reasonable." And when Apple says "you can only download apps on your phone that we think do a good enough job moderating." And when Facebook bans people for posting wrong opinions.
The government can't and probably shouldn't force AWS to host content that Bezos doesn't agree with. It would be Amazon's right to host only content that is pro-Trump, or equally Amazon's right to only host content that is anti-Trump. But when Amazon presents something as a neutral utility but secretly enforces different rules, we can and should criticize them.
That's true even if all the content being removed today is garbage. I haven't seen any "worthwhile" content that's been affected by the recent moves, and I have never heard of any valuable speech on Parler. But I am still concerned that Apple gets to decide what apps I can install on my phone because they don't like the content. For every Apple (managed in California by socially liberal periople) there's a Walmart (managed in Arkansas by social conservatives) that will take the same powers and use them in a different way. Walmart is legally free to remove pro-BLM books from their online bookshelves, but we can and should criticize them if they do.
Honestly feels like just companies are trying to maximize their profits and "don't be evil" became just an old memory.
People are pretending like the platforms that deplatformed the group inciting violence are the only platforms on the internet that they could have used, they're not - they're not monopolies in regards to that. They are however the most convenient platforms to use because of various reasons, however we're not talking about having a right to convenience - we're talking about having the right to free speech, which everyone still does in America and on the internet.
Some advice: if you're going to have a mob boss and wannabe tyrant like Trump and rally your followers on a platform, I'd recommend using, depending on, technology layers of owners who are aligned with you and okay with inciting of violence; Trump goes on Fox News to say whatever the fuck he wants to millions of people while saying he's being prevented from free speech - come on now people, let's come back to reality and stop getting sucked into the gaslighting.
There's no natural monopoly that you can't find an alternative to if you're willing to spend enough effort.
AND we want to ban the whole platform X,
THEN it would be logical to ban also all the layers down the technological stack: AWS, Google Play Store, Telecoms that transported the traffic etc.
Indeed, X platform has approximately the same responsibility as other platform layers and hence they all should be punished.
Another idea is to punish them proportionally to their ability to check the content published on the platform so that telecoms probably will not be punished at all because they are not able to read encrypted traffic.
If the next layer refuses to ban the previous layer, then yes: keep going after the next layer in the stack.
There were about 10 million people on Parler before it was taken down. If you really think its comporable to an ISIS recruitment site, we got a much, much bigger problem here.
No, wait, hear me out.
No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.)
Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls.
Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.)
The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point.
Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats).
But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent.
One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed.
But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable.
There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares.
And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.
With the average opsec of chat sites, would you bet on "effectively"? Ironically Parler itself just had a leak.
Even if a company currently has good opsec, it can be acquired and go downhill (or turn evil).
In the current climate, this comment could (and would) be construed as implicit support of Parler, with all the consequences. The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves.
But suppose you set up a specific semi-public organization to act as the identity provider. (Like IANA? Maybe that's not a good example. :-)) Following something like a provably secure communications flow[1], the chat site gets a unique number representing the user. That's all they know about the user.
Alternatively, and with the approval of the user, the site gets the user's name or whatever the user wishes their online reputation to be associated with and can display that, for their comments to be taken seriously.
Ok, so let's take the example of Parler. Parler doesn't moderate its content, and actively resists attempts outside attempts to do so. However, anything illegal is still associated with individuals and the court system can force Parler to complete the link (that's the "effectively anonymous" approach, here), resulting in that user facing legal consequences. (This is opposed to the current system, where Parler could be technically designed to be unable to complete that link (Yeah, Parler are idiots.) and any kind of moderation relies on Parler's goodwill.)
AWS can continue to host Parler under the cover of a statement like "The POPO are keeping them in check." Or, AWS can kick them off based on measurable facts like "they got more than 10 or 15 subpoenas a day for three months".
As for your last paragraph...
Personally, I think Parler was a sewer filled with the morally and intellectually challenged who lack any sense of responsibility as citizens of the United States of America. (My understanding is that its users were limited to the US, btw.) I understand and agree with its vendor's decisions not to do business with them any more, in the same way I understand and agree with their decisions not to do business with ISIS recruitment sites.
The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves. The rich right loves "consequences", except for themselves. The poor love "consequences", except for themselves. Libertarians love "consequences", except for themselves. You love "consequences", except for yourself. I love "consequences", except for myself.[2] Everyone loves "consequences", except for themselves. Because humans suck.
[1] Yeah, I'm a formal logic guy.
[2] Except I don't really, schadenfreude aside. I seem find in myself a streak of moralism and an excessive sensitivity to fairness. It sucks. Even my schadenfreude doesn't extend to the Darwin awards.
Elected billionaires (and millionaires/thousandaires) don't do much better.
Putting aside questions around whether or not a media filter has always existed in some form...
You're using social media hosted on EC2 instances that can be terminated vs instead of your local newspaper and other similar, less directly filtered options. That's the trade off. I don't really see anything unusual about it - a newspaper could fire a writer (or even hire writers that reflect a certain tone), and nobody batted an eye.
That's just "I'm for free speech unless I disagree with the speech", right?
Who decides what's too intolerant?
We all love our Popper quotes but it's a very hard line to draw. Nearly any opinion can be explained at being somehow intolerant if you try hard enough.
In general, are we sure that no conspiracy ever turned out to be true? How many heresies turned out to be correct and changed the course of our history? And how many people were persecuted in the name of spreading conspiracy? Why are we so afraid of conspiracies?
No one is threatening to kill an elected official over grassy knolls.
Times change.
I think people believe in conspiracies, not because they're mislead on a certain topic, but because they want to believe. So debunking conspiracies is attacking their faith, which is what causes zealotry.
It's more like spreading a religion, which, yeah, you can't really ban it. You just have to let people do their thing.
tl;dr I agree that one shouldn't censor it, but only because it does no good.
I'd argue this is purely selection bias. I think the biggest modern conspiracies are not yet called conspiracies by the public zeitgeist.
Ex. Remember Jeff Epstein? I'm sure there are dozens of powerful people who hope you don't.
Epstein was a Conspiracy. No theory required :)
Have you seen Twitter, Reddit? It's filled with hate, conspiracy, radicalization and racism.
It's astounding how quickly people fall back to their dfault political leanings and stop being objective.
If they can do this to Parler citing politically motivated excuse to shut them down, what stops your company from getting booted off the internet because some of your users posted "lets blow stuff up"?
This sets a dangerous precedent going forward and it affects all of us regardless of your political spectrum. I get that AWS is an independent commercial entity that has its own terms but do you realize the problem of trusting billionaires and their monopoly to always do the right thing?
Tomorrow, the currents might change, and it could be you too.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist....Does it change the flavor if I rewrite the phrase as
First they came for the murderers and I did not speak out ...
?Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. While there may be a market for the speech Parler promotes and amplifies that market is not sufficiently large (in the opinion of these companies) to offset possible bad public relations or the loss of other customers.
I don't think there's any place for legislation that forces private companies to take a loss in this manner. It's clearly anti-free market and definitely anti-free speech, forcing Amazon to associate with speech they feel might harm the companies financial outlook.
Also, is it necessary? There are many BitTorrent tracker sites that are treated as illegal in the US and are still available. If Parler was really dedicated to keeping their website running they could surely do so. Maybe they won't have applications in the Apple App Store but that's not a right, is it? You have to have product that Apple feels helps the overall goal of their App Store, which is to make money for Apple.
Technically, there is no barrier that restricts a corporation from granting free space, so it isn't "free" to do so, moreso that it was not addressed because at the time of the framing of the constitution, the bigger dissenters of free speech were government, and religion, backed by government (or being the government.)
Indeed, it's my position that such laws would in fact be infringing on the free speech of those private companies. In addition they might cost those companies money, making these hypothetical laws also anti-free market.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different.
On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
Excerpts:
Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
(I'm going to leave aside the unfounded assertion that Parler was a "hate site." If it is, then every popular website is a "hate site," from Facebook and Google all the way down. Scores of prominent people who aren't hateful but for bizarre Left-wing constructions of the word "hate" use Parler to communicate with millions of people who are themselves not hateful conspiracy theorists.)
I always feel there's an unjustified logical jump on the part of authoritarian sentiments such as this. The argument seems to be, "X hosts hateful content that it refuses to remove. If we remove X, then we will have reduced hate."
This doesn't make much sense. Has anyone's mind actually changed because of Parler? It makes even less sense for conspiracy theories, where censorship makes conspiracy theorists feel like they're on the right track.
I remember looking up some moon landing hoaxer content on YouTube probably five to eight years ago. There was a lot of it on YouTube, but then YouTube also recommended some debunking videos (a few of which had been made specifically in response to the conspiracy theory videos themselves). The debunking videos were just frankly more persuasive. (The only issue with my little experiment was that the "Algorithm" recommended me conspiracy nonsense for a few weeks after.) There were no passive-aggressive, condescending propaganda boxes, no appeals to the authority of the media or legal system, no "fact checks." Just arguments for and against.
This is not to say that people can't do bad things with speech. We have stories like a random lynch mob forming in India over a viral series of videos shared via WhatsApp.[1] There are other stories like this. All are appalling. And technology has removed frictions that existed before to keep these things from happening.
But let's not forget that the world in which speech is restricted is much, much scarier. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was perpetrated by the most powerful members of Rwandan society, who used their monstrous power to slaughter Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus who spoke against the killings.
In the South under Jim Crow, speech was also violently suppressed with the aid of the states, who turned a blind eye to terrorist groups like the Klan going after black southerners or even white "race traitors" with lynching.
"Censorship, but only for the bad stuff" seems to be an unworkable system. People get riled up, and the consequences can be horrific, but they seem worse in a regime with heavy censorship that doesn't allow a safety valve for the bad ideas.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...
As for hateful rhetoric on Parler, that same hateful rhetoric exists on Twitter as well, don't fool yourself, it is only the fact that it is the left threatening the right that anyone allows it. Remember when Kathy Griffin held the bloody head of the President, or the current rise up and kill cops tweets you find everywhere on Twitter. Or the white people should all be dead tweets? Whether you agree to it or not does not therefore make hate speech. There is no clear cut defined line for hate speech to begin with. Anything can be declared hate speech, hell what I am saying now could be considered hate speech because I actually defend Parler and the people on its right to speech. At least then we can show examples of see this guy right here? He is a moron and believes in really dumb stuff. All they are doing by silencing these people is forcing them deeper underground where even more nefarious ideas and figures lie becoming more radicalized and more violent. But I guess that is what establishment wants, a perpetual idea to scare people with so that they give up even more freedom of thought.
And what did start-ups do before AWS et al? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS?
I understand it's more 'agile' to just spin up instances as needed, but are we in a place that the Old Way can no longer work? (At least theoretically.)
Doesn't Stack Overflow (still?) run on their own hardware?
* https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
Billionaires like the Mercer family, who fund Parler?
You're on a site run as part of the outreach for a VC firm where the owners are best buds with Peter Theil, Facebook board member, early Trump backer, a billionaire who literally hunted for a chance to sue a news organization out of existence because he didn't like a story they wrote about him; a site where a large number of the companies they fund and people who comment are intimately involved with AdTech and/or social media.
And you're only now noticing that billionaires have an unreasonable sway on discourse?
You didn't notice that not only does Rupert Murdoch own print press, book publishing, an TV all over the English-speaking world? You didn't notice the Mercer family also setting up Cambridge Analytica and being principal backers of Brexit?
. You were shadow banned until the right users voted you up
. To get more privileges, you had to scan photo ID
. Influencers were being paid to post "organic" material without disclosing it https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/how-parler-app-plans-to-make-money.html
So it was constructed as an echo chamber where people were being paid to push products.
[0]"In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants."
This sounds a lot like Fox News claim of being "Fair and Balanced". You might think their point of view is fair but there's no way that it's balanced.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-...
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
[2] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506
> So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
I am not sure this is true? The point could have been made without resort to hyperbole stretching into disingenuousness. What about that other platform should not be the issue - social network apps/sites are all subject to and propagate abuse.
Perhaps you mean why did we focus so much of our efforts on a single website? In this very moment, it's because this website was used to coordinate the efforts of a national group of potential terrorists. The pot boiled hard and fast.
In this particular case Trump directly ordered the attack. (At first I put quotes on order and attack, but alas no quotes needed, it's what it is.) But he has been flaring these flames since ... that fucking birth certificate dog whistle.
The idea that Democrats have been easy and kind on Twitter and FB is so disconnected with reality it’s actually kind of funny.
- Denying the current covid-sars-2 pandemic
- Direct calls to violence
I have seen people that were "fact-checked" (which is itself discussion, not silencing) for claiming that the 2020 election result is fraudulent.
None of this is silencing because your views don't align with the left. If you believe covid is a hoax created by George Soros or that Bill Gates bought votes in the 2020 election, your views don't align with reality.
I am not sure whether to assume you have not researched how he lost his platform or if you feel that defending molestation is "views that don't align with the left".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/02/facebook-...
> Traditional far-right views
Can you give an example of a traditional far-right view any of the 3 people in the article were banned for?
The article mentions Alex Jones and Laura Loomer. They were taken off of social media repeatedly encouraging followers to harass people (mobbing). Encouraging/organizing mobbing will even get you banned from 4chan. The number of sites that allow such behavior is exceedingly low, and Alex Jones got several chances to stop before being taken off of youtube and facebook.
Regarding Laura Loomer, her twitter ban doesn't appear to constitute harassment by any reasonable definition[2]. Even if we grant she harassed Omar on twitter, that doesn't justify being banned from payment processors, uber, and food delivery services[3].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/02/tech/facebook-ban-louis-farra...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/laura-loomer-banned-tw...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/paypal-bans-pro-trump-anti-muslim-f...
"I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have," he began a news conference in Manhattan. "This isn’t how I wanted my parents to find out about this either.”
"My experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say almost anything on the subject, no matter how outrageous," he said. “I do not advocate for illegal behavior...I believe the age of consent is right.”
- Milo Yiannopoulos
Although I think Milo is rude, bigoted, and unapologetic, he is a victim, and I agree that he should have plenty of latitude to speak on the subject. What he said in the podcast was inappropriate, and based on his apology, Milo seems to agree.
"The law is probably about right. It's probably roughly the right age; it's probably about okay. But there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age. I certainly consider myself to be one of them." - Milo Yiannopoulos
The more work it is to find the current hiding hole, the harder it's going to be for them to recruit and groom more terrorists from the populace.
One of the reasons moderate Republicans are going the way of the Dodo is they have no place to form a community. It seems like every time someone starts one the entire place immediately veers off into whackjob city.
Consider the "moderate conservative" opinion 100 years ago on women having the vote; compared to today's moderate conservative. Or on segregation 60 years ago. Or on gay marriage 20 years ago. Or on transgender issues today vs what will be considered "moderate conservative" 20 years from now.
The only cohesion they do have is on economic issues, but people are finally starting to realize that it's been a grift all along, perpetuated by big business and conservative establishment elites. "We'll pander to you on social issues (and then fold like a house of cards) in exchange for moving your job overseas, importing workers to reduce labor costs, and lowering taxes on the rich"
So given this loss of trust in the conservative establishment, people find themselves rootless and end up finding a community in this sort of nuttery (whether it be Q-Anon or ethnostate fantasies). Barring a return to throne-and-altar conservatism (which seems unlikely) I don't see it getting better any time soon.
But then, you've already conceded that progressivism is right (but perhaps moving too fast for your comfort) - so what is the point? If you know that whatever you're defending will be seen as beyond the pale of civilized discourse within a generation?
Imagine a moderate conservative forum dedicated to principled discussions created in 2000. Everyone there agrees that gay marriage is a bad idea. Now teleport that forum into 2021 - do contemporary moderate Republicans denounce it as a hotbed of homophobia and profusely apologize for their posts there 20 years ago? Or do they hold it up as an example of a community of moderate conservatives dedicated to principled discussions of the issues?
It seems like any new social platform could be pretty easily crushed under these standards. So the only way we will see a new social media platform is if they build their own data centers, and can grow without having an app.
And maybe they need their own browser, maybe client hardware like phones and tablets?
It seems unlikely that a startup would succeed under these conditions. So we better be happy with our current overlords (and whatever humans happen to be in charge of those companies in the future).
Outside of that, though, I couldn't care less that fascist organization platforms are being tanked. Free speech as an abstract principle has been used as cover for fascism in the U.S. for the better part of the past half century.
My concern is how far down "somebody else's platform" goes. Twitter bans Trump: they're a platform, they can ban whoever they want. AWS bans Parler: they're a platform, they can ban whoever they want. Verizon is an ISP... are they a platform? Can they ban whoever they want? GoDaddy is a domain registrar. Are they a platform? Can they ban whoever they want?
Remember net neutrality? Guess who killed it.
It's time to treat monopolistic/oligopolistic entities providing these services more like utilities; perhaps not as regulated as power companies, but on the same spectrum.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
The right term in this case is an oligopoly.
Semantically it makes little difference though.
People want free speech. You get free speech so long as your speech doesn’t unduly impinge on other’s liberties. That is the trade off we accept when we exchange the rule of force for the rule of law in a self governing, democratic society.
People are not complaining about business practices. People are complaining about not being able to say whatever they want over whatever medium they want even if other people get dead.
Unless you're quite tech savvy, you can't sign up for Parler anymore by using a competitor. So, while I mostly disagree with Greenwald, I don't think this characterisation is unfair.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745908
The mental gymnastics of the people defending Parler on here are wild. If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
[1]: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
'Amazon.com Inc.'s AMZN, Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that Twitter Inc. would be using its cloud services to support its delivery of users' timeliness.'
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/aws-says-twitter-will-use-...
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/isis_tw...
Not true. AWS has been working with Parler for "several weeks" [0] to help it comply with their TOS. Not only did they fail to remove the posts Amazon provided, the calls for violence on their platform got worse during that time.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
That's why I asked about members of Parler still being able to "use" AWS through other AWS-hosted services. I don't get what you're driving at.
> AWS isn't responsible for them.
Again, I'm not sure I understand what point this is responding to. No one is claiming AWS is responsible for the capital hill folks. They are claiming that Parler bears some responsibility and did so in such a way that violated AWS' policies. So AWS banned them.
This is what it feels like to live in a country like China, where if you criticize the government, or question the dominant narrative, or call for regime change, you are called a "terrorist" and denied basic rights like expression and put on no-fly lists. Anti-government rhetoric is routinely suppressed, fire-walled, and forced out. Are you sure that is what you want?
This is what it feels like to live in a country which tries to uphold the rule of law. Sorry if it inconveniences you, but not sorry.
Parler has been vocal that they have no plans solving it. If they had at least showed some vague plan to resolve it, they would have earned some sympathy.
There was a gallows out the front.
In any other nation on earth, this was an attempted coup. Just because it failed doesn't mean that those involved didn't have intent.
Note well: I am far from saying that Trump is innocent. He absolutely should have known that his words would incite violence. In the most charitable light possible, he's still clueless about the effect his words would have. (I could kind of see his intent being to use the mob to pressure Congress, so that they would be inclined to see it Trump's way. He may have intended the mob surrounding the Capitol, but not the breach... in a very charitable interpretation. Even in that interpretation, though, he still very dangerously misjudged the effects of his words.)
