The Parler Bans Open a New Front in the 'Free Speech' Wars | Hacker News Reader

The Parler Bans Open a New Front in the 'Free Speech' Wars

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31 pointsalexrustic18 comments

> It allows pornography. It allows glorification of violence. It allows explicit racism. And so, therefore, does Parler.

Did Parler allow porn? The CEO said it was banned, [1] but there community guidelines say it was allowed. [2] Does anyone know which was enforced?

Also their guidelines banned terrorist organizations. Is that required by US law? Or is that extra restrictions on speech they added?

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/parler-ceo-lays-out-5-rules-to...

[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rikfE6...

I think the article's author was referring to the first amendment in that line. as far as I can tell that platform does not seem to allow porn.

I guess they can be forgiven for not knowing considering the site's offline

Twitter allows porn, and Parler was an alternative to twitter.

Honestly... I think the piling-on is a short term thing, between a violent event and the expectation of violence two weeks later. Nobody wants to be the channel on which a serious event happens on inauguration day.

I expect that following the 20th, Parler or its sequel will open on Amazon or Azure or whatever, and nobody will really think much about it. The immediate threat of violence will subside, and people will go back to the ordinary sniping at one another. Mostly on Facebook and Twitter, who will go back to being very lenient in their moderation policies. (And people will complain about oppression every time they're moderated against, but not enough to stoke a mass exodus.)

Mind you, it's cheap to simply predict "people will forget" and be right 99% of the time. But there's a similar countervailing trend to go "this time, it's different" with every significant event. I've watched enough of them come and go to want to remind everybody, "Maybe, but probably not".

We'll see. I hope you're right that this is just until the inauguration. But there's a segment of the left that wants to win by censoring the right so that they're the only voice that can be heard. We'll see if that segment prevails.

No one threw a fit when I wasn’t allowed to post liberal views on Parler, because it was a private website. No one should throw a fit when parler can’t get hosted on Amazon: it’s a private website.

Don’t let anyone lie to you and claim that parler was a bastion of free speech: you had to hold very specific views to avoid a ban.

I have found conservative bastions to be some of the least respective of 1A rights.

Case and point, r/conservative on reddit. You literally have to be a conservative ("flared user") to even comment on the vast majority of posts, and are immediately banned if any liberal opinion is expressed.

When called out on their hypocrisy the only defense given is a super-sized dose of Whatboutism, if they bother to defend their hypocrisy at all.

But r/conservative is hardly a unique case. The vast majority of right leaning message boards I have visited, Parler included, are ran in exactly the same manner.

Conservatives don't want free speech, they just want their own speech to be the only speech that matters, just like they want their votes to be the only ones that matter.

Section 230 gives platforms the right but not the obligation to moderate.

The reasoning I've heard is, "well if you don't want to be moderated by that platform, use a different platform."

There's a potential argument to be made that collusion between firms to crush an individual platform customer (aka Parler) is anticompetitive. In that approach, the problem isn't censorship, it's horizontal conduct.

I don't think they could ever prove there was collision though. For one, I don't think anybody except Gab was worried about Parler as a competitor. For two, if you do something egregious in front of 3 shopkeepers, and the whole town is looking at the shopkeepers to see what they'll do, and they all decide to ban you from their respective stores, it's not collision.

Don't forget gab was banned by visa. It gets a bit crazy when you consider the nz mosque shooting was livestreamed on facebook- no one shut Facebook down. I can go on Twitter right now and find calls for violence. The whole thing feels like a very selective attack aimed at any small competition the dares base it's moderation in line with the first amendment.

1. They are a private company, don't like it build your own Twitter A. Okay, that has been done twice now. 2. Well aws is a private company don't like it build your own servers. B. Okay that has also been done twice now. 3. The next items in the list of deplatforming attacks are DNS, Certs and ability to process credit cards.

It gets a bit silly when it's rules for thee with the tech olagarchs yet I can still find elsagate videos on YouTube and calls to harm others on Twitter.

In less than a week, all the major tech players banned/ended the same entity. While sure, they found certain infringements due to their ToS, there's a large swath of entities that infringe on their ToS who are not banned. Along with, it's painfully easy to prove it's because the ones not banned are politically aligned with the platform. To state it's a ban due to violence, absolute bullshit. There are tons of Facebook livestreams of violence, gang based, that NZ shooting, and just random people thinking they're cool and hurting folks to gain popularity (and making an easy case for prosecutors). Facebook hasn't been banned from Google Play Store or Apple App Store yet. "But they don't have to moderate due to 230". Well, why does Parler have to then? I'm actually okay with Parler being shut down (mostly because I never used it or really care) but then I want to see the same punishment for other social media platforms. Hold one accountable, hold them all accountable. No favoritism just because you wear a certain color tie during political meetups.

Sure, maybe there is no law that really punishes selective enforcement of company policy. However, can you really say that it's not absurd and ethically fucked up? Can you really not see, "Wow, these companies do hold too much power in public discourse and can twist, bend narratives in their favor"? As the general public, we need to vote with our wallets as well as ballots. These companies need to know that this shit isn't cool or funny. Giving them blank cheques everyday because we're too lazy to change our habits will never help. Complacency isn't an excuse after a certain point.

It’s not clear to me that those companies have more power in our information landscape than MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News. Nor is it obvious that it is more ethically problematic for them to have an editorial slant.

The culture of the companies that ban and report on Parler are predominantly left of center. It is not realistic to expect fairness in any way, including ToS enforcement. In an alternate universe where Parler had been a tech giant and the rest of SV aligned with them, it would be Twitter who got shut down.

Facebook doesn't have the ability to watch every livestream on its service, but they absolutely do shut them down when people report them, and, moreover, proactively reach out to law enforcement when violent activities are being livestreamed or posted to its service.

And that's the difference from Parler: Parler revels in attracting those types of posts, and per Amazon's court filings, Parler does nothing to remove violent posts on the service.

I don’t think the anticompetitive thing really holds water: Parler is in no way a competitor to Alphabet’s companies, or Amazon, and not really a competitor to Facebook (whereas I could say it was a serious competitor to Twitter). So it’s hard to see what the economic or market benefits of the horizontal conduct would be. Amazon, Facebook, and Google have defensible reasons to block Parler that has nothing to do with their bottom line. For example, Parler’s irresponsible refusal to moderate violence if it’s ‘political’ poses a serious threat to these companies’ workers and leadership [1].

I also find the whole idea that there was collusion to be a claim without evidence or plausibility: Parler was correctly associated with the Capitol Hill riot and had been deliberately stoking far-right aggression for years - it was Parler’s business model. It makes far more sense to me that Big Tech leadership all decided to ban Parler independently because they read the news last week.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxKennerly/status/13491723205947...

I don't think you have to prove that the anticompetitive action is directly beneficial to the actors. Regardless, at least two of the three firms have a direct contractual, financial relationship with Twitter.

Twitter is a Google customer since at least 2018:

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

Twitter cut a multi-year AWS deal last month:

https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

Coordinated backlash against Twitter (such as a boycott or other mass exodus) could have spillover effects to Facebook, not the least of which would be a movement to repeal S230.

For some time now the goal of the ones who are generally anti-Tech see Section 230 as the Achilles heel of the tech industry. Did "Big-Tech" take the bait here? I'm starting to think they have. The core issue here is whether these sites can even be moderated.

The fact is that you can't solve this problem entirely through automation. It will always require manual review. And it is a fact you can never have more people reviewing than posting.

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