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Why would anybody think that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft are against censorship? Recent events have demonstrated that they love them some censorship, when they

by ufmace 8y ago

Why would anybody think that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft are against censorship? Recent events have demonstrated that they love them some censorship, when they do it. Witness the case of gab.ai - Google was happy to pull their app from the Play store. Microsoft didn't mind at all threatening to shut down their Azure account unless they censored a post. The Azure case is particularly amazing. I can't believe the tech press isn't picking up on a supposed cloud provider threatening to shut down someone's account unless they make their website behave in a particular way. I will say I haven't heard of Amazon censoring anything yet, at least not at a level I would consider massively inappropriate for a cloud services provider. Not selling something on their normal store is one thing, but pulling the plug on an AWS account for website behavior would be something entirely different.

jonstokes 8y ago
AWS has absolutely taken down websites because they didn't like what was on them, just recently, in fact: https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gun-files-say-facebook-amazon-censored-site/ https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gu... I'm a journalist and have seen a screencap of the takedown that Amazon issued to the Firearms Policy Coalition, which started and maintains the censored site (CodeIsFreeSpeech.com). The takedown erroneously cited a temporary restraining order issued against an entirely different site (defcad.com) as the reason for the sudden, no-warning booting of the site from AWS. And as you mentioned, Azure just now threatened to pull Gab.ai off its platform over a pair of anti-Semitic posts. https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-anti-semitism-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-an... So these infrastructure providers are absolutely involved in censorship right now.
- ufmace 8y ago
  Interesting, thanks! I hadn't heard of that.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I wrote about this last year: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... It's easy to side with CloudFlair when they go against a site like The Daily Stormer (Which is so out there it might just fall into Poe's Law). The fact is that most decent hosting is only available in a handful of industries. Even the CF CEO has had misgivings of his decision and it gets us into a really questionable space. Platforms should be free to do what they want right? They should be able to deny customers .. just like an airplane company should be allowed to keep people who crazy political opinions from boarding plans right? .. oh and black people too. Oh wait..what? The freedom of speech in the US is pretty limited to government censorship. But we don't let businesses do whatever they want. They can't keep a certain ethnic group from eating at their restaurant, and in many states they can't choose if their venue allows smoking. The big question is, does speech need to fit into this same framework? With the recent child protection act that gutted craigslist and took down backpage (an act that is leading to more violence against sex workers in the US and an act that the EFF and ACLU are actively fighting as being unconstitutional), we see the US government holding content hosting companies liable for the criminal actions of their user base. That is disturbing and already a form of government control over what customers a business is allowed to have. It'd be one thing if censored sites could just go to another provider, but there are only a couple of big providers and their mass has the ability to crush anything they find questionable.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    It's actually worse than there being only a couple of big providers. The problem is that the same sort of people who are trying to shut down sites through legal pressure tactics against Amazon, Google etc are absolutely happy to use illegal tactics too. In particular once sites are booted off large providers onto smaller ones or self hosted sites, that's when the DDoS attacks start. Infowars already saw one, for instance. How many firms can sink large DDoS attacks without needing to kick out the target? Not many. If a pressure group or activist employee base can get content off CloudFlare, Google, Amazon and Microsoft then DDoS-wielding ideological zealots will do the rest and then the site is gone for good. Where does speech go then? It's a very dangerous game for the people at these content platforms to play. I don't see Republicans sitting back doing nothing as their worldview and voter base is systematically wiped off the internet. Legislation seems likely.
loudmax 8y ago
The post is about resilience to censorship from outside organizations. That is, it's about governments not being able to selectively block content from service providers. What you're talking about is the service providers themselves deciding what form of speech is allowed on platforms they own. Some may feel that it's inappropriate for Microsoft not extend their platform to white supremacists. Others may think it's inappropriate for service providers not to provide extend their platform to ISIS or Al Qaeda. You may feel that service providers should provide a voice to any possible opinion, but the organizations actually providing the service don't feel this way.
cptskippy 8y ago
> Recent events have demonstrated that they love them some censorship, when they do it. I'm not sure that I would conflate running a business with loving censorship. > I can't believe the tech press isn't picking up on a supposed cloud provider threatening to shut down someone's account unless they make their website behave in a particular way. What would the headline be exactly? "Business drops client for violating agreement and bringing negative attention to their service." Why does everyone assume that businesses have a moral obligation or imperative? When a company goes around saying "We value..." they're really saying "By uttering the magic phrase we hope to make more money off you".
joshstrange 8y ago
No no no, you don't get to throw out gab.ai as an example without expanding on what they wanted censored. For those who don't know what was censored I'll link it as I will not be reposting it: https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/microsoft-threatened-gab-shutdown-over-extreme-anti-semitic-posts/#attachment_1487253 https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/microsoft-threatened-gab-shut... You muddle the waters greatly when you pretend it was just some free speech issue (Newsflash: FREE SPEECH DOES NOT EXTEND TO NON-GOVERNMENT ENTITIES),
- Karunamon 8y ago
  Free speech is a principle that transcends law. They might have no legal requirement to uphold it, as our government does, but these moves were absolutely censorship and absolutely counter to the principle of free speech. The odiousness of the words in question don't factor into it.
- repolfx 8y ago
  So what? Twitter and many other sites hosted in the cloud are flooded with similar hate speech against other groups, and are typically left alone. See the case of the journalist who got hired at the New York Times despite having a Twitter account riddled with racist hatred directed at white people and men. These platforms aren't doing censorship because of some systematic application of content rules. They're doing it as part of an overall ideological battle.
- Spivak 8y ago
  I really hate this meme; Randall did the world a great disservice by missing the point and putting it in a format which spread like wildfire for smug people to quote until the end of time. Free speech is a principal which extends farther than a very limited right in US law -- it's not a rule, it's not prescriptive, it's not afforded by any law -- it's an ideal. I don't in any way deny that you can find people who confuse the legal right with the ideal but if you talk to any lawyer for twenty seconds you'll realize that speech is far from the only area where this happens. What happened is a free speech issue. Did the actions Microsoft took promote the healthy and open exchange of ideas or did they take an action in order to silence? Since Gab is largely a closed community this action wasn't so much protecting people from abuse so much as it was preventing like minded people from talking to each other. And no matter what I think about the things they said I still hold that they ought to be allowed to say them among themselves.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
detaro 8y ago
> can't believe the tech press isn't picking up ? It was widely reported.
jessewmc 8y ago
I'm a supporter of extremely strong free speech protection, but this doesn't seem entirely black and white to me. AWS is a private hosting company, and they may be exposed to legal or authority action based on what their clients host. It seems a lot like the Facebook arguments to me. If you want to obligate them to support free speech, I think they need to be regulated as carriers otherwise it's not a reasonable standard to hold a private entity to. At least there is more competition in the hosting space than there is for Facebook. Maybe this is an argument for regulation, but I don't think it's an argument for finger wagging. Either there is some sort of enforcement, or we acknowledge there are alternatives.