And Trump may well be guilty of more than that. He may well be guilty of attempting a coup to remain in power, and just not have had any idea of how to do it right. (I prefer that rogues be incompetent...)
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/military-investigating-servi...
[2] https://www.wesh.com/article/2-capitol-police-officers-suspe...
There were military personnel friendly to Trump among them.
> He shouldn't have said "now go home".
I may be confused on the timeline; wasn't that after members and electoral votes had been evacuated safely so the people overtly calling to execute the Speaker and VP, or otherwise plotting to capture, injure, or intimidate members, or destroy the electoral vote certificates to provide a pretext for their Congressional allies to resort to a vote-by-states in the absence of certified votes or to count the votes with selected states excluded had already failed?
But a cynic could easily think that Trump could tell that sufficient force was arriving to stop the mob, and that cutting his losses was therefore his best option at that point, even if he were really trying to do a coup...
Clowns who beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, planted pipe bombs, and roamed the capitol with sidearms and zip ties to take hostages.
Still sure they're just clowns?
Even the least violent among them committed a felony by entering the Capitol building. That someone else broke the window they entered doesn't make their entry any less illegal.
There's no contradiction there, despite your efforts to portray one.
People often take glee in and celebrate violence even as they commit it against others.
The german language has even given us a word for it: schadenfreude.
Thanks to the lies from the politicians and media personalities they follow, primarily the president, many of these people also fantastically believed that they were overturning a fraudulent election, and were therefore celebrating what they thought was an imminent success in that objective.
Seemed incredibly tame compared to the riots that went on over the summer that had massive amounts of looting and had buildings burnt to the ground.
There's a big difference between criticizing the government and storming the capitol.
Talk all you want. Engage in constructive debate. Run for office. Change laws through the system. All of those things are OK in the United States.
Dragging a police officer down the stairs and beating him with a flag pole is not OK in the United States.
There are clearly hosting providers (like Epik) who would be willing to take them on as clients from the start. If you read AWS's acceptable use policy, and then read the Parler's TOS, it is clear AWS was a terrible match as a hosting provider. By my read, AWS doesn't want to deal with anything that can be construed as "harmful" where Parler only forbade directly illegal behavior. (And it is apparent they barely felt a responsibility to moderate even to that level.) This was never going to work. Jan 6 brought things to a head, but as I see it, this business relationship was doomed from the start.
(I work for Amazon, these opinions are my own.)
He is full in-bed with this crowd, constantly spreading FUD about criticism of Trump, etc.
/s
When accounts build up a track record of flamewar, snark, political/ideological battle, and other things that break the site guidelines, we ban them. We have to, because otherwise this place will be engulfed by hellfire and then become scorched earth. Those things may be exciting and/or activating for a while, but they're not interesting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful. You can still express your views in that spirit, as many other HN users have been showing.
Every platform has people who violate the TOS, and by that standard, they all should be deplatformed. But that is not happening. You cannot say with any level of proof that Parler was worse at moderating content than any of the other social platforms
Those that stormed the capitol will be able to hang out in jail together and share their conservative ideas. It's a great compromise. Free food too.
From the start, this stood out to me as a very faulty premise. How exactly was Parler, a social media site, a competitor to Amazon, Google, or Apple? It would be different if this were Facebook, but we're talking about ecosystems/infrastructure vs a single app/website.
Also how can the power of three separate companies be a monopoly? The argument seems to be that Silicon Valley is itself a monopoly, except Silicon Valley is only a geographic location.
Presumably, this was of the first 13 people to be charged in US District Court (when about 40 others were charged in D.C. Superior Court). And maybe it's true of those 13, though “a Parler executive told me...none appear” seems to be below the threshold of factual information that a responsible journalist would rest any conclusion on besides “that’s what Parler is advancing as a PR position”.
But clearly there were plenty of people there with active Parler accounts, even if they haven't yet been arrested: https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/?utm_s...
The narrative in the article such as "how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor" looks absurd to me. The competitors of parler Is Facebook, Twitter, i.e. social media platforms, NOT Google, Amazon, and Apple.
It feels like the author deliberately misused these kinds of association to trigger irrelevant focus.
Most of us here know - if you want a resilient, censorship-free service, you can still: buy your own physical servers, rent data centre space (or a garage), buy multiple transit pipes to ensure traffic can get to them from a variety of places. You can move your servers around if you have to and keep your sovereignty despite everything else changing. It's how the internet was designed! Amazon, Google, Apple and most other private companies can go whistle if they want you offline.
Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom, internet patriots!
Instead they built everything on top of the conveniences and goodwill of a single US company, with no backup plan. Hardly living in the wild west - and that's this mob down to a tee. Rich, well-connected dorks who desperately need the society they organise to tear down - why be surprised when the society hits back in such a tiny way as terminating their AWS account?
If this is censorship, I'm a bowl of noodle soup.
https://www.coindesk.com/gotenna-bitcoin-wallet-mesh-network
If GMC wouldn't sell her a bus, she could just make her own!
Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom!
Before anyone comes crying: I in no way support the assault on the Capitol, calls to violence (which should be illegal), alt-right ethno-state madness, Qanon delusions etc. Nazism is a cancer on society.
Buses are run by governments. And Rosa Parks wasn't advocating throwing molotov cocktails at bus drivers, she sat in the wrong damn seat in an act of civil disobedience.
> If GMC wouldn't sell her a bus,
It'd be great if GMC would refuse selling vehicles to insurrectionist militias, IMHO.
Your analogies aren't doing any good here.
Not the one Rosa Parks was on.
>And Rosa Parks wasn't advocating throwing molotov cocktails
Rosa Parks no, but other Black groups most definitely. Same with Parler, not everyone was advocating violence.
>It'd be great if GMC would refuse selling vehicles to insurrectionist militias, IMHO.
Yup, stop selling them to the Black insurrectionist militias (codeword for any Black political group), would have been great.
>Your analogies aren't doing any good here.
They're pretty great honestly, describes the general idea well.
Agreed. But because some others didn't take her approach to civils rights, but were violent, why should she be canceled? It would be interesting to ask people at that time in history whether they saw her actions as violence or inciting violence. I bet the answer is a big ol' yes. I bet even many thought it was inciting the overthrow society/government.
Literal Nazis?! Wow! Didn't know there were that many National Socialist German Workers' Party members in the US in 2021!
Those freedom fighters mostly peacefully protested at the Capitol to fight against tyranny and literal communism! /s
Or she and like minded people could have boycotted the bus lines, in modern terms "cancelling" them. (In case any non-US users don't know, that's exactly what they did, it was called the "Montgomery Bus Boycott").
Ironically, racists in those days tried to use the government to shut that movement down, just like Republicans are trying to use the government to go after people cancelling Parler today.
If you plan on your own AS and IP space - full network independence - ask which carriers are there, and plan on a quarter or half rack for a router. You'd also need to become a member of your regional Internet registry (e.g. ARIN in the US) and ask them for resources - e.g. IP space and an AS number.
When accounts build up a track record of flamewar, snark, political/ideological battle, and other things that break the site guidelines, we ban them. We have to, because otherwise this place will be engulfed by hellfire and then become scorched earth. Those things may be exciting and/or activating for a while, but they're not interesting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful. You can still express your views in that spirit, as many other HN users have been showing.
EDIT: This would be a less bad take if Parler had been booted just because people on the platform voted for Trump, but to be clear: Parler was booted because it was used to organize an armed rebellion with the explicit goal of finding and executing members of Congress certifying a democratic vote, and its users have been encouraging people to feed Democrats' families into woodchippers while making them watch.
Let's see. If I go and organize a violent insurrection using GMail, what does Google need to do to comply with it's own philosophy here? It seems that it needs to start scanning all emails for inciting violence and send them to a moderation queue. Of course, it's never going to do any of that, because unlike Parler it doesn't have any overlords holding it by the neck.
Google, Apple, and Amazon like to do whatever they can get away with when it comes to anti-competitive practices, and enjoy the protections granted to them as private entities. On the other hand, this shows that they're willing to also take unilateral action to silence millions of people, based on nothing more than a whim and a holier-than-thou attitude. There's a messy contradiction here. They're not subject to having to abide by the 1st amendment because they're private companies, but in practice they're in control of the majority of public discourse. This is a big problem.
And this returns me to what I think was a big point in the article. The response to any free-speech concerns has been: "if you don't like Facebook or Google's policies, you're free to create your own." But the sway of FB/Google's policies is no longer just over their own content, but also the platforms they manage. Which as it turns out, form the majority of the infrastructure of the internet.
This is literally how the US were born, cf. The Declaration of Independance. I'm fairly certain King George was praised by a majority.
What loopholes? The 1st amendment protects you from being persecuted by the government for your speech. It does not require private entities to publish, promote, transmit, or broadcast your speech. Similarly, discrimination is legal in the US. It is only illegal to discriminate against members of protected classes on the basis of them being members of those protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.
Anyone that wants to spout off abhorrent things on the internet is free to do so. However, no private entity can be forced to allow such behavior. You do not have a right to have your tweet published by Twitter. You do not have a right to store your bits on an Amazon server.
This Administration publicly announced a policy of maximum prosecution of offenses connected in any way to domestic civil unrest, in general (now, at the top this was obviously, though not on its face, politically targeted at their opponents, but the career prosecutors called on to execute the policy are perhaps less likely to apply it narrowly in that way), and, in specific, both the D.C. AG and the US Attorney for the District of Columbia have separately indicated that they will be actively pursuing all connections out from the attack on the Capitol, including incitement, in the DC AG’s case explictly including that which may have been committed by the sitting President’s inner circle, and, though charges would need to be held until after he leaves office, the President himself.
There's a reason people are fleeing from any material connection to the terrorists or anyone seen to have a connection who isn't themselves actively cutting ties with them.
So is Twitter, by having Iranian leaders account left alone.
Your online "self" does not exist. There is no such thing as a right to free speech in an online sense as there is no shared utility that must accept all speech. Every step of the way is owned by a business - be it your ISP (which is not a utility - at least at the moment), a platform provider, or content publisher, or web infrastructure provider. All of them can and do have Terms of Use that any user must comply with in order to use their service. Unless/until that changes, any discussion of "right" to free speech online is patently ridiculous.
Also, he is propagating lies:
https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457?s=2...
Boycott: "withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest."
> contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
AWS also pointed out clear examples of illegal content that Parler did not remove.
Greenwald has a good point to make but it doesn’t appear that all of what he’s asserting is true.
I would guess AWS had a solid point that without it there's no way Parler could keep up with the moderation, but without knowing more details about what Parler was planning, it's hard to know.
Perhaps Parler had an interesting plan to crowd source moderation? Sites like Stack Overflow and Hacker News do that sort of thing with some success (augmented by real moderators). I have no idea if that's what they were thinking of, but it's an interesting thought.
But a variety of app stores or payment processors functioning over a common carrier (ISP, USPS) is a good thing.
What people should be griping about is that they put so much faith and trust into private organizations that are not the commons or public services and have no obligation to anyone beyond the contract that they enter into (ToS etc...).
[1] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/economics-2/market-coord...
I considered him a respected journalist, but this article doesn't seem like it's either balanced or fact-checked.
Has there been something going on with him? is he alright?
Having started a media outlet but given someone else the Editor in Chief job because he was more interested in being a reporter and didn't want editorial responsibility, he rage-quit to substack on his own because he also didn't like anyone else exercising editorial oversight of his work.
It almost seems like the practice of having someone detached from the work of writing a piece that is responsible for assuring balance, fact-checking, etc., is addressed serves a purpose...
First, why was it that these supposedly too-powerful tech giants could be intimidated into allowing activity that was clearly against ToS to go on for years before they grew a pair?
"Free speech" in privately owned spaces is a difficult problem. i would settle for even handed enforcement of ToS and a more transparent ToS appeal process.
How where they able to determine this?
"Free Speech" is a great thing when it's used with wisdom and solid judgment. It can be a vehicle for insight, innovation, and new ways to think about the world. This reflects the constructive uses of "free speech"
If you look at the other side of the coin you have these eruptions of toxic individualism. The power of "free speech" isn't used for constructive reasons. Instead it's a show of force. I am going to say this and there is nothing you can do to stop me. This has continued even as we see real material setbacks manifest because of this capricious use of "free speech"
Returning for a moment to the power of the pardon. It's likely we will see that power reigned in. It was never scrutinized before because the wielders of that power always used it responsibly and judiciously. I think we're going to have to turn the same scrutiny to speech on the internet. In the end you can point the fingers at the selfish few that ruined a good thing for the rest of us.
Are you perhaps referring to Bill Clinton, who pardoned Susan Rosenberg, a convicted terrorist that set off a bomb in US federal buildings and committed armed robberies?
Bill Clinton did not pardon her, he commuted her sentence to the 16+ years she had already served. Commutation and pardon are significantly different.
Are you in a jurisdiction that disenfranchises felons? If you are pardoned, you can vote. If your sentencd was commuted, you can't.
Is there a job that bars felons (either in general, or who have committed the kind of offense you are convicted of)? If you are pardoned, you can be hired for it. If your sentencd was commuted, you cannot.
Is there a job that, while it doesn't strictly ban ex-offenders, requires a criminal background check. If you were pardoned, the conviction was wiped away. If your sentence was commuted, it is still there.
Etc. Pardon undoes the conviction. Commutation stops incarceration and leaves the conviction and all its ancillary effects in place.
> Would you find it appropriate to "commute" the sentence of any other terrorists?
If, as one hypothetical pattern, their sentence was unusually long form the crimes they were convicted of with no apparent explanation beyond the political circumstances at the time of conviction, if they'd served more time than the typical sentence for the offense, and their conduct in prison showed a high probability of successful reintegration into society, sure.
A commutation is a lessening of the penalty. It implies that the act was wrong and the sentence was deserved but perhaps it was heavy handed. There is no implication of innocence in a commutation.
Sometimes the customer is the reason they all make the same decision.
Two names not included in the de-platforming accusations here are Facebook and Twitter. If anybody of the tech titans were to benefit from this cynical take on the actions against Parler, it was them.
SV is not one entity, and each of the five listed above has very different goals for themselves, so I'm pretty skeptical of this conspiratorial perspective.
I understand the sense that these things are monopolistic, but of course there are real alternatives. They are harder, and more expensive, but the cost is borne by the transgressor of pretty reasonable common norms (don't tolerate promotion of violence).
Parler gets to join Stormfront and all the torrent sites on the lower decks not because Apple, Google and Amazon are knocking out nascent competition, but because those sites violate reasonable, privately set and moderated rules.
Of course it's both, like all social media.
The content is horrible now, but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that it would have broadened quite a bit. It was a likely home not just for political extremists, but also quite acceptable content that's being deplatformed elsewhere, like firearms-related content.
When it’s their own interests at stake for the same reason, suddenly it’s unconscionable that a private company should exercise such unilateral control.
Funny how that works.
Parler can recreate itself on another platform if they wish. Gab is still up. It is just as disgusting. The Constitution only guarantees that Congress shall pass no laws prohibiting free speech. The last time I checked Amazon or Twitter cannot pass legislation.
Free speech is prevented by the use of force. We held an election. The results where not what some people liked. They tried to cancel the people's voice. That is the real speech suppression here.
I don't agree with this argument.
"Bad" is subjective and changes based on political perspective. If Parler was instead a pro-abortion forum, and it was taken down by a conservative company citing that abortion is an 'act of violence' (I don't agree, but many pro-lifers do) I think we'd see very few of the same voices cheering.
Businesses should tolerate some higher-cost customers. Ex. If a restaurant wants to exceed regulatory accessibility requirements to make their business serve disabled clients better, that is a good thing. Similar examples: multilingual support, making female hygiene product freely available, parental leave. This does 'reduce value for other customers' but is a net societal good (and hopefully most customers get some amount of that reduced value back in feeling good about helping people). Some customers costing business more isn't necessarily a bad thing that should be avoided.
If a site posted links to houses where people were on vacation and discussed best ways to break into them. It would get banned. Nobody would complain.
Why is it that a site which is essentially built to allow people to discuss violent crimes against people is supposed to be tolerated? We should tolerate it because it's discussing violent crimes against politicians? I don't even think it's limited to that regardless.
Parler was created so people could discuss things which were banned on other sites for being too violent and had too much hate speech. It's unofficial charter is based on supporting criminal activities.
I don't understand why people are acting like this is free speech when so many similar crime-based sites are not tolerated.
Can you provide a source for this?
Maybe don't hold your breath waiting on that.
Or, even that a big % of their content was hate speech and plotting violence regardless of what Parler knew or thought.
Maybe you should open your eyes.
This is the stuff which made it to the courtroom.
Parler knew exactly what their platform was for. They don't delete this shit because it's their competitive advantage. If they don't post threats and violent plots, there is no reason for them to exist.
Their executive team knows this and leaves it up for exactly that reason.
I literally just asked you for evidence and you literally refused to give any. Then I asked you to stop spreading unsubstantiated claims. Somehow you are surprised at that reaction?
> https://bit.ly/3i9NknT > This is the stuff which made it to the courtroom.
I could easily find similar posts on Facebook and Twitter. The questions are: how prevalent is this & did Parler really not delete this stuff?
> They don't delete this shit because it's their competitive advantage.
Parler claims to have deleted every single post reported by Amazon. You claim that they didn't delete any of them. Do you have proof? It would be pretty weird for Parler to flat out lie on this point, so unless I see some evidence I'm going to assume Parler is (in this particular instance) telling the truth and you are lying.
> If they don't post threats and violent plots, there is no reason for them to exist.
You fail to imagine any other reason for Parler to exist other than for "threats and violent plots"? That's so outlandish I don't think you believe it yourself.
--A.J. Liebling, quoted from memory.
I think I heard this point before about it trending to most popular for a fleeting moment. Does anyone have specific dates when that occurred and how long that trend lasted? Where exactly is this information conveyed, in the app stores themselves? Is there some archived location I can go look up to verify the veracity of the claim?
For example, if BLM had occupied the capital does anyone think that BLM would have been removed from the big tech platforms within two days or the response would be remotely similar? Although BLM is a much better cause, there were fringe elements that advocated violence for change that received no widespread tech backlash. Furthermore, there were BLM protests for months in nearly every state capital and Seattle had an occupied portion for weeks with no similar response.
Sure, perhaps in this case BLM is such a better cause than Trump's election shenanigans. However, couldn't someone on the center or right could see this as a problematic precedent? Today it's clear cut, but in the future it could be 'agree with the left or be 'cancelled''?
The reasons are not as important as the fact that it happened.
Power doesn't truly exist until it's exercised, because you don't really know how things will play out. Now we do know how it plays out: exactly like we feared.
An unsypathetic "victim" to experiment on with their overwhelming strength. Now it's just a matter of who is next and when. It's OK, that victim might be evil also.
It became the most downloaded app _because_ Apple gave them the 1 day ultimatum to start moderating their content. Only then more people heard of the app and downloaded it before it’s off the store.
It is the same to me as saying “it is true one can find sexually explicit images of children on a dark net pedo site”. Parler was made to harbour the kind of content which is getting purged by any platform caring about not appearing as a Daily Stormer outpost.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... of-monopolistic/comments
Hosting and domain registration are commoditized services. If one doesn't want to do business with you (or vice versa) there are thousands of other options.
server hosting isn’t a monopoly, everyone has access to the web on their phone even when app stores drop apps
they may have had problems getting managed services on the big providers but there are many many other options
Sure, banning a Nazi from Twitter doesn't actually kill the Nazi. They still exist, they still have Internet access, and they're still filled with hate. But at least they're not on Twitter anymore.
And when AWS sees that they're flocking to a hate site hosted on their platform, there's no reason they have to tolerate it. Sure, they'll go somewhere else, and maybe the hate site will find a new hosting provider, but at least they aren't hosted on AWS anymore.
If we have to play an constant game of Whack-a-Nazi, I vote we whack as many Nazis as we can.
What will you do when you find out that a family member or friend or neighbor is a "Nazi"?
Free speech is dead in America. The only speech allowed, is the one the left allows. Long live fascism.
Prove me wrong.
Edit just to point out this is a bad idea
The worst is that most of his current criticisms have considerable truth, which he destroys with his focus on bad examples.
Yes, it is a bad thing that FAANG have too much power, but removing Parler, a racist hate site where people blatantly plan violent crimes, is the world's most terrible example.
There isn't going to be _any_ model of an internet we want to have where sites which encourage violence will be acceptable. So what's his problem?
Sure, Parler isn't going to serve you a custom feed with that data, but what are they doing with it? They collect an insane amount of PII to create an account, when compared with alternatives Reddit and Twitter.
On another note, this whole article is written in bad faith:
- The AppStore screen shot shows Parler at the top of the social media list on Jan 8th, when it was trending because the impending ban, but the image is intended to show Parler as a more popular app. Bad Faith.
- The claim that there was a united attack is unsubstantiated, and, in order with Occam's Razor, it is far more believable that these companies banned their support of Parler as a response to violations of ToS from those companies than any sort of conspiracy.
- In referencing the Congressional report on anti-competitive practices, the article seeks to conflate the actions taken against Parler with anti-competitive behavior. This doesn't come close to being anti-competitive. ToS were violated, and private companies have to right to not host whatever they want, and the right to moderate it however they want.
- The article seeks to conflate the actions of some mega corporations with _all_ liberals, claiming all liberals cheered for this. That is also unsubstantiated mudslinging.
- The article overall seeks to conflate freedom of speech with access to private platforms and mass audiences. This is not the reality. Parler itself may have promoted itself as a free-speech platform, but that was only true if you agreed with the common opinion on the platform, and anyone who promoted dissenting ideas there were banned.
The whole article is a bad-faith farce, and should be treated as such. Ignore it.
There are real points to be made about how the behavior of these companies might impact discourse, whether they have too much power, and more. However, this bad faith argument is a distraction from meaningful discourse.
I disagree that the article distracts from meaningful discourse. To the contrary, the article has elicited a great deal of meaningful discourse (in these HN threads) that helps us examine the role of social media in modern society.
If following a constitutional process for protesting a State's results in a presidential election is "inciting the insurrection", somebody better start fitting Nancy Pelosi for an orange jumpsuit: https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral...
It's not sedition or insurrection to wait your turn and speak out in Congress that the results for a State are invalid. That's exactly what the Constitution stipulates you should do. It wasn't a crime or an insurrection when Pelosi did it and it's not a crime now.
If you want a word to describe then versus now I'd go with hypocrisy.
On the wider topic, it's sad that people's biases have become so blatant against others with different political views that they interpret every comment in the most disingenuous light, with the dumbest of assumptions. One does not have to call out "Violence is bad!" in every comment or statement that they make for it to be true. It should be assumed as that's the default for any sane individual in modern society.
So, yes violence is bad. We all know that. But unless you can show me where Cruz or Hawley actually committed acts of violence or directly instructed people to do the same, talk of them being guilty of insurrection is totally out of line. If telling your supporters to "March to the capital and make your voices heard!" is an insurrection we're not going to have room in our prisons.
So, this is exactly how leaders want you to think. I suggest reading up on how coups happen and how the leaders in those situations use the media and exactly what they say and how they say it. We have a lot of examples in this world and they have been very well documented too. Also in these cases its irrefutable evidence once the coup has happened who the bad guys are, so the books will not be controversial.
Here is a book to look at if you want - Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.
Just to be clear, it's possible to detest silicon valley monopoly power while celebrating the deplatforming of Parler in particular.
Antitrust is one concern, the risk of losing democracy to political violence during a transition of power is a separate concern.
This is a serious question: Was there a bastion of nuanced discussion and debate occurring on Parler? Almost everything I've ever seen has been amplification of disinformation. I am sure some nuanced discussions were there, but Glenn it making it seem like it was a minor part of the service or perhaps mirrored how common it might be on Twitter and other platforms? Is that what he's trying to imply?
Parler can go buy some servers, hook them up to the internet, and come back online.
I wonder if the united States at this point is capable of that discussion? In a healthy democratic political process as applied to this issue, there probably needs to be input from both the free speech side and the societal protection side, and some compromise legal solution reached.
If Biden follows through on his rhetoric that seems possible, but that seems like a big if, with political power apparently firmly in Democratic hands for the next couple of years at least.
I know this may be difficult to do currently, with the site brought offline, but still.
"Hashtags on Parler denoting Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories — #Dominion, #Sharpiegate, #QAnon — trend freely, without the restrictions Twitter and Facebook have instituted to suppress them."
Hashtags trend freely. Oh no! I might be exposed to free range hashtags! I may have to actually think for myself.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/01/07/capitol...
2) Facebook is self hosted.
My band needs a place to practice. Give me your living room. You have people over, so if you don’t let my band practice, you’re censoring me.
More importantly, you've also conveniently dropped the crux of my argument, about when does the government get to force political association on private entities, including surrendering their private property for political use they disagree with. I would really like an answer to the this. That's why I used the reductio absurdum of having my band practice in your living room. If you'd rather, I'm also open to putting political bumper stickers on your car.
Imagine the flip side. Imagine if a bunch of "conservatives" from Mississippi started a web hosting company 10 years ago and then an anti-fascist social media platform sprouted up on their infrastructure. Imagine people on this platform started posting about how black lives matter on the platform.
Imagine what the "conservative" reaction would be.
You take a platform for violent extremists off of _private_ servers hosted by a _private_ company on the West Coast and everyone flips their lid. "Conservatives" have no shame.
Oh that's rich. There are good reasons to be alarmed by the power these tech giants hold over people's ability to communicate with one another, and Greenwald even talks about a few. But these are weasel words. These are cynical words which are desperately attempting to distract from the gravity of events that precipitated the tech giants' actions.
Difficult to entertain bad faith arguments like these.
Apple, while accusing Parler of not monitoring what it users send, technically is guilty of the same, when users send SMS messages to each other to bomb a place.
Now that Apple is enforcing tenants on its platform such as de-platforming Parler, it should also be held responsible for the actions of any other app ( left or right wing), since it has stepped up to do that.
If this is not acceptable, all talk of free speech is really hogwash.
Whats next - havens for kiddy porn?
The app stores are true monopolies that as gatekeepers to users loading apps on phones (particularly so in apple's case). There isn't really any alternative to them.
In contrast, a hosting solution can be swapped out for another hosting solution. While non-trivial (especially if you are using a bunch of AWS specific services), there are viable solutions.
Parler has already found a new hosting solution with epik. [1]
Given that anyone can host a website (potentially even by buying their own bare metal hardware and procuring IP addresses), then one always has the ability to disseminate one's ideas. The "public square" equivalent is simply having your content online as it is available for all to read / consume.
That does not entitle you to speech on other people's platforms. That is the equivalent of saying you should have the right to go into a private venue, hosting a private event, and espouse your ideas.
I've long thought that we should reinterpret campaign finance law from this perspective. Specifically, that because the internet enables anyone to get their ideas published and accessible, then we should remove the ability of political campaigns to buy ANY advertisements. Having the right to speak should not be expanded to having the right to BUY eyeballs / impressions. You should be able to speak all you want, freely, on the internet. But all traffic should be earned, organic traffic from folks actually wanting to listen to you.
The ability to use targeted advertising to target specific messages to specific political segments seems disingenuous. It allows the politician to choose their voter instead of the voter to choose to listen to their politician. It is like digital gerrymandering.
Given that a politician can easily host videos, content, etc that can literally be consumed by the entire planet with relative ease (not to belittle the complexity of youtube), free speech exists fundamentally in the foundation of the internet / web.
Attacks on those fundamental components of the internet are concerning though. For example, SciHub having its domain names revoked and thus being unable to have DNS properly route to their servers is of grave concern. But the recent developments of NextDNS and similar decentralized DNS solutions are promising [2].
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-moves-to-epik-domain-...
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/pirated-academic-sci-hub-handshake
Greenwald is a conspiratorial loon.
I have not seen any evidence backing up those claims, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you're aware of any such evidence, could you please post it? I'd honestly just like to understand the situation better.
In the absence of such evidence, I see two plausible explanations:
1.) Parler was a small-scale operation (30 employees from what I've heard) who built a social media platform intended to appeal to pro-Trump conservatives by tolerating a higher degree of free speech compared to the likes of established social media platforms. It became very popular very quickly and speech on the platform became increasingly violent. Parler's relatively small team was unable to keep up with moderating so much content, which enabled a lot of extremist calls for violence to propagate. Since they could not keep up with AWS's requests to moderate their platform and it was facing public scrutiy after events at the capitol, AWS pulled the plug.
2.) Parler was intended as a platform for violent, pro-Trump extremists and used "free speech" as a week justification to not moderate their platform. It became very popular very quickly and speech on the platform became increasingly violent. Parler still refused to moderate the platform even after events at the capitol, so AWS pulled the plug.
AWS is not necessarily in the wrong in either case. However, the optics for Parler looks very different between the scenarios.
They signed a contract with AWS and didn't live up to it, so AWS cancelled it. That's how free markets work.
If the finger-quote conservatives want their own platform with which they can plot the downfall of American democracy unrestricted, they're going to need their own infrastructure and their own apps and, it's starting to look like soon, their own banks and financial industries to handle their money.
You have ANY idea how hard it is to get a bank to overlook a pecuniary interest for a moral one? Apparently you have to erect a gallows on the Capitol lawn.
Remember that he and Laura Poitras helped Edward Snowden disclose to the world what he did, in 2013.
In other words, as a journalist, he does, or should command a huge amount of respect from the HN community.
He has my respect.
Now, with that as a background, let's talk about this article.
It's an important article, and yes, broadly speaking, the claims that are made are true.
But the problem I have with this article (and not with Glenn Greenwald personally, who again, is a great journalist!) is that it's a little bit too broad...
To give you an understanding of this, let's say that in the future, I ran an online service with an App Store, like Apple or Google.
OK, so now, for whatever reason, the Parler App is removed from the App Store that I run.
But, to tell me (and the newsreader) that it was an act of Tech Tyranny, of Monopolistic Force -- is not good enough.
You see, I believe in several things:
1) Strong Logging
2) Chain Of Command
3) Chain Of Custody
But most importantly, the "5 Whys":
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
In other words, I'd like (as a member of the public) an "organizational backtrace", starting with the engineer who physically removed the App from the app store, moving from there to his manager that ordered it, and moving from there up levels of management.
In other words, WHO ordered WHAT, WHEN, and WHY.
In other words, don't start with the highest level effect, the silencing of free speech, start with the lowest level effect -- the physical removal of the App from the App Store by the engineer that did it.
From that point, use the 5 WHYS to work backward, something like, "OK, this engineer did this because he was ordered to by his manager", so WHY did the manager do it?, "Because he was ordered to by his manager", etc.
But now the question arises -- Who was at the highest level of management at that company that gave that order?
And now we ask WHY again... so we need to talk to him, and find out exactly WHY (what socio-political-moral-ethic-legal-or-whatever pressure was applied to him, and how?)
See, answer all of those questions, and THEN you have the true story!
But all this being said, I do love Glenn Greenwald!
An example for this article:
> including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them.
He says this but fails to mention that the same people who were the founders of Cambridge Analytica also were the founder of Parler
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201116/01141545710/what-...
Furthermore there seems to be little, if any, mention of the fact that the Mercers who were major funders for the Trump organization were also using the data obtained from Cambridge Analytica to target political advertising.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/595338116/what-did-cambridge-...
I know this is beyond the scope of the article that Greenwald was writing but having read his writing for years I have to wonder why it wasn't mentioned? It's not something that would typical go without mention in writing from earlier in his career.
I am not one to typically hedge on the side of removing "free speech" from people, but Parler represented a clear and present threat to American democracy. The ties to the Trump organization and it's funders were innumerable. Why does Greenwald have an agenda to foment discord regarding this? His writing lately, the twitter screeds that he has gone on against the left, and his staunch denial of the Russian interference in the 2016 election makes me question if he hasn't been compromised in some way.
Facebook, Twitter, etc are PRIVATE property. They are legally ALLOWED to set terms of use on their property - whatever those terms may be. If anyone breaks those rules they can then be throw out!
Trump, and company can peddling their LIES wherever it is allowed, like on FAUX news :-). His free speech STILL exists over there.
First, I fully agree that the entire mobile ecosystem is walled-garden first. That should be addressed to a greater degree than sideloading apps on android. Second, the idea that this is 'monopolistic' seems deeply silly. Parler isn't offline because Amazon, the only provider of web services, told them to get off the internet. It's offline because Amazon and most of their specialized service providers (twilio, etc) kicked them off as well as all of those service providers' competitors. This is not an example of monopolistic power. It's an example of an entire industry choosing to reject a company they find odious. This is very similar to what happened with Stormfront some years ago[1].
Still, this is troubling. I feel like it's reasonable to see Parler as acting in bad faith. It seems to me like they knowingly fostered an environment that would lead to militants using the service to plan attacks. I think they protest too much.
I also think that hosting truly "free" speech in an ethical way is enormously, obviously difficult. Threats are genuinely hard to evaluate and must be taken seriously. Mass communication has been at the center of all the modern genocides (and early forms of communication were key to the older ones). I think this is the discussion we should be having - what is the "right" way to create a space where people are save to speak? How could Parler have existed to allow people to speak their minds while preventing the platform from providing aid to violent hate groups? I suspect it's impossible to allow people to speak freely about their belief that other people are not human without fomenting violence but it's clear that not everyone agrees with that and I think we need to talk about it.
P.s. Quite sad to see that Greenwald has descended into red-faced sputtering grievance-listing. I agree that the moral case for shutting down Parler and shutting down Facebook is the same. I think both should be shut down for fomenting and planning violence. We can reopen both of them when we figure out how to more effectively stop their use in violence. I didn't even need ten paragraphs to say it.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/stormfront-has-been-kic...
I feel like we've all been a bit brainwashed by the government in our notion that "free speech" must have limits. I very much doubt that that is true. I think the speech part should always be 100% free. Of course any crimes that derive from it are and will always been fully enforceable. I just question whether or not the speech itself should be viewed as illegal, or something that should be regulated.
Obviously all of the insidious planning and hatred that presumably occurred on Parler is abhorrent. I think I can hate all of those things without believing that the site should be censored.
Then why are you posting that on a heavily-moderated discussion forum and not 8kun?
I have yet to see any evidence that the capitol protest was planned primarily on Parler. I have seen plenty of evidence that it was planned primarily on Facebook (that has since been deleted/hidden by Facebook). You'd think if the goal was to punish or curtail such events Facebook would be getting at least similar treatment as Parler.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/parler-safe-space-fo...
> Still, there is a set of community guidelines and a user agreement, which prohibits deliberately obscene usernames, pornography, and threats to kill others. Meaning even Parler’s free speech absolutists have some vague rules for what they deem as too offensive. “When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED,” wrote Matze during a consequential exchange on his site, shattering the hopes of conservatives and libertarians everywhere who dream of a social media site with a completely laissez-faire ToS.
There are plenty of individuals claiming they were banned for posting left content or disagreeing with right wing content. Hard to know how much is trolling or not, but I think that's kind of the point. If it is the home of free speech, who is Parler to determine their intent?
Their counter argument is that if you bring up conservative view points, the liberal echo chambers ban you. So they should be able to do it in their free speech spaces.
This also unfortunately hides the fact that hate speech, dog whistles, saying that COVID is a hoax, pushing for falsehoods and getting upset about not being able to do so, is why you get banned.
I fail to see how this any different from any other social media site??
Again, NOTHING that Parler did is any different from any other social media platform that is a total cess pool of what you just described. The difference is, the speech was predominantly conservative in nature. Which leads me to believe the decisions to remove the app were purely a political decision - which is an incredibly dangerous precedent to start.
Because all of the people who defended Twitter from suppressing conservative voices told them if they don't like it, they can start their own network.
Which is exactly what they did.
Now THOSE people who told them to start their own network so they could do as they please, are up in arms because they didn't moderate their content enough for their liking?
Seriously, that's asinine.
[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/06/trump-riot-twi...
No, that's one of his unsubstantiated claims that conveniently fits the ideological tirade he's been on since long before the events in question.
Other journalists have pointed to planning on Parler, including citing specific posts.
Sure.
And that may indicate problems with those platforms. At a minimum, though, those platforms reacted against continued use by the same terrorists once it was unmistakably, publicly, concretely clear that they were a deadly serious threat.
I very much disagree. Hate speech is just one example. "Speech" designed to terrorize, threaten, and incite action should not be "free".
> Of course any crimes that derive from it are and will always been fully enforceable.
By this logic no one who is purposely inciting anything is even liable for the actions that they cause. "Leaders" will never face punishment, because they only say things, right?
The line (or at least one of the lines) comes when speech is no longer an expression, but an instruction. It may be a tough line to draw, but that doesn't mean that the line shouldn't exist somewhere.
You're missing a part in this line that's very important, it should be "nearly absolute and protect unpopular opinions from the government."
(This is not an endorsement of the delusional presidential behavior that created the leadership vacuum filled by the corporations.)
It would be government overreach to tell the platforms that they're required to host whatever speech is posted to them, not the other way around. As I've mentioned in other comments, there are more ways to communicate now than at any other time in history. Facebook and Twitter do not have monopolies on speech, nothing on the internet does.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25750501
Where would you draw the line?
In your linked comment, all of these governments recognize (3) as a scenario that should be governed by laws (which vary between countries).
So why not 2? When does 2 become 3?
> As you noted, Germany restricts speech more than the US for obvious historical reasons. So the fact that even their government objects to this behavior is evidence against your position, not mine.
The German and French government objects to the US not having laws that require this behavior and leaving it in the hands of private companies, sure, and I object to the US having censorship laws and would rather private entities be able to make the decision for themselves, the direction of MORE freedom of speech.
To elaborate on the other user, Germany and France both ban holocaust denial and "hate speech", which would include much of the content on Parler. Mexico's speech laws are less clear, but if my reading is correct the constitution allows regulation of hate speech. And in practice, speech in Mexico isn't protected from the government or cartels.
So France and Germany could be seen as asking the US government to take a stronger stance on hate speech. This would, of course, require a constitutional amendment, at which point anything goes. Excluding that, what you see (and will continue to see) is corporations stepping in to ban hate speech because the government is restricted from doing so.
> He said it's right not to "stand back" when such content is posted, for example by flagging it, but qualified that the freedom of opinion is a fundamental right of "elementary significance."