by ufmace 8y ago

jonstokes 8y ago

AWS has absolutely taken down websites because they didn't like what was on them, just recently, in fact: https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gun-files-say-facebook-amazon-censored-site/ https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gu... I'm a journalist and have seen a screencap of the takedown that Amazon issued to the Firearms Policy Coalition, which started and maintains the censored site (CodeIsFreeSpeech.com). The takedown erroneously cited a temporary restraining order issued against an entirely different site (defcad.com) as the reason for the sudden, no-warning booting of the site from AWS. And as you mentioned, Azure just now threatened to pull Gab.ai off its platform over a pair of anti-Semitic posts. https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-anti-semitism-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-an... So these infrastructure providers are absolutely involved in censorship right now.

ufmace 8y ago
Interesting, thanks! I hadn't heard of that.
djsumdog 8y ago
I wrote about this last year: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... It's easy to side with CloudFlair when they go against a site like The Daily Stormer (Which is so out there it might just fall into Poe's Law). The fact is that most decent hosting is only available in a handful of industries. Even the CF CEO has had misgivings of his decision and it gets us into a really questionable space. Platforms should be free to do what they want right? They should be able to deny customers .. just like an airplane company should be allowed to keep people who crazy political opinions from boarding plans right? .. oh and black people too. Oh wait..what? The freedom of speech in the US is pretty limited to government censorship. But we don't let businesses do whatever they want. They can't keep a certain ethnic group from eating at their restaurant, and in many states they can't choose if their venue allows smoking. The big question is, does speech need to fit into this same framework? With the recent child protection act that gutted craigslist and took down backpage (an act that is leading to more violence against sex workers in the US and an act that the EFF and ACLU are actively fighting as being unconstitutional), we see the US government holding content hosting companies liable for the criminal actions of their user base. That is disturbing and already a form of government control over what customers a business is allowed to have. It'd be one thing if censored sites could just go to another provider, but there are only a couple of big providers and their mass has the ability to crush anything they find questionable.
- repolfx 8y ago
  It's actually worse than there being only a couple of big providers. The problem is that the same sort of people who are trying to shut down sites through legal pressure tactics against Amazon, Google etc are absolutely happy to use illegal tactics too. In particular once sites are booted off large providers onto smaller ones or self hosted sites, that's when the DDoS attacks start. Infowars already saw one, for instance. How many firms can sink large DDoS attacks without needing to kick out the target? Not many. If a pressure group or activist employee base can get content off CloudFlare, Google, Amazon and Microsoft then DDoS-wielding ideological zealots will do the rest and then the site is gone for good. Where does speech go then? It's a very dangerous game for the people at these content platforms to play. I don't see Republicans sitting back doing nothing as their worldview and voter base is systematically wiped off the internet. Legislation seems likely.