> Seibert said the U.S. ought to follow Germany’s example in how it handles online incitement. Rather than leaving it up to tech companies to make their own rules, German law compels these companies to remove possibly illegal material within 24 hours of being notified or face up to $60.8 million in fines. [0]
You mean verified to be correct as confirmed by her spokesperson who released the initial statement. (Seibert released the initial statement, as can be seen here[1])
So yes, the statement can be seen as saying two things
1. Twitter is too powerful and needs to be regulated
2. The US needs stronger regulations on hate speech.
[0]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/angela-merkel-rips-twitters...
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/germanys-merkel-hits-out-at-...
"Seibert said the U.S. ought to follow Germany’s example in how it handles online incitement. Rather than leaving it up to tech companies to make their own rules, German law compels these companies to remove possibly illegal material within 24 hours of being notified or face up to $60.8 million in fines.
""This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators — not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms," he told reporters in Berlin. "Seen from this angle, the chancellor considers it problematic that the accounts of the U.S. president have now been permanently blocked.""
> So France and Germany could be seen as asking the US government to take a stronger stance on hate speech.
Which was, and continues to be, supported by Merkel's statement.
Your original comment was in support of/elaborating on "It would be governmental overreach [to set the rules]." That original comment had an overly permissive rule in place of what I've bracketed, but that's beside the point since all of these governments are specifically objecting that the recent actions are problematically restrictive.
Yes, and one reason for that, as stated by Merkel, is that the US doesn't have a democratic framework for managing hate speech. Because such a framework is illegal under the first amendment. And her statement suggests that the US adopt a more German framework for adjudicating such speech, so that corporations don't need to make their own rules.
Your claim is that Twitter is "effectively" acting as the government. That's not true under a significant amount of law and precedent. (There are cases where private entities are acting as a government, and importantly, trying to use government force to suppress speech, Marsh v. Alabama).
In fact, one could argue that by censoring speech, Twitter is explicitly not acting like the government, because Twitter is taking action the government cannot.
I'm not even going converse this with nonsense.
From what I can tell, whether speech in the form of "group X should be eliminated" constitutes a threat is still subject to controversy [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/02/steyn...
That case gave rise to the "fighting words" doctrine or test which has (thus far) only been applied (successfully) to speech that is so vulgar or offensive as to provoke violence. A good representative example is the recent Twisted Tea smackdown video that made the rounds. If a police officer had swooped in and arrested the instigator before he got hit the arrest likely would have been kosher under the doctrine because the n-word is generally so vulgar you don't expect to be able to use it in that manner and not start a fight. Basically it's used to justify arresting someone for speech so inflammatory that even though you are not picking a fight someone is inevitably gonna pick a fight with you whether you want one or not.
I can't think of any case where it was used to prosecute someone for calling for "adjacent to violence" type behavior. I am unaware of any cases (that have not been overturned) where fighting words doctrine was used as a justification for suppressing political speech. If you know of any examples I'd be interested to read them.
For a concrete example of nominally political threatening speech that was found not to be protected, see Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists, where it was found that certain anti-abortion ads were not protected by the First Amendment because they reasonably caused the targeted doctors to fear for their safety. I don't believe they explicitly invoked the "fighting words" doctrine, but it relied on the same principle as Chaplinsky — that if speech has the effect of creating a real-life threat, the speech isn't necessarily protected by the First Amendment.
(To be clear, the point wasn't that Chaplinsky is the be-all-end-all, just that the concept of "hate speech," where the consequences of some speech make it unworthy of free speech protections, is not a recent invention.)
>(To be clear, the point wasn't that Chaplinsky is the be-all-end-all, just that the concept of "hate speech," where the consequences of some speech make it unworthy of free speech protections, is not a recent invention.)
Yes, but those consequences must be imminent and unlawful.
The point of Chaplinsky isn't that it's a real life in the moment affront to civility so offensive that it's bound to cause a fight.
Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists is about specific threats, e.g. "I'm going to specifically kill you".
Both examples of non-protected speech are under totally different doctrines (I forget how far back the specific credible threat doctrine goes and what the real name for it is but it's really old, older than planned parenthood) that were more or less condensed into the "imminent lawless conduct" test established in (Brandenbyug).
It's going to be very hard for anything that is published in an asynchronous medium that isn't a direct call to lawless action by someone who can credibly get people to pull it off to fail the test because in order for the lawless action to happen people must do things that would be premeditated crimes on their own. There is no current US court doctrine for limiting free speech with regard to hate unless the content and situational details add up to something that fails the Brandenburg test.
In no way does it even reflect the possibility of something like Parler being used to amplify the sort of messaging it does.
Americans have been struggling with hate speech and censorship for well over a century. The most obvious example is the censoring of the film The Birth of a Nation back in the late 1910s, but there are examples even further back in US history.
Our interpretation of "freedom of speech" (both philosophically and as protected by the First Amendment) isn't immutable and has changed since the Bill of Rights was adopted. Prior to the 1950s, the supreme court upheld the censorship of books and film for reasons that we now interpret as unconstitutional, and censorship remained the law in many states for decades after.
I would argue that our current expectation for "free speech" and this idea that it is "nearly absolute" is far more liberal than what we've seen through most of American history.
Hate speech was very much an issue even before 1947.
Libel laws alone put paid to your second sentence.
Free speech is not meant to be nearly absolute - it is not even meant to be largely absolute, copy right alone would be incompatible with such a strength of freedom.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
I was just trying to make a point that this was removing a toxin from the app eco-system. Not a harmless player who did mostly good with a few “bad apples”
I think you should be free to say what you want and to think what you want, I also think a privately owned space has the right to remove people who are saying things they don't want in that space.
Here are three examples:
(1) You own a bar and someone comes in and starts calling your patrons racial slurs, can you throw them out?
(2) You start a social media company and somehow a large contingent of your initial user group turns out to be a hate group. Shouldn't you be allowed to remove the group and their hateful content? Do you really want to be REQUIRED to leave it on the site unless it is breaking a law?
(3) You start a social media company and it grows to the size of twitter. Your site is one of the most visited sites on the internet, and is getting overrun with hate speech. Don't you want to be able to remove that?
Are you fine with one and two but not three? Where's the line? If you want to argue that Facebook and Twitter are utilities and should be regulated as such, what do they get in return? Don't forget, utilities are often government sanctioned monopolies or near-monopolies in "exchange" for all of their regulation.
Parler wanted to open a new platform and attract its own users. Only incidentally was it (like everything else these days) dependent on a number of other services to work.
> of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler
https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
I suspect Amazon is not the one to breach the lease.
Yes, that was my point
No, and I didn't suggest that.
> electric company
Regulated. The electric company is a regulated monopoly. Hosting companies aren't. If an ISP had banned traffic from Parler, that would be an issue, it is a regulated monopoly. If Amazon shuts them down, there's no issue, it is an unregulated service provider.
I don't understand the shock and surprise. No US company is going to choose anything over their own bottom line. Certainly not for a site as small and niche and literally riddled with hate speech as Parler.
Parler and it's customers can say whatever they want to whoever they want. Can they force Amazon to take their money? Absolutely not. Should they be able to? No: forcing Amazon to host Parler would be a violation of Amazon's own right to free speech.[0]
From Parler's point-of-view it would be unfortunate if they tied themselves to AWS specific infrastructure. There's absolutely no way that they now have some kind of "right" to be hosted by Amazon. Also, it's just poor planning on their part.
When you rent space to someone, and they start using it in a way you don't like, maybe even specificially violating their lease, you can throw them out, but it becomes a legal process called eviction. You can't just put their stuff on the sidewalk and change the locks without going through that process. This is how the game is played when you get into that business.
Maybe that is the part that's missing with the AWS/Parler situation. AWS doesn't want them, but they leased space and services to them and there is a contract. Breach of contract is not something that either party to the contract can determine, because they both have conflicts of interest. If we had a judge review the contract, and approve the eviction, at least there would be a lot less basis to claim that are acting capriciously or out of bias.
Maybe in the long-term we'll look at hosting more like real-estate and it will have more laws and regulations about what the providers can and cannot do, but I doubt it and I'm willing to bet the trade offs that come with that are truly terrible. Imagine how many things wouldn't get off the ground if hosting contracting was even 1/3 of the real estate process.
More importantly, hosting isn't a monopoly. There's no government provided moat that justifies that level of regulation. The way I see it there are only two things that are in utilities in the internet space, ISPs (both consumer facing and interconnects) and DNS, and DNS is arguable.
The US built roads to enable commerce and some law breaking people have access to them.
Intent matters
I don't think a claim like this is meaningful without a precise definition of "speech". And, consequently, I think you'll find any attempt to define which things are not "speech" ends up being functionality equivalent to dialing back from that theoretical 100%.
In general, you can't have 100% freedom over any finite resource. If there's only one dessert in the fridge, you and I can not both have 100% freedom to eat it.
If you presume that any meaningful "speech" has some non-zero audience size, then speakers are competing for the finite attention of other humans. You can't have perfect freedom for that.
Schrodinger's pie - you both have 100% freedom to eat it until one of you actually does
A closer analogy would be private roads. If Amazon owned a series of private highways used solely for shipping goods, would we care if they stopped transporting items they didn't agree with on those Amazon owned highways?
Forgive me if I'm repeating a common refrain here, but the words we say on Twitter, Parler, Facebook, and even HN aren't "free", spoken in a public place. They're owned by Twitter, Parler, Facebook and HN. Those companies can choose to do whatever they want, for better or worse.
But right now, it doesn't matter if I disagree or not. US law makes it very clear what responsibilities and rights publishers have.
Title 47 U.S. Code § 230 explicitly states that publishers are not liable for the content that their users post, with some minor exceptions related to sex trafficking.
They are also allowed to restrict whatever they like, whether it's constitutionally protected or not.
No, it doesn't.
It states that online systems with user generated content (and other users on such systems) aren't treated as publishers of what their users post, with some major exceptions related to civil liability related to sex trafficking and all criminal liability regardless of subject matter. Civil liability not deriving from status as a “publisher” is also not on its face, affected, though some courts have also applied 230, controversially, to immunize against notice-based civil liability that would apply to them as distributors, even if they aren't considered publishers.
To be accurate, it certainly does.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
It also says other things that I neglected to state, most importantly, that section 230 does nothing to change criminal law, so it's also fair to call me out on that.
No, it doesn't say they won't be liable for user content, it says they won't be considered the publisher. There is liability for content that is tied to being a publisher, and there is liability that has other bases. On its face, 230 says nothing about liability on other bases (as noted in GP, some courts have also used it to provide immunity from liability as a distributor, but that is controversial and not stated in the text.)
Then there is the acceptable use policy of the hosting provider(s). dns, server, cdn, app store This is entirely outside of 230. If the provider gets enough complaints, they may eventually see your site as a risk and may choose to terminate your account in order to protect the image of their business. They do not want their reputation tarnished as it will affect their profits. I think that is totally fair. If you want to run a site that may likely provoke emotional response from the public, then in my opinion it would be best to find a hosting provider that accepts the risk in a contract. The contract should state what is expected of you and what you expect of them and what happens if the contract is to be terminated, such as off-boarding timelines. Smaller startups are at higher risk as they provider has less to lose by booting them off their infrastructure.
Where I believe this issue has gone sideways is what the industry believes to be considered an appropriate method of moderation. The big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Apple are using automated systems to block or shadow-ban things they consider a risk to their company or their hosting providers. This leads to people fleeing those systems and going to the smaller startups that do not yet have these automated moderation and shadow-banning systems and that is what happened with Parler and a handful of other newer platforms that wanted to capture all the refuges of the big platforms. A similar thing is happening with that alternate to Youtube, but I can not remember what it is called. Bitchute?
Another potential problem that may confuse the 230 discussion could be that many powerful politicians and corporate leaders use the big platforms like Twitter and Facebook. They and big lobbyists and investors may have some influence over the behavior of these platforms and may be able to tell them to squash the sites that do not follow the automated version of banning and shadow-banning. Does that create echo chambers? Is that what is happening here? Not sure. If so, I predict it will push many people under ground and that is probably not great for agents that would like to keep an eye on certain people.
I'm afraid you're misinformed.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
> > If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher"
> I regret to inform you that you are wrong. I know that you've likely heard this from someone else -- perhaps even someone respected -- but it's just not true. The law says no such thing. Again, I encourage you to read it. The law does distinguish between "interactive computer services" and "information content providers," but that is not, as some imply, a fancy legalistic ways of saying "platform" or "publisher." There is no "certification" or "decision" that a website needs to make to get 230 protections. It protects all websites and all users of websites when there is content posted on the sites by someone else.
> To be a bit more explicit: at no point in any court case regarding Section 230 is there a need to determine whether or not a particular website is a "platform" or a "publisher." What matters is solely the content in question. If that content is created by someone else, the website hosting it cannot be sued over it.
Edit: BTW, I'd suggest reading that whole article. Section 230 has been misrepresented by politicians and the media fairly regularly, and this piece does a nice job of laying out the current state of the law and its interpretation and application.
Roads encourage bank-robbers. Honestly who would rob a bank if you could only flee on foot? It's ok though that it encourages and facilitates bank robbers. We should not close the roads because of it.
We need to be OK that certain things (free speech) can have huge negative effects and criminal elements.
From the experimentation side of things, you have Canada, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (I'm probably missing some) where they impose restrictions on free speech while still having mostly free speech rights. You can even include the US as well, since it does have restrictions, they're just more relaxed, and seem to only be enforced if financial damage can be proven from libel.
Now very broadly looking at that list, it seems that countries that take a most speech is free (especially speech that criticizes the government and ruling class), but some speech is restricted (especially hate related speech, speech that imply violence to others, speech that targets minority groups, and diffamation and libel speech) seem to work pretty well in practice. At least, those countries have had stable social and economic environments, and seem to allow for good opportunity to its citizen and give them a good standard of living in general.
So from the experimentation side of "truth seeking", it seems to me I'm not seeing an argument for absolutely all speech should be free always no matter the circumstances or the intent of the speech.
Now, we don't have a good experiment example of "all speech goes" unfortunately. Maybe the US is the closest to it, and that seems to be causing quite a lot of social and economic instability for now at least. But I'd say it's too soon to conclude anything on that front.
The other approach to "truth seeking" would be from first principle. The theory around free speech comes from the liberal progressive thinkers of the enlightenment. So turning to them for first principle makes sense. From my research into it (and I welcome you do your own), there seem to be no winning theory around it. All agree that speech against government should be free, but how far to take other speech in other circumstances is not clear. Also debatable if the government should be free to criticize groups of citizens or not, because that can enable top down propaganda and repression, which free speech is trying to protect against. Most theory seem to recognize the "risks" with unrestricted free speech, but some believe that the benefits of free speech against authoritarianism and majority's rule is worth it, while others think it is possible to draw a line that protects against this and mitigates the risk of unrestricted free speech.
It seems some of the thinkers that are pro unrestricted free speech also assume the system provides people with an education that allows them to identify and rationalize fake and manipulative ideas and thoughts from legitimate ideas and thoughts.
So the first principle outlook also seems inconclusive in my opinion.
That personally leaves me to conclude that mostly free speech is good, and fully free speech might also be good but that's not yet been demonstrated to really know, with keeping in mind that this uncertainty about fully free speech could resolve in it being worse or better than mostly free speech.
While I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I wouldn’t say that the brainwashing has been on the part of the government. All of the efforts at limiting speech, at least recently, have come from private, left-leaning people and organizations. The general consensus seems to be that all speech that doesn’t endorse leftist political views is hate speech and should therefore be banned.
I went on Parler, which I had never heard of before last week, just to see what the big deal was. I saw nothing endorsing violence, planning attacks, conspiracy theories, or hate speech. I saw a modern looking Twitter clone with similar, mundane conversations. I suppose I didn’t see much leftist banter, but that was the only real difference between it and Twitter.
The idea that elite liberals with monopoly power colluded to strangle a site like this, simply because a percentage of its users likely voted a different way than they did, should be offensive to all Americans, regardless of political affiliation. It makes me fear for the future of democracy as a whole. Democracy cannot exist without the ability to debate.
The only element of free speech ironically was that Parler was found to censor left-leaning and moderate messages in its forum.
I genuinely believe that free speech should have limits in order to maintain the cohesion of our societies and protect people from mobs. I don't think I've been brainwashed into it, I've just seen what unbridled and unchecked hate speech can lead to.
Of course there's the problem of where the line should be drawn and who should draw it, but in order to have this discussion we need to move away from these strawmen (strawpersons?) and accept that maybe people just have convictions they haven't been brainwashed into.
After all, I'm sure you wouldn't be very happy if I erected billboards along the highway featuring hardcore pedopornography with your faced photoshopped in. One way or an other we all have limits to what we consider acceptable expression, it's all about figuring out how this should be codified and enforced.
And I want to add that having taboo topics and forms of expression is probably a good thing overall. For our lives to have meaning we need "sacred" things to protect, things to fight against, things to think about. We need to be able to shock, we need to be able to be transgressive, to make revolutions and counter-revolutions, to express frustration.
Imagine saying this in June 2020
When you block traffic? When you enter a secured space? When you break into a federal building? When you set fire to a federal building? When you set fire to cop cars? When you break windows of local businesses? When you loot local businesses? When you spray paint hate speech? When you threaten cops families with death? When you throw fireworks at people? When you throw Molotov cocktails at people?
These all occurred in large numbers during between the death of George Floyd and the Capitol Riot. How many times did big tech step and and stop the coordinating efforts for those protests/riots?
People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.
People are fine with Parler getting banned by all their vendors for not moderating violence and threats. But people would loose their minds if the same thing happened to Facebook for their failure to moderate violence around the Rohingyan genocide.
This is a great point. It's also key to consider that some of the groups that praised the Arab Spring were the Obama State Department which was led by Hillary Clinton at the time.
It appears the threshold is "support violent insurrection in other countries but stamp out the discussion of it here".
(The United States had an election, right? One with no more than the usual, minor, issues, right? One where legal actions were taken and weighed appropriately, right? One where one specific loser seems only to be complaining about losing, right? One where all of the other contemporaneous votes were not objected to, right? One that will be revisited in 2 to 4 years, right?)
For example, Bowyer et al. v. Ducey et al., which has a currently unresolved (https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-azd-2_20-cv-023... is the latest federal dismissal) but the dismissal refers to Ward, CV 2020-015285 (Ariz. 2020); (Doc. 81-1) (and has a short explanation of the ruling that goes into the evidence).
So, that brings me to Ward v. Jackson et al (CV2020-015285) (https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/records/election-2020/...). https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1... is the minutes of the first evidentiary hearing and https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1... is the minutes of the second evidentiary hearing and ruling. (The minutes don't include the evidence, just who gave testimony and what the evidence is.) The ruling is 1) Background, 2) The Burden Of Proof In An Election Contest ("The Plaintiff in an election contest has a high burden of proof and the actions of election officials are presumed to be free from fraud and misconduct."), 3) The Evidence Does Not Show Fraud Or Misconduct (see below), 4) The Evidence Does Not Show Illegal Votes, 5) The Evidence Does Not Show An Erroneous Vote Count, and 6) Orders.
P: "A.R.S. § 16-672(A)(1) permits an election contest “[f]or misconduct on the part of election boards or any members thereof in any of the counties of the state, or on the part of any officer making or participating in a canvass for a state election.” Plaintiff alleges misconduct in three respects. First is that insufficient opportunity was given to observe the actions of election officials."
C: "The observation procedures for the November general election were materially the same as for the August primary election, and any objection to them should have been brought at a time when any legal deficiencies could have been cured."
P: "Second, Plaintiff alleges that election officials overcounted mail-in ballots by not being sufficiently skeptical in their comparison of signatures on the mail-in envelope/affidavits with signatures on file."
C: "Maricopa County election officials followed [the Secretary of State’s Election Procedures Manual, with multiple verification steps] process faithfully in 2020. Approximately 1.9 million mail-in ballots were cast and, of these, approximately 20,000 were identified that required contacting the voter. Of those, only 587 ultimately could not be validated.[...] The Court ordered that counsel and their forensic document examiners could review 100 randomly selected envelope/affidavits to do a signature comparison. [...] Of the 100 envelope/affidavits reviewed, Plaintiff’s forensic document examiner found 6 signatures to be “inconclusive,” meaning she could not testify that the signature on the envelope/affidavit matched the signature on file. She found no sign of forgery or simulation as to any of these ballots. Defendants’ expert testified that 11 of the 100 envelopes were inconclusive, mostly because there were insufficient specimens to which to compare them. He too found no sign of forgery or simulation, and found no basis for rejecting any of the signatures. [...] None of them shows an abuse of discretion on the part of the reviewer. Every one of them listed a phone number that matched a phone number already on file, either through voter registration records or from a prior ballot. The evidence does not show that these affidavits are fraudulent, or that someone other than the voter signed them. There is no evidence that the manner in which signatures were reviewed was designed to benefit one candidate or another, or that there was any misconduct, impropriety, or violation of Arizona law with respect to the review of mail-in ballots."
P: "Third, Plaintiff alleges errors in the duplication of ballots. Arizona law requires election officials to duplicate a ballot under a number of circumstances. One is where the voter is overseas and submits a ballot under UOCAVA, the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Another is where the ballot is damaged or otherwise cannot be machine-tabulated."
C: "The Court ordered that counsel could review 100 duplicate ballots. Maricopa County voluntarily made another 1,526 duplicate ballots available for review. [...] Of the 1,626 ballots reviewed, 9 had an error in the duplication of the vote for president. Plaintiff called a number of witnesses who observed the duplication process as credentialed election observers. There was credible testimony that they saw errors in which the duplicated ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected on the original ballot. This testimony is corroborated by the review of the 1,626 duplicate ballots in this case, and it confirms both that there were mistakes in the duplication process, and that the mistakes were few. When mistakes were brought to the attention of election workers, they were fixed. The duplication process prescribed by the Legislature necessarily requires manual action and human judgment, which entail a risk of human error. Despite that, the duplication process for the presidential election was 99.45% accurate. And there is no evidence that the inaccuracies were intentional or part of a fraudulent scheme. They were mistakes. And given both the small number of duplicate ballots and the low error rate, the evidence does not show any impact on the outcome."
The Arizona Supreme Court decision (https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1...) makes for good reading. It's pretty clear, with a summary of the evidence (for the parts that were appealed). Weirdly, it takes the three claims in reverse order. I particularly liked the statements that the Secretary [of State, of Arizona] represented an error of 0.37%, while the appellants say it represented an error of 0.55%; the trial court accepted the appellants' number but it and the Supreme Court note that extrapolated to the total number of duplicated ballots, that doesn't come close to what would be required for a recount. The appellant offered no evidence that 1626 ballot sample was inadequate. The court accepts that there were irregularities, but that they did not even render the result uncertain.
So, there's one. I'll go fishing for more.
From what I know about law (NOT A LAWYER!), they're probably all in state courts---elections are state procedures---and thus not reported like the federal cases (which seem to fall into two classes: appeals, which deal with laws and procedures, not evidence, and them as were dismissed due to lack of standing since state procedures are a matter for state laws.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/voting-ri... does have links, but not always to the court filings. (There's a crap-ton of lawsuits in Georgia.)
And then there's https://healthyelections-case-tracker.stanford.edu/cases.
"In this case, the district court issued an emergency temporary restraining order at the plaintiffs’ request, worked at a breakneck pace to provide them an opportunity for broader relief, and was ready to enter an appealable order on the merits of their claims immediately after its expedited hearing on December 4, 2020. But the plaintiffs would not take the district court’s “yes” for an answer. They appealed instead. And, because they appealed , the evidentiary hearing has been stayed and the case considerably delayed. For our part, the law requires that we dismiss the appeal and return the case to the district court for further proceedings."
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.284055...
Many of the court records can apparently be found on democracydocket.com, but my browser is complaining about the site. Sorry.
Trump v. Kemp, 1:20-cv-5310 (N.D. Ga.) (https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.285271...) (from https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/voting-ri...) is interesting, though. The plaintiff's first claim is that the election was not conducted in accord with election laws established by the GA legislature. The court decides "Therefore, Plaintiffs Electors Clause claim belongs, if it belongs to anyone, only to the Georgia General Assembly" and since none of the plaintiffs are members of the assembly, they don't have standing. (That's rather fine logic chopping, but....)
The rest of the ruling seems to be that the governor and secretary of state of the state are not the ones legally responsible for verification of ballots, so the second claim cannot apply to them.
Here's one from Michigan based on affidavits from eye-witnesses, trying for an injunction forcing an independent audit of the election: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... (Love the URL. But no cut-n-paste.)
J claims that election workers coached voters and was instructed not to ask for photo ID from voters. However J does not name the location, provide the number of incidents, or name the employees. J never told a supervisor of the incidents nor took steps to address them. (J only came forward after reports of Biden winning.) J also claims, at the TCF center, she was directed not to compare signatures and to "pre-date" absentee ballots received at TCF on Dec. 4. The State Elections Director, CT, answers that signatures were previously verified at the Detroit Election Headquarters and that the "pre-dating" involved completing a data field inadvertently left blank during that earlier process. (I wonder if Michigan use the envelope/affidavit and anonymous ballot approach like Arizona, which ideally would have stripped off the signature part before vote counting for privacy. Michigan may need to do some work, if vote counters can match signatures with ballots.)
State Senator RJ wasn't there and makes claims based on other affidavits.
AS was a Republican challenger that didn't attend the training. AS claims out-of-state license plates brought "tens of thousands" of ballots in at 4:30 am, and that every ballot after that was for Biden. CT responds that rental trucks with out-of-state plates were used, all ballots were brought in the same way, the number of ballots he claims is speculation, and that 220,000 more votes were made for Biden.
DG claims large numbers of ballots were delivered in unsealed containers. Plaintiffs never supplied any legal requirement that sealed containers were required.
PC claims that computers were connected to the internet, based on an icon on one of the computers, but provides no other evidence. CT asserts that only the computers that needed to be connected were. (The Court notes that CT, in a Facebook post prior to the election, claims that Democrats were using COVID to commit election fraud (They see you when you're sleeping, they know when you're awake. (I'm getting punchy here.)) and that the predilection to see fraud undermines his claims.
MC was an IT consultant from Dominion Voting Services at TCF. MC claims witnessing "nothing but fraudulent events take place" including tabulating machines that jammed a lot (?) and a cover-up of the loss of vast amounts of data. No one else corroborates MC's claims, and by no one the court says the other complaintants.
Ex-Assistant Attorney General ZL claims that he was mistreated, that ballots were processed without confirmation of eligibility, that he was unable to observe because he was required to stand 6 feet away, and that he was excluded from the room after leaving to get something to eat because he was a Republican. However, two Democratic observers were also excluded, with the reason being the maximum occupancy of the room. Further, as mentioned above, voting eligibility was determined elsewhere. A large monitor was provided to allow observation at a safe distance. ZL also did not file any complaints at the time.
There's a bit about injunctive relief, irreparable harm, and legal remedy. (Michigan law provides for the Secretary of State and county clerks to audit races, but that doesn't seem satisfactory for the plaintiffs.)
The court finds that the plaintiffs have legal remedies and suffer no harm without an injunction, but that the defendants would be harmed by an injunction, as well as the public interest. The plaintiff's affidavits are contradicted by the State Election Director, whose account is corroborated by five other affidavits. An injunction and independent audit is denied.
This one is kind of interesting, even though the "independent audit" thing seems only like some kind of delaying tactic, rather than trying to get the election discarded.
On one hand, there's the assumption that election procedures and officials are legal and fair, and the further consideration that a ruling for the plaintiffs would be a big deal. (Judges apparently don't like to be backed into a corner and forced to make rulings that result in big deals, particularly on short notice. The phrase "judicial activism" shows up, for example.) On the other, these are serious accusations that are being considered seriously.
In this case, the court decided that the plaintiffs had other options they could use, and that the affidavits were not credible enough to override other considerations.
It sounds like a good example, massive allegations of fraud and what-not. But it was voluntarily dismissed. After a Trump/Raffensperger phone conference. Yes, that conference (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/04/trumps-phone...). The Trump team accepted the terms of the settlement from R., that Georgia share information about the election outside the court process in return for Trump, et al, dismissing the suits. (https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...).
I can hear the smug smiles.
Nevada! Law v. Whitmer, No. 20 OC 00163 1B (Dist. Ct., Carson City, Nevada), No. 82178 (Nev. Sup. Ct.) (https://healthyelections-case-tracker.stanford.edu/detail?id...) Complaint: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/..., Order granting dismissal: https://www.8newsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2020/12....
Let's talk AI. In this case, Clark county used a machine to sort mail-in ballots and to do a first pass validation of signatures. For 453,248 ballots. For reasons, including that the signature exemplars from the DMV were less than 200DPI, 70% of the ballots were viewed as sketchy, while 30% were found machine-okey-dokey and passed on without further review. The complaint wants those 130,000 votes invalidated.
The interesting thing is that the 70% that required manual review, 1-1.5% were initially rejected due to signature mismatch. Most were "cured" by voters (presumably by officials actually contacting the voters), leaving 0.3% to be completely rejected. The court notes that Washoe county (not using the magic machine) had a pre-cure reject rate of 1.53%. [So, if I have my sums right, the complaint wants 130,000 (30% of mail-in votes) plus some unknown number (greater than 1%) of the remainder invalidated, full stop, because between 1,400 and 6,900 were invalid. Or something.]
The complaint also includes Nevada's electronic voting machines ("not less than 1000 illegal and improper votes" counted and "not less than 1000 legal and proper votes" not counted). And no less than 15,000 illegal and improper mail-in votes from out-of-state. And the USPS, which was "directed" to deliver mail-in ballots where the addressee was deceased, moved, or had no known affiliation with the address. No less than 500 votes from dead people. There are also allegations of fraud in vote counting and observation. (It's a laundry list.)
According to the court, the Agilis sorting machines were determined to be ok in a previous case, Klaus v. Cegavske (which I have yet to look up).
As far as evidence, the court ordered the contestants to disclose all witnesses and evidence they intended to use by 5:00 pm Nov. 25. The contestants did not issue their first deposition notices until Nov. 27. Therefore the contestants' evidence consists of non-deposition witness declarations, with no cross-examination. The court considered these hearsay.
Michael Baselice offered expert evidence on the incidence of illegal voting based on a phone survey. He was unable to identify the source of his data and conducted no quality control. Similar questions faced Jesse Kamzol's analysis of various databases of voters. Scott Gessler's report lacked citations of facts and evidence and did not include any exhibits in support of his conclusions; his conclusions are based on a handful of affidavits. The complainants' experts were found to be of little or no value, but were not excluded from consideration, although given little weight.
The defendants provided a stack of testimony that court judged credible (including Dr. Michael Herron and the president of the company manufacturing Agilis).
Based on Herron's testimony, the court finds no evidence of a higher rate of voter fraud associated with mail-in voting. He also found that an illegal vote rate of 0.00054 percent between 2012 and prior to the 2020 general election. Herron testified that the contestant's implied double voting rate was 89 times larger than a conservative academic estimate. He finally testified that the contestants provided no persuasive evidence that fraudulent votes affected the presidential margin of 33,596 votes. (Gessler also testified that he had no personal knowledge of any voter fraud.)
The court found that the record does not support allegations of problems with provisional ballots.
The court found that the Agilis machine did not accept any signatures that should have been rejected and that the record did not support a finding that ballots with improper signatures were counted.
And on, and on. The court finds that the record does not support the allegations of the complainants, hearsay declarations included, under "any standards of evidence". The contestants failed to meet their burden and the case was dismissed.
I'm going to bed.
The reason why someone might hold these competing beliefs is simple: they strongly value democratic institutions. Violence, in the name of promoting democratic institutions, and ideally expanding human rights, is justifiable. Violence in the name of authoritarian insurrection is not.
Now, of course this gets really tricky, because many people on Parler, and in the capitol riots, fully believed that they were protecting democracy from massive voter-fraud. No clear answer to address that issue, but it is something that democratic societies will need to reckon with. How does one preserve democratic ideals (including promoting free speech, to whatever extent possible), while still maintaining a healthy society that doesn't tear itself apart?
They did closed accounts that called for violence. I have literally seen that. Both twitter and facebook. Not perfectly, but they did not refused to delete tweets or whole accounts.
"On September 17, 2020 we will lay siege to The @WhiteHouse for exactly fifty days.
We need your wisdom and expertise to pull off a radically democratic toneshift in our politics.
Are you ready for #revolution?
This is the #WhiteHouseSiege"
1k retweets
Doesn't seem they were advocating for violence.
If your stated intent explicitly calls for ‘non-violence’, I expect this doesn’t violate ToS despite potential inferences from the sensational branding.
I never heard of this before so I don’t even know what happened on Sept. 17. Was it violent?
https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/whitehousesiege-tactical...
the stuff that parler was leaving up was outright sedition and calls for violence.
I haven't actually seen any proof that the Capitol riot was anything other than a protest that got out of hand (like what was described every time there was violence and riots after BLM protests across the country). It only takes a few dozen agitators to get a mob mentality going.
Facebook suspended #WalkAway, a group of 500K people that joined to support leaving the Democrats because they were being alienated by their policies (their words, not mine). No threats, no violence. Straight up deleted the group with no recourse by the organizers. All Facebook said was that the page allegedly ran afoul of “hateful, threatening, or obscene” content, but no proof was actually given.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/8/brandon-stra...
Compare that to the Capitol insurrection, where the goal was to overturn the results of an election. To overturn the government. Where the people inciting the violence were in the same tent.
There was never good intent on the side of the insurrection it’s, and they escalated to violence on their own.
If that was really the goal you'd think they would have gunned up a little more than they did. Instead, very few people were actually armed, so that seems rather disorganized for an actual coup.
> A lot of people supported BLMs pre-violence protests because they wanted police held accountable.
So protesting for police violence makes it OK to loot stores and burn cars that have nothing to do with it? How is that EVER ok? If you condemn violence you need to condemn violence no matter who instigates it, not only when it's very convenient for one to do so. because this is exactly what was happening 6 months ago, people cheer-leading the violence on Twitter if it was BLM related.
I have no idea about what has really happened last year in USA, because the truth cannot be discovered just from video transmissions at TV or on the Internet.
Nevertheless, I have seen much more closely a large number of peaceful protests in other countries, which eventually became riots.
However it became clear later, that in most or in all cases, the transformation of the protests into riots was done by undercover police agents or secret service agents, who had infiltrated the protests and who had done this in order to discredit the protests so that their demands could be ignored and their organizers punished.
Still, it's not relevant because they weren't exercising freedom of speech, just incitement of violence. Same as the people at the Capitol.
The large Black Lives Matter protests all over the country were overwhelmingly lawful and peaceful. The main exceptions were the scenes in many places of cops beating the shit out of people, etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/style/police-protests-vid...
In various cities a small number of people acted violently. These were opportunists without apparent link to the Black Lives Matter organizers who took advantage of the situation to smash things up. Some were likely sympathetic to the BLM message, but others have been identified as far-right agitators. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-cause... https://www.justsecurity.org/70497/far-right-infiltrators-an...
I don't mind the people protesting peacefully, I'm talking about the violent ones.
Your fact checker doesn't report a number, some people counted 36. Wikipedia reports 19+ deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
It's irrelevant.
There was looting from stores, burning of buildings and killings, surrounding people in restaurants and forcing them to comply.
You can call it a peaceful protest as much as you want and you can link biased sources all day, but you won't change facts.
This list does not at all support the thesis that organized BLM protests were intentionally violent.
* * *
Yeah, there was a time that a group of white BLM sympathizers heckled another white BLM sympathizer who was eating at a restaurant table on the sidewalk, and the heckling was caught on video. The people involved are obnoxious jerks (organizers and most others in the BLM movement also agree they are jerks).
Similar heckling by all sorts of groups of jerks happens all over the country on a regular basis. For example a bunch of MAGA folks were following and heckling Lindsay Graham at an airport a few days ago.
But you really think heckling at a restaurant should be compared to an armed mob breaking into the Capitol building, chanting for the Vice President's execution and for the overthrow of the US government, beating cops to death, ransacking offices, stealing sensitive national security materials, and literally shitting all over?
Are you really claiming there was never any incitement?
This popped up with one search: https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-leader-if-change-doesnt-ha...
“If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation,”
https://blacklivesmatter.com/for-immediate-release-statement...
> Hawk Newsome has no relation to the Black Lives Matter Global Network (“BLM”) founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi — and is not the “president” of BLM or any of its chapters. Only BLM chapters who adhere to BLM’s principles and code of ethics are permitted to use the BLM name. The reason for this is simple: unaffiliated uses of BLM’s name are confusing to people who may wrongly associate the unsanctioned group and its views and actions with BLM. As BLM has told Mr. Newsome in the past, and as is still true today, Mr. Newsome’s group is not a chapter of BLM and has not entered into any agreement with BLM agreeing to adhere to BLM’s core principles.
If you look hard enough you can find unaffiliated yahoos of every ideological persuasion and self-proclaimed identity (libertarians, stoics, Christians, vegans, Canadians, chess players, computer programmers, stamp collectors, minivan owners, ...) spouting militant nonsense. Such statements should be condemned (and have been by those nonviolently protesting police brutality), but cannot be taken as sweeping evidence that everyone with similar self-proclaimed ideology or identity is a supporter of hateful violence.
If you intend to apply this kind of standard, then surely every organization that calls itself "conservative" should be similarly held responsible for the actions of the MAGA insurrectionists, right?
Inciting violence, endangering someone with false speech, committing fraud: they're already a crime and they're not covered by free speech.
edit: it seems people have misunderstood my comment to take a position. I' m taking issue with the idea that "free speech doesn't need limits" followed by a listing of limits applied to free speech. If we can't agree that there even exists such limits and that perhaps they're necessary any discussion below is fruitless.
But I shouldn't be obligated to let someone put a sign saying that on my lawn, nor should I be obligated to remain friends with someone who is pushing that lie.
Most of the people who are complaining about free speech being limited are really arguing for things like the above.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
You running a corner store the way you want is fine, you running the only store in the country the way you want is not.
You know, you don't need AWS to run a website, right? Similarly, newspapers have often been local monopolies, but as far as I know, they've always been able to decline to publish a letter to the editor.
Whoever wants to stick a sign on my lawn is going to come up with some rationale to force me to do it, but that doesn't mean it holds any water.