loudmax 8y ago

The post is about resilience to censorship from outside organizations. That is, it's about governments not being able to selectively block content from service providers. What you're talking about is the service providers themselves deciding what form of speech is allowed on platforms they own. Some may feel that it's inappropriate for Microsoft not extend their platform to white supremacists. Others may think it's inappropriate for service providers not to provide extend their platform to ISIS or Al Qaeda. You may feel that service providers should provide a voice to any possible opinion, but the organizations actually providing the service don't feel this way.

cptskippy 8y ago

> Recent events have demonstrated that they love them some censorship, when they do it. I'm not sure that I would conflate running a business with loving censorship. > I can't believe the tech press isn't picking up on a supposed cloud provider threatening to shut down someone's account unless they make their website behave in a particular way. What would the headline be exactly? "Business drops client for violating agreement and bringing negative attention to their service." Why does everyone assume that businesses have a moral obligation or imperative? When a company goes around saying "We value..." they're really saying "By uttering the magic phrase we hope to make more money off you".

joshstrange 8y ago

No no no, you don't get to throw out gab.ai as an example without expanding on what they wanted censored. For those who don't know what was censored I'll link it as I will not be reposting it: https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/microsoft-threatened-gab-shutdown-over-extreme-anti-semitic-posts/#attachment_1487253 https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/microsoft-threatened-gab-shut... You muddle the waters greatly when you pretend it was just some free speech issue (Newsflash: FREE SPEECH DOES NOT EXTEND TO NON-GOVERNMENT ENTITIES),

Karunamon 8y ago
Free speech is a principle that transcends law. They might have no legal requirement to uphold it, as our government does, but these moves were absolutely censorship and absolutely counter to the principle of free speech. The odiousness of the words in question don't factor into it.
repolfx 8y ago
So what? Twitter and many other sites hosted in the cloud are flooded with similar hate speech against other groups, and are typically left alone. See the case of the journalist who got hired at the New York Times despite having a Twitter account riddled with racist hatred directed at white people and men. These platforms aren't doing censorship because of some systematic application of content rules. They're doing it as part of an overall ideological battle.
Spivak 8y ago
I really hate this meme; Randall did the world a great disservice by missing the point and putting it in a format which spread like wildfire for smug people to quote until the end of time. Free speech is a principal which extends farther than a very limited right in US law -- it's not a rule, it's not prescriptive, it's not afforded by any law -- it's an ideal. I don't in any way deny that you can find people who confuse the legal right with the ideal but if you talk to any lawyer for twenty seconds you'll realize that speech is far from the only area where this happens. What happened is a free speech issue. Did the actions Microsoft took promote the healthy and open exchange of ideas or did they take an action in order to silence? Since Gab is largely a closed community this action wasn't so much protecting people from abuse so much as it was preventing like minded people from talking to each other. And no matter what I think about the things they said I still hold that they ought to be allowed to say them among themselves.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

detaro 8y ago

> can't believe the tech press isn't picking up ? It was widely reported.

jessewmc 8y ago

I'm a supporter of extremely strong free speech protection, but this doesn't seem entirely black and white to me. AWS is a private hosting company, and they may be exposed to legal or authority action based on what their clients host. It seems a lot like the Facebook arguments to me. If you want to obligate them to support free speech, I think they need to be regulated as carriers otherwise it's not a reasonable standard to hold a private entity to. At least there is more competition in the hosting space than there is for Facebook. Maybe this is an argument for regulation, but I don't think it's an argument for finger wagging. Either there is some sort of enforcement, or we acknowledge there are alternatives.