"You're allowed to talk people into believing that they need to violently rebel, but you're not allowed to actually do the rebelling" is not a particularly reasonable position.
There is a good reason twitter, facebook, youtube does remove certain content. They have the right to remove whatever they want.
If someone publishes fake news about vaccines, it takes a lot of effort then for people to keep explaining to other people how this is not true. It is harmful to society, and unfair - it takes less time to invent a new hoax than to fact-check it.
Just like loitering on the ground is considered an offence, so should be publishing fake news. It doesn't hurt one person, but it hurts society.
There also are objective criteria for determining if something is fake or not - so it is possible to create laws that forbid it and don't limit a freedom of opinion.
What seems to be under attack here is the right of individual companies and people to decide who they wish to work with. Everyone who is criticizing big tech for choosing not to work with certain people is forgetting that that same principle can be applied to them. Do you want to be forced to work with companies you abhor?
It's not irrelevant.
> What seems to be under attack here is the right of individual companies and people to decide who they wish to work with.
To the extent that that is based on expressive preference, that is an aspect of free speech, and the closely-related right of free association.
Limiting that right is limiting free speech.
For example, it’s a form of free speech for Microsoft to decide how they write their own software. One of those decisions was to bundle a free web browser in with their OS and tie the OS function tightly together with that browser. Microsoft Corporation was almost broken up by the government because they did that.
The issue that Greenwald is raising is similarly rooted in anti-trust;
> If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
Freedom of speech is not absolute. Just like individuals’ free speech rights have limits such as incitement to violence, corporations also have limits to their “free speech” rights based in anti-trust law and anti-racketeering laws in how they can attack potential competitors.
That the outcome here is banning a community that was apparently mostly used for hate speech (never actually checked it out) is... maybe a red herring? I mean, they obviously didn't build these massive companies with the primary goal of banning niche hateful websites.
If we were to, say, break up social media and internet infrastructure giants, then this sort of website would probably be able to persist by hopping from host to host until they found one without any morals. But could consider if losing the ability to perform this kind of deplatforming would be worth it, in exchange for a much more competitive marketplace.
I think it is actually a really tricky situation.
Ultimately, if not one of the hundreds of hosting companies out there wants to work with you, that should be a very strong indication that the community is not something we want. But if you really really want this community anyways, just hook up your computer to an internet connection and host the site yourself.
You mention protected classes in your first paragraph, but then act like it's self-evident that it's bad to "force people to work with (and serve) people they abhor". What else is the concept of a protected class if not this?
It's clear that we already don't have full freedom of association, and the question is where the line should be drawn. When people talk about big tech regulation, it's undergirded by many of these platforms' unique amount of market power. This isn't a novel concept; utility companies are an example of a natural monopoly: benefiting from scale, considered critical infrastructure, and legally prohibited from cutting off power to its customers, even if they don't like their politics. The topic under discussion here is whether the "new public square" (or things like payment infrastructure!) are considered critical enough to society that we want to protect access to them.
I'm constitutionally (not "Constitutionally") disinclined against ill-considered regulation, and most of the conversation by government about tech regulation is pants-on-head stupid. But the dissonance between the two paras in your comment are a good indication that this discussion isn't nearly as simple as you're framing it.
That's one core question. Another is whether it should be up to these companies to police their own platforms. Inciting violence is illegal. They're banning people and platforms inciting violence.
"Repeal section 230" seems to be about making these companies responsible for policing their own platforms. When people incited violence/genocide on Facebook in Myanmar, some people held Facebook partially responsible. Now, there are people are inciting violence on Facebook in the US, and it's still an open question whether Facebook should be held liable.
There are important differences, but the parallels between the Rwandan genocide and the growth of talk radio in the US in the 90's have always struck me as interesting.
That being said, I think that the new public square argument is strong, and if we're going to have internet monopolies, then they probably need to be regulated similarly to the utilities.
Alternatively, they can be broken up. I don't think the current state is sustainable over the longer term.
It is not provided by the government. Congress is prohibited from passing laws that abridge freedom of speech; Congress is not the fountain that free speech springs from.
It is perfectly relevant to discuss freedom of speech in contexts where someone else might be doing the abridging besides the U.S. Congress.
I'm skeptical that such a line can ever be truly "settled." Sure, it can be settled in a particular social and technological context, but when those latter things change, the line may need to be adjusted.
TLDR: yeah, the law can change, but it's highly unlikely because "the United States Supreme Court has been more consistently protective of free speech than of any other right, especially in the face of media sensibilities about "harmful" words"
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
It's worth noting that no legally forbidden censorship has been happening with regards to the recent insurrection against congress.
> TLDR: yeah, the law can change, but it's highly unlikely because "the United States Supreme Court has been more consistently protective of free speech than of any other right, especially in the face of media sensibilities about "harmful" words"
But that's not a fixed fact of nature, it's a reaction to a particular social and technological context.
For instance, if someone discovers an idea instantly turns 10% those who hear it into murderous zealots (sort of like the poem in "The Tyranny of Heaven" by Stephen Baxter), that idea is going to censored hard and the Supreme Court will be like "yup, ban it."
Likewise, if some social change or technology renders the legal regime that the Supreme Court has created a cause of serious dysfunction, then Supreme Court is going to have to change that regime to accommodate. Idealism's great, but not when it doesn't work.
Yes, this is true as far as I am aware as well. But I find myself in a conundrum; had this "inciting" speech taken place in the town square or a public park, much of it likely could not have been censored because it would have been protected by the 1st amendment and the last 100 years of case law. Where, then, is the town square and public park of 2021?
Despite the fact that the legal protections of public speech haven't changed much in decades, the practical protections of public speech (as I discuss in greater detail in [1]) have indeed been eroded, because social media platforms and, apparently, web hosting and device makers are now the arbiters of the vast majority of speech. Free speech that only applies where virtually noone can hear you is a very limited free speech indeed.
The existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. have accustomed people to the ability to air their opinions globally free of charge, however that is a very novel phenomenon. It's hard for me, having come of age in the 1980s/1990s, to see this as an inalienable right.
I think it should at least be a line open to challenge without being accused of being brainwashed. If that line cannot be questioned, we're skating on dogmatism. There are very few good reasons for a special guarantee of free speech (versus, say, a special guarantee to be able to eat fries) which stand up to closer scrutiny.
The only convincing reason for a constitutional guarantee to freedom of speech is mistrust in the government, but again, that depends where you draw the line. Food regulation is arguably just as important in our lives, but few mistrust the FDA as to call for its abolition, or propose a constitutional amendment banning all regulation of foods.
This isn't a matter of what the law is, it's a matter of what the law should be - whether it's a constitutional law or not.
Saying things like "I support Nazis" could be considered a valid political opinion protected by free speech in some countries and illegal hate speech in others.
If I threaten to kill you, or commit fraud, in person, you call the police, give them what information you have about me, and ideally I get a knock on the door. If I do it online, well, you don't have much recourse.
If the author can be identified, which is frequently true, then it should be the same for online as for in person.
However, I want to repeat what I have already replied to another similar post.
All these speech crimes should be punished according to the law, as soon as they are committed.
Restricting the speech of someone, by denying access to publication media, just because it is believed that they might commit some speech crime in the future, that is clearly an arbitrary and baseless restriction of the free speech right.
Maybe this belief about most people being stupid is correct, therefore free speech must indeed be limited, but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell what they really think in the face of those whom they want to protect.
I don't know about this part. the narrative seems to be more about protecting the vulnerable from the stupid, not so much protecting the stupid from themselves.
Normal people are vulnerable to lies only in the sense that when presented with deliberately false information that they cannot verify immediately, they may trust the liar and make a wrong decision to do something that they cannot know yet whether it is right or wrong, e.g. buying something cheap for a high price or being the victim for another kind of fraud.
Only someone stupid will beat someone or burn a house because of some false accusations.
All the arguments for these deplatforming actions were that the people, who would have heard the propaganda of those to whom the access is denied now, would have been easily convinced to do stupid things.
So are countries that have more limits on free speech than what the US has, less democratic than the US?
Many European countries have more restrictions on free speech than USA, so yes, they are less democratic by this criterion.
By other criteria, e.g. by evaluating how many abusive laws they have that favor a few rich individuals that own some large companies against the majority of the citizens, most European countries are more democratic than USA.
The same conclusion comes from other criteria, like how easy is for most citizens to access education or health services.
Do you trust people who live in an echo chamber overrun with disinformation to deduce the truth about the outcome of the US election? If so, can you speak to the mechanism by which such people can determine the truth? And could you speak to the empirical failure of this population to discover the truth?
This is the most unfortunate consequence of the idea that free speech must be limited.
If it is accepted that a part of the people cannot be trusted to not do wrong things when others tell them to do so, then an unavoidable consequence is that to that part of the people the right to vote must also be denied, because if they may be convinced by lies to do very wrong things, like violence, then it is even more certain that they will be easily convinced by lies to do a minor mistake, like casting a wrong vote.
Any proposal to deny the right of voting to stupid people, or to give different weight to the votes, depending on the "intelligence" of the voters, would rightly generate huge protests.
However, any proposal to restrict the free speech without also restricting the right to vote is logically inconsistent, even if many seem to not notice this.
But if you did, how is that different from worker protections or consumer protections or environmental protections or mandatory seatbelt or million other laws?
> ... In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
>This is Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Popper discovers that every real regime must have the apparatus of the Inquisition in its back pocket. If it hesitates to deploy its intellectual rack and thumbscrew, it will be replaced by a regime with no such qualms.
>Popper, read logically, advises the Nazis to repress the Communists, the Communists to repress the Nazis, the liberals to repress both and both to repress the liberals. From his “open society” he comes all the way around to Hobbes, Schmitt and Machiavelli. Next he will tell us, in Esperanto, that “the earth is nothing but a vast bloody altar.”
I think Moldbug reads Popper much more elegantly. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis
By analogy, imagine if someone commits murder. Would putting them to death as punishment also be murder? No. You have the right to life as long as you respect other people's right to the same.
...as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise...
It's only when the other side has abandoned discourse and is interested in meeting you with force that tolerance is to be abandoned.
You're leaving out some very well-established restrictions on free speech, including slander, libel, copyright infringement, obscenity, privacy violation... in short, absolutism hasn't been a prevailing philosophy for centuries. This sudden resurgence of it feels like a refusal to engage with the very real, very difficult debate on what speech deserves censorship.
It doesn't have anything at all to do with intelligence, but the observed consequences of certain kinds of speech. Lies, for example, that manipulate peoples' emotions. This is not unique to "stupid people."
There is a huge difference between punishing someone for something already done, e.g. slander or libel, and denying him access to publication media because you believe that in the future that person might say something that might have who knows what effect on other people, who might do some crimes.
I completely agree that whoever abuses the free speech right to do something punishable by law must be judged and punished if found guilty.
On the other hand, I do not agree with any of these "deplatforming" actions based on vague beliefs about the future actions of some people.
If Trump or anyone else is expected to do a speech crime, then watch him and, as soon as he does that, fine him or arrest him.
If he already did such a crime, then also fine him or arrest him.
Otherwise, "deplatforming" him has no basis in facts.
Is this the case here?
The statements in question are already made. Typically, the deplatforming happens after a violation has already been made. Which seems to be the case here, unless I am misunderstanding.
However, this discussion thread started about the actions done against Parler.
I had not previously heard about Parler, but I understand that the efforts to stop its activity are based on claims that it does not perform adequate censorship of the content published there, unlike Facebook or Twitter.
If there are people that have published there things that are punishable by law, they should be punished. If Parler itself has done something illegal, then they should be punished.
However, if some private companies sabotage Parler based on the fact that Parler does not have the same censorship rules as themselves, then that is clearly wrong.
From what I have heard here, it might be good if Parler disappears, but I cannot accept that the end justifies the means.
I don't see why this is true; intelligent people can be harmed by speech just as much as stupid people can. Everyone can certainly be harmed by the immediate follow-on effects of speech. Some words can harm in a way it is unreasonable to expect guard against, or those for which it is impossible to guard against.
The scholarly literature on speech, harm, and legality has dozens of such examples.
>but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell
I can courageously say now that I'm not in favor of restrictions on speech for reasons of "stupidity" but rather the demonstrable harm speech can cause.
Maybe people don't actually espouse that stated position because it's a strawman.
Intelligent people can be fooled and manipulated without being stupid - they have been for ages. What's different now is the speed and concentration of misinformation.
Platforms of mass misinformation and manipulation are curious beasts, and susceptibility to radicalization != stupidity. Something somewhat novel appears to be happening due the new ways we communicate, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that "something" should be done about it.
It's not them I want to protect (though I don't have any explicit desire for them to _not_ be protected). It's me I want to protect. Your right to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose, and your right to yell "Fire!" or "Stop the steal" or "Storm the Bastille!" are likewise constrained when they infringe on my rights.
The practical implementation and realisation of rights is always a trade-off of rights vs rights. What is under discussion is where the balance of those trade-offs lay.
Having said that, there is a very strong case to be made that we need to address people's propensity to listen to, invest in, and act on, obvious bullshit (e.g. flat-earthers, reptilians etc). More than education is required. My brother-in-law - a highly functioning, tertiary educated small business owner and nice guy - is a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracist, believing the most outrageous things. Having a rational discussion with him has not budged him from his beliefs one iota. I believe it's a psychological condition as common as depression or anxiety.
There are no easy answers nor quick fixes for this problem.
That's not "a problem", that's the only problem.
Of course hatred and bigotry and false scientific claims and calls to violence, etc., are negative and of course we wish they would vanish.
But a Ministry of Truth would be worse.
I am willing to build and maintain mental, emotional and psychological armor against very negative, harmful speech if it helps avoid erecting a Ministry of Truth.
Convince me. I have a side project that's intended to foster free speech, but I disallow advocating harm toward identifiable humans, except through process of law. Should this limit really be removed?
I think when speech starts to risk real harm to others, we need to start thinking carefully about it. It's not so clear cut, but I think that if someone threatens to harm someone with some degree of seriousness, society should be able to act before that harm occurs.
With Parler (and to be fair, Twitter), I see it creating more radicalization, which very directly creates a risk of harm to others as we saw play out on the 6th. And I don't think we should tolerate it, or we're stuck just treating symptoms rather than causes.
If you have evidence o some other app hosted on AWS where left wing groups calling for violence and applauding it when it materializes, but not being shut down, please show everyone. I won't even go to the extreme of saying it has to be at the same level or quantity of violent speech we saw on Parler.
Edit to reply the post below:
Actual terrorism? Al-Queda and ISIS are active on Twitter. There is content still up calling for genocide against certain ethnicities. Real genocide and terrorism. Not the hyperbole in U.S. politics.
U.S. politicians were actively egging on protestors and calling for violence around the country this summer. Where do you draw the line? It's cool if one side does it but not the other?
There's clearly an uneven application of their moderation policies. And, they are afforded legal protections as platforms under the assumption / intent that users create the content and they stay out of curation. IMO, they aren't being equitable with enforcing their own rules and should lose status as platforms. Because clearly they are opinionated in their enforcement of the ToS.
Now, it's arguable that the other sites knowingly facilitating crime and just hoping to escape consequences because no one was going to make a big deal of it, and they only cut it off because the risk of that strategy increased after the Capitol attack. But while that may paint the past actions of the other firms in a worse light, it doesn't paint Parler’s actions before it was cutoff by other suppliers in a better one.
Remind me when the politicians who promoted the Antifa and BLM riots and actually set up funds so the protestors would be bailed out had their accounts "indefinitely suspended" for doing just what you're describing as the reason Parler got shut down.
Unequal enforcement is already very much a thing on the roads. Ever heard of a "fishing stop" or "driving while black". Getting cut less slack than a boring sedan and a work truck is one of the few things red Porche drivers and 30yo shitbox drivers have in common.
The algorithmic curation of all social media platforms that is intentionally built to assault users with the most distasteful, extreme lies (because it's good for engagement!) is the real problem in my view. If every social media platform stopped all algorithmic curation/recommendation and simply presented a chronological list of updates from people you follow (and did not recommend who to follow), then I think the bulk of the problem goes away.
I have no problem with free speech (even abhorrent speech). But I have a problem when a person's online experience is controlled by algorithms specifically designed to ratchet up the garbage and inundate people with hateful rhetoric.
With all the discussion about Section 230, could such opaque algorithmic curation constitute a form of editorial control, not unlike that of a publisher? Could we reform Section 230 in a way that is pro-user, so if a website wishes to be a "platform" they would have to make their raw feed available to the user, or if they provide algorithmic curation, it's transparent to the user how information is prioritized? Could we clarify the distinction between platform and publisher?
That's not reforming 230, that's abolishing it and repudiating it's entire purpose. Enabling host action to suppress perceived-as-undesirable content without increasing host liability for content not removed was the purpose of 230.
> Could we clarify the distinction between platform and publisher?
The distinction in 230 is crystal clear: to the extent content items are user-generated, the online service provider (land other users, even if they may have the power to promote, demote, or suppress the content are not publishers or speakers, period, the end.
The source (whether it is the user that is the source or the service provider for it's internally-generated, first-party content) is the publisher or speaker.
We are debating whether the hateful series of billboards and bulletin boards along the side of the road can be removed by monopolies or not.
The highway has a crapton of regulations around how you can use it. Speed limits, rules against drunk driving, driving only in 1 direction, requiring your lights be on (in some places during the daytime).
Nobody (almost) complains about limits on "free driving."
If you start doing crazy stuff on the highway you will not only be stopped, but potentially fined and imprisoned.
The thing I think people miss when making the "this is an assault on free speech!" is that they think it's becoming a gray area, when in fact it has always been a gray area.
The people responsible for those highways spend a lot of money preventing them being used for drug trafficking, blackmarket weapons etc. Parler actively refused to moderate right wing hate speech.
> Obviously all of the insidious planning and hatred that presumably occurred on Parler is abhorrent. I think I can hate all of those things without believing that the site should be censored.
I have to ask, where then do you want the line to be drawn? How detailed does the plan have to be before it's nipped in the bud?
Would you feel the same way if it had been Muslim terrorists in camo storming the Capitol, and they had organised on a Muslim site?
Because no matter how this is being spun, that is literally comparable to what happened last week.
Examples of this in practice are the checkpoint around El Paso in West Texas that checks for all sorts of contraband. And the agriculture checkpoint on Highway 80 between California and Nevada.
In this analogy, Parler seems more like a single road used for lots of crime, while social media overall is the highway network that is more free.
Checkpoint cop, looks at people in vehicle, sees they are all white, bored sounding asks “is everyone an american citizen?”
Driver: “no, some of us are american and some are canadian.”
Checkpoint cop, confused: “uhhh that’s alright, proceed”
There purpose is supposedly to check for illegal cross border activity in the US and yet a car full of canadians doesn’t even blip their radar because it’s not actually about nationality it’s about race.
Which is all to say that i believe your comment about that checkpoint being about contraband glosses over the real motivations. In the dozens of times i’ve been thru there all i’ve ever been asked about is citizenship, and it’s never mattered what the answer is because i am white.
There aren't millions of Canadian citizens crossing the US-Mexico border illegally every year. There aren't tens of millions of Canadian citizens living illegally in the US.
They are trying to stop the 99.999% of illegal aliens who are from Mexico and Central America from crossing the border, not the random Canadian who is basically guaranteed to be entering legally.
Free speech is one thing, free amplification of speech at global scale is another
To the highway analogy: Yes, highways can be used for crimes. And there are restrictions on highways to prevent crime, enforced by everything including local police, county sheriffs, state police, border patrol, and national guard when necessary.
The Interstate highway system was built specifically for wartime transport of people and materials. One of the specifications was to be able to move a division coast-coast in 24 hours.
You can get away with small crimes on the highways.
However, if you try to wage your own war doing that, with significant numbers of your own fighters, you will be shut down pretty quickly.
Similarly, we have free speech.
I am also not required to amplify your speech. That would be compelled speech - your govt compelling me to speak what I do not want to say - just as bad as forbidding me to say what I want.
Similarly, nothing should require any hosting provider to carry the propaganda for someone else's war, when they do not want to be a part of the war (and make no mistake, what was being planned on Parler is nothing short of war). No hosting provider should be required to carry, or be prevented from carrying porn either.
Should the New York Times be required to carry David Duke's (fmr KKK Grand Wizard) screed on the benefits of racism, or should Fox be required to carry Bernie Sander's latest speech?
This is no different from the press since Guttenberg.
If you want free speech, speak
If you want free amplification at scale, build your own press or find a friendly one.
One of the specifications was to be able to move a division coast-coast in 24 hours.
All but certainly at least 48 hours or more.
US Interstate 80 is 2899 miles terminus to terminus. At 60 mph, that is just over 48 hours continuous driving time.
The "Cannonball Run" record is 26 hours 38 minutes. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cannonball-coast-coast-...
Even the 48 hour transit is optimistic for a military convoy. I suspect 4--6 days (96--144 hours) as a more realistic estimate.
(I cannot find a reliable plaanning source or reference.)
Otherwise, good points.
A bit more detail on what I've read, the banking was designed for 130 mph to be used by high-speed convoy troop transports.
I'd expect your usage description to be the norm, but to fight an on-continent war, I'd expect that they'd close the roads, and send through the convoys, and since 2899mi / 24h is 120.8 mph, it'd be doable.
The Cannonball Run is indeed approaching 24h seems to have just gotten to 25:39[1]! Of course, they have to deal with normal traffic out of NYC and into LA, and avoid cops the whole time. With the the cops clearing the roads and any street-legal car allowed, I'd bet under 17h would be the norm
“And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings.”
-TFA
IMO, this is literally a strawman argument. You're picking a very rare, extreme event and amplifying the importance of that event in an attempt to make an argument.
Following the implication of your argument (that we don't worry about a rare even on an otherwise good system), we shouldn't even bat an eye at Parler being removed.
If you're promoting armed, violent protests and insurrection - that is also a crime.
And sure, this is happening to a small degree on Twitter and FB - but they make some attempts to stop it, and it's not the main value proposition of the platforms.
The problem with Parler is that this was always where it was headed. It was built to serve people who would use it for this, and a significant portion of the content created and consumed was about this.
There is also legitimate content available on Kick Ass Torrents. But the majority of the consumption is for things that are illegal in the US. So it gets the same treatment as Parler.
You are conflating Parler with it's users
> this is happening to a small degree on Twitter and FB - but they make some attempts to stop it
From the article:
> And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
1. You either are unaware of the meaning of the word "disingenuous", or you know my own intentions better than I do.
2. Did Parler express suprise that some of its users attempted to (and in some cases succeeded) incite violence on their platform?
3. Again your tendency towards superlative undermines the discussion, but "everybody knows it" and "the damage has been done"? This is a very strong statement indeed, claiming that you have knowledge that Parler's moderation has been so ineffectual that every user on their platform is able to view all inciting content before it is taken down.
I'm simply crediting you with the intelligence and experience to understand that what someone says publicly is not always in line with their actual goal. Therefore, by pretending that Parler's terms of service represent their actual intentions despite evidence to the contrary, I believe you are being disingenuous.
> Did Parler express suprise that some of its users attempted to (and in some cases succeeded) incite violence on their platform?
I have no idea. It doesn't matter. "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face!" is not a credible expression of surprise when you invite a bunch of leopards into your home and set them loose.
> Again your tendency towards superlative undermines the discussion, but "everybody knows it" and "the damage has been done"?
I don't think it's undermining the discussion to assume a certain level of conversational and contextual shorthand. "Everybody" does not mean literally every person on earth, it means "people with interest and experience in these matters". I apologise if English is your second language or similar - I'll try to be clearer in future.
> This is a very strong statement indeed, claiming that you have knowledge that Parler's moderation has been so ineffectual that every user on their platform is able to view all inciting content before it is taken down.
Not every user needs to have viewed content for that content to be damaging. However, the more people that see damaging content the more damaging it is. Most social media platforms expose more recent content to more users, so damaging content will do most of the potential damage within a short time. Therefore, platforms with actual intent to reduce damage will need to remove problematic users from that platform while also employing a highly effective moderation team to identify new damaging content as quickly as possible.
It stands to reason that a platform that only wanted to look like they were reducing damage could employ an ineffectual moderation team to remove content only after the majority of the damage was done. I suggest that's what happened here - it seems clear that large amounts of inciting content were available for long periods of time (hours/days).
Imagine that you have a private company that manages all of the toll roads in a city. One day, this company decides that they no longer want John Smith to use their toll roads. John Smith is banned.
Maybe John is a terrible person. Criminal convictions, DUIs, whatever. Regardless of that, should a private company have unilateral right to ban a customer? With no recourse? No appeal, no accountability? There is no elected official to vote out of office if you don't like it. There's no appeals court to hear your claim. John is just banned. He now has to drive an extra 30 minutes every day because he can't use the high-speed toll roads to get to work.
Parler is problematic. For sure. And I'm a big believer in free speech, and that companies, in general, should be able to run their business however they want.
However, there are limits. A sandwich shop can't refuse to serve a customer because they are black, for instance. But cake shops can refuse to serve customers if they are gay, as we recently learned from supreme court cases.
I think that much of the issue here revolves around how much of a monopoly a company has. If my local sandwich shop doesn't want to serve me, because I'm a jerk, that's fine. I can just go to another shop down the street. I'm not that inconvenienced.
But these massive tech companies have enormous ecosystems. They dominate their industries, and are often the only really viable choice in their markets.
I see a constant stream of article about YouTubers that build a massive business with millions of followers, and then one day 'poof', Google kicks them off, and they have no recourse.
Or the guy on Facebook that spent $47 million dollars in advertising over the years, and one day Facebook kicks him off, banned for life. No recourse, no appeal, no explanation, even.
Apple and Google have absolute say over their app stores, and what is allowed. Companies can be ruined overnight because some algorithm tipped from the "ok" to "not ok" overnight.
This is troubling.
As someone who was born and lived in USSR it pains me so much to see to many Americans willing to give up or restrict free speech...
So would you say, for instance, that we should be able to do an unlimited amount of discussion, planning, and coordination of an elected official's death. And it's only when one person takes a concrete action towards the plan that they should anyone be able to be arrested, and only that person? Because the rest is all protected speech?
> unlimited [...] discussion, planning and coordination
turns into evidence once "intent" and an "overt act" thresholds are crossed, for all involved.
[1] https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/conspiracy.htm...
There's even ambiguity about elements of this in current law. If one were to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government, and begin running training exercises to help people prepare to overthrow the government at some unspecified future date--- it is unclear whether this is protected by the First Amendment. SCOTUS mentioned -- but did not address -- this problem in Stewart v McCoy (2002):
... While the requirement that the consequence be “imminent” is justified with respect to mere advocacy, the same justification does not necessarily adhere to some speech that performs a teaching function. As our cases have long identified, the First Amendment does not prevent restrictions on speech that have “clear support in public danger.” Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 530 (1945). Long range planning of criminal enterprises–which may include oral advice, training exercises, and perhaps the preparation of written materials–involves speech that should not be glibly characterized as mere “advocacy” and certainly may create significant public danger. Our cases have not yet considered whether, and if so to what extent, the First Amendment protects such instructional speech. Our denial of certiorari in this case should not be taken as an endorsement of the reasoning of the Court of Appeals....
I've seen this kind of argument all too frequently in the last week. While I don't think the People Who Decide what is taken down to be infallible, I do think that we're all capable of making reasonable decisions here. Taking down a hate speech site obviously doesn't mean we need to delete the internet, or iPhones, or whatever else Parler users have in common with every other person who uses the internet.
> I feel like we've all been a bit brainwashed by the government in our notion that "free speech" must have limits. I very much doubt that that is true. I think the speech part should always be 100% free. Of course any crimes that derive from it are and will always been fully enforceable. I just question whether or not the speech itself should be viewed as illegal, or something that should be regulated.
I strongly disagree. Apps and websites being taken down is not something new at all, and what happened to Parler is only notable because it impacted more people.
There are many sites that are IMO righteously taken down. Our conversation should not be "should big tech control what we see online", but should be "where do we draw the line?".
Are you equating social media with the US highway infrastructure? I have to disagree with you in that case. The Internet and ISPs are like the US highway infrastructure. Social media is like demanding your stuff be carried by a particular truck company.
If you want social media to be public infrastructure, maybe the government should start a social media company.
Drug trafficking and gun running are illegal activities. Generic Parler hate may not be illegal.
Your argument does not establish an effective parallel between the things you are comparing.
If we want to limit the powers of these platforms, then Congress needs to pass laws limiting the scope of ToS and/or create a regulatory agency charged with adjudicating claims.
There's no analogs or moral arguments necessary. Just the legal ones. And Congress has failed to take any action to invoke legal authority over these platforms and their ToS. Thus, the government has minimal control here.
A highway is funded in large part via taxation.
The argument is a poor one because it draws parallels between things that are not parallel. There is no indication that (A) it serves the public interest for the government to forcibly alter business decisions, nor that (B) there is an existing legal basis upon which to do so.
With AWS, Google Play store, iOS store as toll roads (Pennsylvania Turnpike, Golden Gate Bridge etc...) and Parler, Facebook, HN etc... as car brands?
Manufacturers can be forced to take all of their cars off the road for repair. Take Toyota or Waze.
You might have an argument about iOS taking Parler off the store as an issue because you can't sideload, but you can directly install APKs onto Android. You can self-host Parler with physical servers. I guess I'm less bothered by this than a lot of folks cause one of my rules is basically "Be nice around other people's things and ask before you touch". AWS and the Android + iOS stores are other people's things. And Parler poked at a sore spot: being used to plan attacks
That being said the Supreme Court has weighed in on what kinds of speech are protected under “free speech” and which aren’t. Overt calls for violence and such are not protected.
There are limits.
A trivial counterpoint is shouting fire in a theater, or other forms of inciting a riot.
1. Abuses and crimes should always be persecuted. I have read lots of posts on Parler, and ALL grounds for violent speech, radicalisation and terrorism apply to lots of them. I've read posts inviting people to hang and quarter democrats on the streets in front of their families, as well as posts inviting armed sedition against the institutions. Those who use this kind of language MUST be made accountable of their words, just like we'd make ISIS supporters accountable of their words. It's not that just because they're white and Christian dudes that look like us we can condone them a bit more. And if a platform refuses to limit this language, then the whole platform must be taken down.
2. Your freedom ends where my beings. You may be free of saying whatever you want, but if that ends up doxxing information about me that I didn't want to reveal, or it ends up spreading misinformation about me that ends up in death threats, then you are NOT free to do that.
Parler has failed to guarantee both the non-negotiable freedoms when it comes to building a sustainable free speech framework, therefore it must be taken down. I really fail to see any contradiction in this.
And keep in mind that the anarco-liberalist vision of free speech is something that has arisen only in the past couple of decades. The founding fathers of the liberal school thought (including Popper and Hayek), those who had REALLY seen how things in Europe ended up when unlimited freedom of speech is guaranteed also to fascist jerks, were well-aware that unconstrained freedom with no framework to contain fundamentalism is a threat to a tolerant society. "Being intolerant with the intolerant is a civic duty for a tolerant society that wants to preserve its values" (Popper)
And I've read posts on HN saying we should hang and quarter Trump supporters; should HN be wiped from the face of the earth?
https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/138288704_4398...
https://scontent-frt3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/138535861_3660...
https://scontent-frx5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/136066263_4291...
https://scontent-frx5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/136413545_1022...
https://scontent-frt3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/137061105_4299...
https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/137628944_1015...
And when it comes to doxxing of private individuals who simply opposed Trump's attempts to overturn the election, just search for EnemiesOfThePeople (it was also a very active account on Parler).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749435
Took me about 30 seconds to find. But in general I will not do unpaid moderation work for ideological crusaders like dang. For example, I'm sure there will be a reallllly good excuse why this comment is actually okay. And I'll probably get flagged/moderated for good measure.
Oh, but for good measure... "The radical right is a scourge ... They need to be repeatedly smacked down until normalcy is achieved."
The complete quote: "If we have to play an constant game of Whack-a-Nazi, I vote we whack as many Nazis as we can."
That is a reference to the game Whack-A-Mole. Literally, that would mean hitting them with a soft foam hammer.
"Oh, but for good measure... "The radical right is a scourge ... They need to be repeatedly smacked down until normalcy is achieved.""
owlbynight's entire quote:
"Our political representatives are corrupt and generally represent whomever gives them the most money, namely large corporations.
"We, the people, are represented through our wallets now by the corporations that control our politicians because social media has unionized us. We're able to use online platforms to leverage companies into giving us what we want socially by threatening them when they step out of line. The companies that led to Parler shutting down were acting on public sentiment as a boon to their brands, thus ultimately reflecting the will of the people.
"It's kind of like a single payer system for social justice.
"It's weird end run back to representation but I'll take it for now. The radical right is a scourge that, unchecked, will lead to us having no rights at all. They need to be repeatedly smacked down until normalcy is achieved."
I could be wrong, but I'm also not reading that as a call for violence, much less "hang and quarter". It's not a particularly attractive metaphor, though.
It just jumps so easily to your mind how to defend, defend, defend leftist violence; you don't even consider yourself doing it. You too have trained yourself well as an ideological crusader.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whack
Because all I see is "murder".
Look how far you will stretch to defend literal calls for murder! What do you even tell yourself your motivation for doing this is?
It's a reference to the children's game whack-a-mole about banning Nazis from a platform:
> If we have to play an constant game of Whack-a-Nazi, I vote we whack as many Nazis as we can.
It's like you aren't even trying to hide your distortions.
That's okay, right? Because it's just a children's game, right? Or is it interpreted differently depending on who the target is? Nazis, whacking them is just a game. Leftists, whacking them is srs bsns?
Did you read the full quote or not? The context matters not the targets (in this case a singular target changes the context). There is only one Joe Biden, so they way you are using it has a different context. If it was about whacking lib-trolls from your news group, that's different than specifying a person.
Maybe you aren't a native english speaker, but whack-a-mole is a common carnival game. That's the context in the quote YOU picked.
"Singular target changes the context". Okay, so "Man, Hitler sure was really good at playing whack-a-Jew, wasn't he?" This is okay by your "logic", right?
The context of the "whack Nazis" comment was the worst day of domestic terrorism and murder in American history. I don't think anyone was playing carnival games at the Capitol last week, but maybe we should go ask them? Maybe the whole thing was just a misunderstood carnival game!
But your comment clearly outlines that you consider them Nazis, that you have no problems with it, and that even if they are Nazis they should not be targeted for their hate and bigotry.
And keep in mind that I'm just picking a random example from thousands of similar posts.
Radicalized Trump supporters were using Parler to share invites to "do a bloodbath out of Democrat voters", "burn them alive on the streets and throw them in wooden chips in front of their children", and you really have the courage to come here and say that WE are the violent ones for a whack-a-mole the Nazi joke?
From the bottom of my heart, fuck you, you filthy fascist.
I've got absolutely nothing against the old Republicans, I've got absolutely nothing against conservatives, I've got many, many conservative friends as well. But I've got A LOT against the violent scum of the earth represented by people like you who try to play the role of the eternal victim after inciting Civil War and gratuitous gruesome violence against the political enemy!
You just described investigative journalism.
Doxxing is not itself a violation of your rights, it’s just taboo when it’s done in the small.
Only when it’s done with the intent of causing illegal harm, such as “X lives here, go kick his ass”, would it be a violation.
Threats, slander and misinformation where never part of free speech and never will be. Invoking "free speech" here is disingenuous.
To go back to your comparison, if Parler - or anything similar - was like the highway we wouldn't know about what was going on. But we do, and it's inciting violence so it's basic human decency to stop it. Even apart from anything that a government would say. I don't get it, why are we still talking about this on HN.
They get closed fast when the shit hits the fan though. So, where does the analogy leave us ?
Is it censorship is law enforcement shuts down a section of highway due to safety issues?
And since you mention drug trafficking, Personally, I think 100% of drugs should be legal and we have been brainwashed by the governments and media about their effects. But I realize that it is currently very much not the case where I live, so I have to be aware that my actions might have consequences and know I'm going to have a hard time to convience others of my view, so I might have to compromise to get anywhere.
This should be in my opinion the main focus of democracy: to contiously tweak the system to what the current society agrees on in regards to living together instead of inisting on ideals. It just seems to me, that most democracies are not really fond of the idea of taking democracy actually seriosly.
Whereas Parlor intentionally created a system where there was virtually no/super biased moderation, and bragged about it as a core feature.
It would be like if the various law enforcement that is tasked with keeping the drugs, trafficking etc you mention off the road, were instead staffed entirely by a group of a handful of these very same law breakers who obviously vote in their own illegal interests.
And additionally the creators of the highway spoke to the NyTimes bragging about their setup, maybe even telling the public about specific highway routes for these criminals travel.
If Twitter is a highway, Parler is a tunnel operated by drug cartels.
What do you think about the Silk road? The onion website that operated strictly in Tor that was a marketplace used exclusively for crime? That is infrastructure too right? Should it be legal? Fuck no.
Stop defending a lost cause. They got shut down because they tried to stage a coup by kidnapping senators in the Capitol.
They failed, and it is a good thing that they failed, and it is a good thing they got censored. And it is great that more companies decide to do the same.
Shut them down, all of them. Enough is enough. Have you ever been assaulted by a Trumper while minding your own business, just for being a minority? I have. These news make me happy. Adios, amigos... Your movement will never attain anything again.
This is a good thought experiment actually. I think typical Americans support policing all roads and highways, especially where stretches of road are known to be frequented by bad actors. If private corporations owned highway infrastructure and unilaterally decided to shut down segments of road in order to stop those bad actors, it should raise a lot of questions.
I think this highlights the need for better legislation, not only to limit corporations ability to shut down services, but but to replace that with policing put in place by elected governance and based on laws that apply equally to everyone.
The line gets drawn when a platform is used as a base of coordination to overthrow a legitimately elected government and threaten violence against people. Not sure why that's so hard to grasp.
Is preserving democracy worth putting limits on free speech? I'd argue absolutely. People are animals.
If a significant chunk of the population hesitates to get vaccines then it has consequences for all of us, regardless of our beliefs. Lies and misinformation spread through social media should be kept in check by patrolling, just like our highways are patrolled.
Unfettered free speech would dictate we can all do that anytime we want because free speech has no limits.
Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action. That is where the line in free speech ends.
The notion that the purveyor of technologies used to distribute speech that are incitements to imminent lawless action has no legal obligation in regards to the consequences is akin to saying a theater owner has no obligation to make sure a person who's repeatedly screamed "Fire!" and caused a stampede that injures people isn't allowed in their theater doesn't hold up. And it has ground at all to stand on if the theater owner actively pursues them and promotes they can do that in their theater.
In this case, Parlor has essentially pursued and invited those who love to scream "Fire" and actively encourage them to use their service to do that. And in fact they used it to organize a mob and help plan a insurrection.
And it did not matter to them that lies were being spread to fan the flames of hate, or who or how many might lose their lives as a result.
Parlor is a prime example of the lowest form of capitalism. Little different than crack dealers. We cannot let them hide behind the noble goals of "Free Speech".
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
I'm sure it was a small minority of Parler's activity that was death threats or planning/encouraging/inciting violence, but it seems like it was intentionally a safe-haven for those activities.
The highway has criminal activity, but is not a safe haven for criminal activity. Parler appears to have been to an extent beyond what is generally considered acceptable.
As we've learned from the now settled case law on Bittorrent trackers & co, it is not sufficient for your infrastructure to make it possible to support legal uses, it is necessary to show that that is the vast majority of its uses.
I think comparisons suck, because people obviously come up with comparisons with the things that prove their point of view, while ignoring all other comparisons.
FANGMULA holds tremendous power. No doubt about it. They can make or break any business very easily. This was known in theory and recently we saw this in practice. This doesn't mean that Parler cannot fight this out in court. They likely will. However, all SV companies have very deep pockets and can sustain a very lengthy legal challenge even if they're in the wrong. Small businesses just don't have that kind of cash to fight this out in court.
Some (non-US observers) would say that the incoming administration and SV companies have stifled civil liberties and free speech. In the past, this was the exact reason that US sanctioned (or at the very least criticized) several countries when they would ban certain groups for inflaming racial tensions, spreading hate speech and radicalizing people.
I am in no way a CCP supporter here but imagine if the CCP silenced a bunch of people because they did not agree with them, destroyed a platform where they gathered and then gloated about it, what would the US have to say? What would the world say?
I don't have all the facts here. However, there are accusations that Facebook, Google both facilitated planning of the Capitol riots. There are no consequences for these companies - yet. Just because they "moderate" their platform does not make them better than Parler. More importantly, Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter did not act while Trump supporters were actively spreading misinformation and lies. Trump has been indiscriminately lying and inflaming racial tensions for a long time on Twitter. Why wasn't he suspended before? Lots of Facebook groups, YouTube channel spread lies about many topics, why weren't they removed earlier?
These companies were emboldened when they saw that Trump is leaving office. They are acting opportunistically to drum up the new cycle. I could be totally wrong about this, but its a personal feeling.
It felt like a feeding frenzy starting with Twitter suspending Trump's handle and eventually banning his account permanently. Other companies had to jump in otherwise they would look weak and complicit.
I think Parler should've given a longer notice period to resolve whatever issues they had with moderation. 24 hours is very little notice for anybody to do anything meaningful.
Finally, I am shocked that not a single "civil liberties" supporter came out and criticized these tech companies for being Judges, Juries and Executioners.
These companies need to be treated like utilities because they are. They need to be regulated as such. The amount of monopolistic power that they have shown is unbelievable.
During the US-China trade war, China realized its dependence on US chips and software. The US government could effectively cripple Chinese companies. This was disconcerting in itself as there aren't effective alternatives for many tech related hardware and software.
However, the show of power post Jan 8th by these tech companies was several orders of magnitude worse than the trade war. Europe, Asia and rest of the world are watching and should take note of this event and build their own local competitors otherwise, SV and the US government can effectively control the whole world.
AWS is great the servers you run. Those can be anywhere on earth, including physically located at your business
In this instance, a platform decides, effectively "we refuse to host your ideas, go elsewhere." Facebook and Google and Twitter aren't going out of their way to scrub these people off the internet; they are just kicking them off their own platform.
You might consider this part of the "cancel culture", but it's not censorship.
In this case, Twitter et al. thought a LOT about what to do, as they did very little for 4 year's of Trump's presidency, and only decided to act after Trump incited a literal self-coup and insurrection with the goal of illegitimately keeping himself in power.
If in the future "those who think completely differently from me" are going to think liberal ideas are so dangerous to be removed, it won't matter what "standard" we set today. It seems even with the highest standard of "don't support open coups", you still think I will be judged the exact same.
Censorship is bad. But insurrections against legitimate governments are worse.
Right now though there's a small group of people looking to cause harm and damage using tools that barely existed 10 years ago and our laws won't keep up. Antisemitism and racism have no place in the world and private companies have no business profiting from its proliferation. Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on.
I will use my limited resources and time on this planet to cry for someone else.
Imagine that Parler was a site dedicated to child pornography. Would anybody be complaining about it being shut down them?
Hopefully not. My point is that what Parler represented was equally odious. It's a hate speech platform and hate speech should not be tolerated.
And how is hosting hate speech “equally odious” to hosting photos of abused children anyway?!
You can use the same argument to abolish all free speech, just by claiming that anything your opponent says is equal to abusing children.
Hate speech translates into hateful actions, case in point was on display in the US Capitol last week.
This is challenging territory but to frame this as a free speech issue without acknowledging that there are limits to such is not being entirely honest about the matter.
Well this is exactly the issue here - because unless you believe in moral absolutism, why are these tech companies suddenly the arbiter of morality?
Like you said, if there were an app where 90% of the conversation was about child pornography, no one would cry "1984" if it's removed by Apple. So we're just having a conversation about where the line should be and if hate speech and planning insurrection should meet that standard, not beginning a rapid descent into thought control.
It obviously is. It started with child pornography which most everyone can agree on banning, now you are suggesting we apply the same ban to political discussion. That's the definition of a slippery slope in action.
Parler wasn't banned, the market decided they wanted nothing to do with it.
I don't think this means what you think it means, because it doesn't appear true.
The market usually means 'the free market' i.e. raw consumer demand - 'are people buying it?', 'vote with your wallet' e.t.c., By all accounts it looked like the market did want it - because they had a rapidly growing user base. Left to the free market, Parler would have continued.
The market does not mean the CEO's of other tech companies want nothing to do with it. It also does not mean that popular opinion is that it's bad.
One is speech - maybe hate, maybe political, maybe both - and one is distribution of illegal products of child abuse. They're not the same thing. They're not "equally odious" and honestly it's pretty gross you'd even pretend they are.
For example, I don't recall FOSTA/SESTA and its ramifications generating anywhere close to this level of breathless outrage on HN. The leftists I know (actual leftists, not the USA's conflation of centrist ideals with leftism) are all already very intimate with getting targeted and censored. Who is the "us" whose unfiltered work/speech/views have always been guaranteed a platform?
> For example, I don't recall FOSTA/SESTA and its ramifications generating anywhere close to this level of breathless outrage on HN.
You shouldn't rely on memory. It tends to fail everyone. Search engines are better
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830744
No, they should not be doing that. It shouldn't even be legal for Silicon Valley to do that. I don't care that you describe the people being censored as having negative traits, that is your political opinion.
I am a free speech absolutist but that doesn't mean you have a right to force others to endorse, host, or amplify your speech. Just that you shouldn't go to jail for it.
What this entire episode has shown is that capitalism's ability to offer alternatives is being stymied by network effects. In the USA that used to bring out the Anti-Trust big stick.
Parler can be shut down when it has been shown to have breached legislation passed by the country and has been found guilty of that in a court of law after due process.
It's not just free speech that is at issue here. It is innocent until proven guilty and due process. All of which are Human Rights issues. Or at least used to be.
Due process is inefficient and slow compared to letting unelected mega-corps determine what other businesses can exist and what speech can and can't be heard.
Imagine how awful a system with a 'burden-of-proof' and 'oversight' would be compared to just trusting the invisible hand of the market and profit motives determine the optimum course of action! Adam Smith proved that it would all work out fine anyway - there was a graph with some curves that proved it I think.
Now if only we had a way to merge all these mega-companies into one, bigger super-mega-corp. Imagine how much better that would be! Hopefully over time with market consolidation we can achieve anything.
> The fact that Parler isn't back online shows that there is an oligopoly in place.
It shows that they have mediocre-at-best technical talent in place, which isn't all that surprising given the content and target market.
> Parler can be shut down when it has been shown to have breached legislation passed by the country and has been found guilty of that in a court of law after due process.
This may be what you want, but it's not reality so I wouldn't frame it as a definitive fact like this.
> It's not just free speech that is at issue here.
It's not a free speech issue at all. Free speech means you can't be jailed or persecuted by the government for your speech.
> It is innocent until proven guilty and due process.
You're conflating a misunderstanding of Constitutional rights with criminal law. Due process is 100% irrelevant.
Yes, but we are seeing collusion
> It's not a free speech issue at all
Yes, it is.
> Free speech means you can't be jailed or persecuted by the government for your speech.
This is incorrect. You are confusing free speech with the 1st amendment.
The first amendment is the law that says the government cannot suppress your free speech. Free speech is not synonymous with that.
> Due process is 100% irrelevant
It is relevant to the extent that tech companies are operating as quasi governmental entities.
Buuuuuut I hope the larger community takes this as a cautionary tale about being completely beholden to single entities - whether that's AWS, or Facebook, or even larger entities such as "Silicon Valley" that are grouped by ideology - that you may agree with today, but not tomorrow.
Great, now what's that technology that lets my domain be split between two entities again so I can't get deplatformed?
There's plenty of ways to get around supposed censorship, rightly or wrongly.
You don't need AWS.
Great, thanks.
Nobody is saying they have no right to speech. AWS is just saying they don't have the right to speech on their turf.
On the contrary, people have generally been smart enough to not do business with companies that won't want to do business with them (for example, nobody is really sure where the various [\d]chans are hosted, and Pornhub self-hosts). There are any number of actually competent people on the left, the right and orthogonal to politics that aren't visibly getting denied "critical infrastructure" because they simply knew better than to use it in the first place; what we are really witnessing is rather entitled people realising they're not guaranteed a ready-made popular platform (whether for an individual's speech or for an app's deployment). The lack of guarantee of a platform itself is far from news.
What is not present are their radical wings, which were kicked away just like leftist violent radicals. Difference is that at least so far, mainstream left is ok with those being kicked.
It is possible to think that SV has too much power AND that they still have the right to deem what is acceptable on their own services.
You can be entitled to free speech without being entitled to a platform or an audience. Despite how much HN loves to bash on SV big tech, this isn't 1984 and there are plenty of other ways to spread hate if that's what you really want to support.
I'm growing really weary from all the slippery-slope/everything-is-being-censored/what-aboutism alarmist arguments.
There is quite a large spectrum between "any and all speech is acceptable, on the platform of your choosing" and "total censorship". Let's stop pretending its a binary choice.
It's legitimate concern that we have passed new thresholds of power, that the power can be exercised, and there's not much anyone affected can do about it.
Furthermore, it's disturbing how much those in power think -- and act -- alike. Isn't it weird that nobody has really broken ranks here?
Getting banned from Twitter for violating the ToS is not censorship.
Getting your Twitter clone kicked off of AWS for violating the ToS is not censorship.
Companies refusing to do business with you on ethical grounds is not censorship.
Anyone calling what we're seeing this week "censorship" is carrying water for fascists.
But in practice, the risk is that these labels will be applied much more liberally by self-interested parties precisely because they are unquestionably bad and hard to refute. If power hungry forces have access to a weapon which can be used to shut down discourse with no due process, it will most assuredly be used and create undesirable outcomes.
IMO we should all take issue with the ability of a small oligopoly to take these actions without any legal due process or recourse. History shows us that this kind of power without restriction in the hands of very few will lead to abuses.
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
My Chinese peers are saying how much this reminds them of the Cultural Revolution.
Such an legal action is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to prove, and I cannot prove it. A key clue for me, however, is the defection not just of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Stripe, and other tech firms, but of Parler’s legal counsel, who would have to be an exceptionally stealth-mode startup to fit Greenwald’s, or other’s, “it’s the tech monopolists” narrative. I’ve tempered my degree of assurance and language (“plausible” rather than “probable”). Time will tell. But a keen and critical mind such as Grenwald’s should at least be weighing the possibility. He instead seems bent only on piking old sworn enemies, with less evidence or coherence than I offer.
This is the crux of Greenwald’s argument. It’s all he’s got:
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
I’m no friend of the tech monopolists myself. The power demonstrated here does concern me, greatly. I’ve long railed against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, among other tech monopolists. Largely because as monopolies they are power loci acting through their occupation of a common resource, outside common control, and not serving the common weal. Hell: Facebook, Google (YouTube), Reddit, and Twitter played a massive role in creating the current fascist insurrection in the US, along with even more enthusiastic aid and comfort from traditional media, across the spectrum. Damage that will take decades to repair, if ever.
But, if my hypothesis is correct, the alternative explanation would bet he opposite of this: the state asserting power over and through monopolies in the common interest, in support of democratic principles, for the common weal. And that I can support.
I don’t know that this is the case. I find it curious that I seem to be the only voice suggesting it. Time should tell.
And after this is over, yes, Silicon Valley, in its metonymic sense standing for the US and global tech industry, has to face its monopoly problem, its free speech problem (in both sincere and insincere senses), its surveillance problem (capitalist, state, criminal, rogue actor), its censorship problem, its propaganda problem (mass and computational), its targeted manipulation adtech problem, its trust problem, its identity problem, its truth and disinformation problems, its tax avoidance problem, its political influence problem.
Virtually all of which are inherent aspects of monopoly: “Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly” https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470
But, speaking as a space alien cat myself, Greenwald is so far off base here he’s exited the Galaxy.
I’ve only read a few bits and pieces so I have a few questions.
1. Does getting booted off AWS actually mean the end of the service? Somebody sent me some quote about how the software was built to run on bare metal servers, so are they having difficulty getting servers at OVH/Linode/DO/whatever? I know that Amazon is HUGE but it’d be a trip (and HIGHLY worrisome) if they actually dictate who gets to be on the internet as a whole.
2. Again, never dealt with apps. I’ve 100% always dealt with clients using websites, packaged software, email, phone calls etc. Is user behavior and/or mobile browser design such that having a mobile-friendly interface (like mobile.twitter.com) that’s entirely under Parker’s control an untenable way to run the service?
Maybe I’m just old but I’ve grown up as a huge fan of bookmarks and still make heavy use of them today, even on mobile. I don’t install almost anything on my phone unless the app is a huge value add like VR/AR stuff or the Audubon bird guide that I can use offline.
I suppose my overall question is: Is this irreparable? If so, that’s pretty terrifying.
This is like watching someone with dementia slowly morph into a completely different person.
No aspect of what made early journalist Greenwald a champion for democracy is recognizable in this whatsoever.
It’s full on Republicanized befuddlement.
And those people trying to claim these tech companies are "utilities" are insane. There is a 0% chance that any tech company is going to be declared a utility in the next several decades in the US and to think otherwise is totally absurd. So those arguments just hold no water.
I don't really care if Amazon crushes Parler. I also don't find back-doors, infiltration and R&D relationships with the government alarming or surprising. What matters to me is whether the government itself is corrupt.
I am a globalist and I do hope for more, not less integration between trade blocs. I think it would be beneficial to avoid the supply chain panic that underlies the extreme pursuit of labor cost arbitrage, but not in pursuit of national, but rather regional, balance of power and trade.
Surveillance is not going away. We cannot fight it. What can be combated is the willingness to harm others and the tendency to view others as separate from ourselves and as a danger to our interests.
But these tech firms are not yet absolute monopolies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, all display in my opinion anti-competitive and in some cases anti-consumer behaviour, but I think a new framework is needed to quantify harm in tech antitrust regulation.
I think Facebook is the most egregious offender because, as I have hyperbolically stated before, have constructed what amounds to a genocide machine. So while they are not "anti-consumer" in terms of price, they are anti-peace and stability of the system which hurts all of us. They disrupt the political process and not in a fun way.
Greenwald seems to be inviting pretty draconian anti-trust action, which would certainly be a bit controversial because some libertarians might not like it - ideologically the founders of Parler might be among them. On the other hand he seems to be stroking Parler as being some kind of underdog that is less bad somehow than other social networks. In my view Parler is only different in scale.
Again, Greenwald makes me very uneasy in this article because he comes out hard against "monopoly" but whose side is he on? I feel weird that I agree on paper that antitrust action is needed, but his article feels bought and paid for in some way.
This is a really interesting moment in history to think about censorship, platforms, speech, and monopoly. We can do a lot better than this article.
They didn't kill Parker though, we did. We made if clear that we wouldn't do business with companies that supported the worst of us. They complied with our demands to force them out of the public sphere and I applaud them for it. As an ex Googler and generally anti FAANG, I don't have many fond words for them but I support this action. For the most part, I even approve of the timeline: let garbage peddling monsters be garbage peddling monsters until they do real damage and then cut them off.
All of these companies, for what it's worth, seems to only use their power when its socially acceptable. For instance, they continue to abide by restrictive Chinese laws for the benefit of money. I'm convinced they will submit to the will of the state in Poland as well, where freedom of speech appears to mean something entirely different.
I'm sorry, but parts of this are not true.
Liberals were banned. [1] That's anti "free speech."
Parler only did a soft delete of data, flagging it as deleted, rather than removing it from servers. [2] That's anti "anti-data collection".
[1] : https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
[2] : https://mashable.com/article/parler-archive-user-posts/
The Biden Administration is getting stuffed with corporate executives and lobbyists of all kinds. If that alleged quote about fascism being the merger of corporate and state power, then congratulations, fascists! You won.
And if that quote is wrong, this situation is still bad, way worse than Trump.
They just sent the biggest signal they possibly could that they're willing to play ball to keep one party in full control of our government forever.
Big Tech is part of your government now. As if years of senior cabinet positions for Big Tech employees wasn't already enough of a clue.
All that the valley has done is demonstrate quite clearly they are now too powerful and need tighter regulation. Protections can now be removed.
This wasn't a great idea. But it likely felt good.
This guy used to have a ton of my respect, but honestly he seems like a complete joke recently.
If Silicon Valley is such an overwhelming monopolistic force, why is 8kun and 4chan up?
No, Parler did a dumb thing by depending so deeply on one hosting provider, and the inevitable bit them.
We don't need names to know what something is. A young scientist might think an elderly aboriginal person foolish because the elder has never heard of a "star", but that doesn't mean the elder hasn't seen the sun rise every day of their life.
My point is that we should not be discounting opinions because someone used the wrong word. We're smart enough to read between the lines and see the crux of what is bothering someone. Free speech, as an ideal, doesn't have to refer to any law, but to avoid spiraling into pedantry, I would suggest that we all be more descriptive during the course of these conversations.
We, the people, are represented through our wallets now by the corporations that control our politicians because social media has unionized us. We're able to use online platforms to leverage companies into giving us what we want socially by threatening them when they step out of line. The companies that led to Parler shutting down were acting on public sentiment as a boon to their brands, thus ultimately reflecting the will of the people.
It's kind of like a single payer system for social justice.
It's weird end run back to representation but I'll take it for now. The radical right is a scourge that, unchecked, will lead to us having no rights at all. They need to be repeatedly smacked down until normalcy is achieved.